This might be a good moment to remind all that polite people are not supposed to discuss politics, sex, religion or money at social gatherings.

There are two possible responses to this traditional admonition: 1) We are not polite people. And 2) gimme an unprintable break--what the hell else are we supposed to talk about?

I'll grant the etiquette mavens the money part. That's perhaps the last taboo for many people--folks who are perfectly happy to detail their latest sexual congress or their opinions about candidates for the big-C Congress suddenly get all mannered and haughty when the topic of dollars arises, as in how many do you have and how'd you get them and what do you do with them?

But in this impossibly opinion-saturated political season, what do you make of a survey that contends that 77 percent of Americans say they "avoid discussing politics" with friends and family?

I'm not buying it. Yes, I understand that here in Washington, we're more likely than folks in most places to talk politics. And yes, I figure someone in my line of work is more likely than the average bear to be drawn into a conversation about things political. But I just don't see much evidence that the traditional bar against talking about such controversial matters is holding.

It makes perfect sense that talking about politics can be very upsetting, and surely we all know folks who really cannot be trusted to maintain the peace if they are confronted with human beings who do not share their political worldview. "Nearly half of respondents have had bad experiences in the past when sharing their political views--and rather than risk a verbal battle, they hunker down and shut up," says the press release from the company that commissioned this survey, VitalSmarts, which produces corporate training tools. And certainly we can all think of folks in our lives with whom we know never to talk politics (there's somebody in my family whose body literally shakes with rage when someone dares to express an opposing political view, but enough about that.)

In her "The Right Thing To Say," Miss Manners (Judith Martin) provides this "list of topics that polite people do not bring into a social conversation:

"Sex; religion; politics; money; illness; the food before them at the moment and which foods they customarily eat or reject and why; anything else having to do with bodily functions; occupations, including their own and inquiries into anyone else's; the looks of anyone present--especially to note any changes, even improvements, since these people were last seen; and the possessions of anyone present, including their hosts' house and its contents and the clothing being worn by them and their guests, even favorably."

I'm thinking Miss Manners must go to some silent parties. Maybe they talk about flowers, or furniture.

Actually, that may not be far from the case: Here's a woman who argues that the aversion to talking politics is a female thing, and that women need to get over their reticence about causing tensions or controversy so that they can be more engaged citizens and better role models for future generations.

Here's the disturbing part of the survey results: When political conversation "becomes the least bit controversial," the VitalSmarts folks say, "only 28 percent feel they can control their own temper and only 23 percent believe they can handle it if the other person gets upset."

This is not good. It calls not for less conversation about controversial matters, but more--and earlier. There is today indeed an almost pathological aversion to giving offense in everyday chatter and classroom discussion, and that attitude is pervasive in today's schools and colleges--a social shift that has perhaps left an entire generation without the tools needed to have a strong but civil disagreement and to hash out such matters without doing themselves or others physical or psychic damage.

So: More talk about poltics and all that other good stuff, no?

Redskins fan Shane Feldman, who is hearing-impaired, loved going to football games but felt left out. Unable to hear the public address system, he couldn't understand the referee's calls, the announcer's description of plays during the game, or the stadium's emergency announcements.

Feldman and other deaf or hard of hearing fans complained and then sued the Redskins. The team agreed to post captions on the scoreboard, spelling out everything from the announcements naming the players involved in the last play to the penalty calls and even the ads read over the PA system.

But that wasn't enough for the hearing-impaired fans. Now, a federal court judge has ruled that the Redskins must go even further, posting on the scoreboard the lyrics to any songs played over the loudspeakers.

Exactly what is so magical or essential about song lyrics is not clear from Judge Alex Williams' strangely reasoned ruling in the case. Williams doesn't demand that the Redskins post descriptions of the musical style, beat or harmonies, just that the lyrics be spelled out. Apparently the fact that many, if not most, hearing fans cannot make out the lyrics either does not impress the judge.

It's only fair to post on the scoreboard the summary of each play that gets announced to the crowd--in fact, the scoreboard version is sometimes easier to understand than the announced version, even for hearing fans.

But the songs played during time-outs and halftime are hardly crucial to an understanding of the game. Indeed, many fans find the constant blasting of music distracting and annoying and may even envy the deaf for being able to focus more purely on the game.

The idea, pushed by the deaf fans in their suit, that the Redskins have "not made FedExField fully accessible to deaf and hard of hearing fans" because they don't post song lyrics is so picayune, so petty as to drive other fans to wonder whether the motive is really to enjoy the game or merely to harass the team's owner.

More important, however, the court's ruling threatens every public performance by a sports team, musical group, theatrical troupe or any other artistic endeavor. If, as the deaf fans argue, it is "discrimination" against them to stage a pro football game without putting the lyrics of every song up on the scoreboard, then the same reasoning would force concert halls to post lyrics as singers sing them. Would movie theaters have to erect a second screen on which to flash the lyrics of any song used in the background of a movie? Must stage companies now tear audiences' attention away from the actors by putting up screens spelling out the lyrics of incidental music, or of a song that a character might break into as part of the play?

Amazingly, Williams concluded that the deaf fans "suffered injuries because they did not have access to music captioning and because information allegedly was not being effectively communicated to them." The judge did concede that the Redskins made "reasonable efforts" to accommodate the fans who complained. But Williams says he can't be sure that the captioning the team now provides will continue indefinitely.

