Crash…Bang…Gu-gu-gu-gu

The trash trucks around your building come at 7:30? Count yourself extremely lucky. The ones that service office buildings a little to the west of that photo show up and start clanging just before 6am, every day except Sunday. Ahhh, the sounds of the city!

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for tree boxes, but it seems to me that the quality of life downtown would be better improved if the city would crack down on the predawn noise pollution.

I find it extremely upsetting that this work is occurring and is disturbing the residents of the Penn Quarter. I could understand if the roadwork was needed to repair a water main or improve the traffic flow. But to install new streetlights? What is wrong with the street lights that we already have? The daily 7:30 am construction has made me want to move to Virginia to avoid this poorly managed city.

This is a tremendous waste of resources and significantly degrades the (relative) peace of Penn Quarter. I now must sleep with earplugs in fear that I will be awoken by the decidedly NON-bucolic noises of heavy construction … FOR A YEAR?

I have lost hours(!) of sleep for …. better street lights? Treeboxes? WTF.

It’s not like the workers are installing FiOS, water, power or, say, a grocery store. Instead, in a project practically scripted from “Falling Down,” they are “fixing” the lowest-maintenance, best-functioning parts of the street. If it is night time look outside your window *right now* — see the trees? With the lights? That’s my point.

I can do city noise, but weekend construction at 7:30 AM is over the line … and just wait until summer. I AM moving from this area and some of the highest rents in the city for a decent night’s sleep. I will be telling anyone interested in Penn Quarter to do the same.

to be clear, we were not awakened at 7:30 am over the weekend – it was 9:30 am or so when we heard the noises – but we also know the Penn Quarter is not just made up of our block.

I have been awoken at 7:30 am every morning for the past month because bulldozer GEHL, which used in this nonsense streetlight project, is parked outside of my building 7 days a week. This bulldozer seems to be capable of only driving backwards prior to 9 am, but luckily it is equipped with a brilliant safety feature, which loudly warns the entire neighborhood of its backwards trajectory. I am able to see this bulldozer right now because of the excellent street lighting that already exists in front of my building.

Whine, whine whine. A little road work is nothing when compared to having 2 buildings constructed outside your window over the course of 2 years.

YOU LIVE IN A CITY where these and other plans are announced, published and available for you to research. Are you active in your neighborhood associations? Do you read the the city’s web sites? Its not like this project just materialized — it was planned ages ago.

City living is noisy and not for everyone. If its not for you, then you have an alternative which involves a truck and new mortgage. Those that remain will love the area even more without the naysayers.

My condo faces the interior courtyard of a PQ building. I have never been awakened by any of these noises. Other than the occasional siren, or the horns of heinous Caps fans, that’s about all the outside noise I get.

Come on people. If you choose to live in a city in a “preferred” street view condo. Hello. Trade offs. Trade offs. Trade offs.

This discussion has lost its way. No one is complaining that the city is a noisy place to live — it is simple-minded and stunningly short-sighted to believe that is the point.

The point was, and remains, that we are suffering maximum discomfort (noisy dawn construction on the weekends) for minimal gain. A new building (or plumbing, etc.) dramatically enhances the value of the area and is worth the noise: new lights and tree boxes are not. We are only asking for the distractions to match the gains. This means, for instance, the workers start at 10:00 am, not 7:0O on Saturday morning.

And if I joined the neighborhood board and studied byzantine municipal websites only to find myself across the street from planned construction for 2 years, I would seriously reconsider the value of my time investment, among other things.

While the entire streetscape project will last a year, if your street segment is only in need of the tree boxes and streetlights upgrades then they will move on from your block to the next much more quickly than that.

One of the big competitive advantages of downtown DC is the pedestrian experience. We need to continue to maximize that as lord knows we can’t compete on ease of parking. This ARRA stimulus money was tagged for streetscape improvements. I’m grateful district officials determined that our area was a priority to complete.

Kudos to Anon @ 9:55 for his rebuttal. Every discussion of problems in the neighborhood in this blog gets at least one commenter who’s point seems to be — You chose to live in the city so don’t ever have high expectations about city services of basic quality of life issues like construction noise. Perhaps Pqliving should simply reference back to this comment when the naysayers hijack the comment thread.

Second DCZen’s comment. Also to note…these construction companies’ permits restrict them to working between certain hours of the day/night so as not to disrupt the community, and many of them blatantly IGNORE those restrictions.

I know personally of one PQ building within earshot/eyeshot of a company who was in violation of their permit’s operating hours. The residents of that building got VERY tired of the noise, collaborated, and sent their own representative over to file their grievance. Needless to say, the problem was solved the very next day. (And before someone comments that this was a problem that should have been brought to the attention of the bldg mgmt first, it was–and the response was, What do you want ME to do about it?).

Does anyone know what we can expect from the construction underway at the abandoned building on D street, between 8th and 7th? Tell me something is going into that space?