The Redskins's lawyers argue that "all information that is integral to the use of the stadium can be gathered solely from watching the game," Williams writes. But the judge says the Americans With Disabilities Act requires that all people be provided with "full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation." And Williams interprets that to mean far more than just the football game, because the Redskins offer more than just a game: "They also provide public address announcements, advertisements, music, and other aural information to hearing fans.... Presumably Defendants provide this aural information to hearing fans for a reason."

So the judge orders the team to provide captions for song lyrics. He rejects the Redskins' "argument that bars and restaurants are not required to caption background music. While the Court expresses no opinion on the ADA requirements for bars and restaurants, the Court believes there is a significant difference between a stadium that seats 91,000 people, which currently captions audio content on large LED ribbon boards, and a bar or restaurant."

Williams never explains what that significant difference might be. In both cases, the music is a supplement to the main offering that customers are buying. In both cases, the primary service--football, or food and drink--could be offered without the music. In both cases, the odds that anyone really listens to the song lyrics are pretty slim. And in both cases, the chance that any appreciable number of people on hand can actually understand the lyrics is almost non-existent.

But most non-existent of all in this case is any common sense, any attempt to be reasonable. Handicapped people should expect to be able to gain access to public places and activities without undue hardship. And it's fair to ask a rich company like the Redskins to invest in some technology to make the game equally understandable to deaf fans--which the team has done for several years now.

But no matter what the law might say or how any narrowminded judge might rule, neither legal verbiage nor wishing it will make all people identical. In any public performance, some people will get more of what's going on and some will get less. Many blind people love going to baseball games; they wouldn't expect the team to have to hire a guide to sit with them and narrate the action to them. They get out of it what their special circumstance allows--and from what blind fans tell me, that is something quite rich and extraordinary, an appreciation for the sounds and smells of the game that goes deeper than many seeing fans will ever know. Similarly, deaf fans may see a level of detail that eludes many hearing fans.

In sports as in so many other areas of life, good people with admirable motives can usually work out problems just fine--it's when someone decides to get the lawyers involved that the whole enterprise goes off the rails.

When two children -- two adopted children -- end up dead in a block of ice hidden in their mother's freezer, the entire child welfare apparatus flies into a panic.

Almost immediately after the news broke about the gruesome case of Renee Bowman and her children, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty called a news conference to say that the city had done no wrong (the family lived in Maryland, but the children had been adopted in the District). The Baltimore-based agency that cleared Bowman to adopt dropped into a defensive crouch from which it has yet to emerge. And social workers braced for another round of outraged cries for heads to roll.

It sure looks like someone messed up. You might think that the people charged with investigating Bowman before she adopted one child in 2001 and two others in 2004 should have known and raised alarms about facts such as these: Bowman was convicted of threatening bodily harm to a 72-year-old motorist just two years before the first adoption; she may have had an abusive mate; she filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001; she described her childhood to friends as akin to that of "an abused dog"; and her own mother had been a homeless wanderer of the city's streets.

Now we learn that Maryland's social services agency got a complaint accusing Bowman of child neglect last January, sent a caseworker to the house and concluded that everything was fine -- "clean and appropriately furnished," though with a funky smell that was attributed to mildew.

Still, it is possible, as Fenty and some adoption advocates argue, that everyone did their jobs, that Bowman passed every screening, and that whatever went horribly wrong in her life happened only after she had adopted the children.

The problem is, we can't know. And the fact is, it is our business.

In the reflexively privacy-obsessed world of adoptions, it is somehow an imposition if the public wants to know where the state's wards end up, who is collecting the stipends taxpayers shell out to encourage adoption and how all that money is being spent. We know best, social workers say.

But anytime public money is involved, it's the public's job to demand oversight and accountability, and the only road to that goal is transparency.

I met Adam Pertman many years ago when he was a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe. After experiencing the joys and frustrations of adoption, he left the news business to advocate for those who give that loving gift of parenthood. Now, as director of the Adoption Institute, he understands both instincts: the newsman's passionate belief that sunshine is the best medicine, and the adoption world's embrace of secrecy to protect children and grant adoptive parents the same rights birth parents enjoy.

When he trains social workers, Pertman tells them: "Your secrets don't do you any good. The only time you get in the news is when someone dies, and it's because you won't give out any information."

The roots of that secrecy lie in the not-so-distant past, when adoption carried a powerful stigma. "This is a whole institution built on stigma and secrecy and shame," Pertman says, "on people being told to lie for the rest of their lives. You didn't tell your children they were adopted. Amazingly, we got to the other side, and adoption is no longer anything to be ashamed or embarrassed about. But the remnants of that era of secrecy are profound."

Executives at the Board of Child Care, the Methodist church-affiliated agency that investigated Bowman's suitability for adoption, would not talk to me. The top boss didn't even return my call. The reflex is to circle the wagons and board up the windows.

Luckily, some see that public trust is essential. Janice Goldwater, who runs Adoptions Together, a private agency in Silver Spring not connected to the Bowman case, opened her files so I could see how exhaustively her social workers investigate families being considered as adoptive parents.

Adoptive parents tell me they feel as if they've had a colonic irrigation of their finances, family history and even their sex lives. Social workers interview friends, relatives and co-workers; examine tax, criminal and credit records; and ask about religion, guns, drugs and corporal punishment. Families are rejected if they are likely to spank the child, keep unlocked guns in the house or put the child to sleep on a bunk bed or sofa bed.

And somehow a Renee Bowman gets through. How? The pathetic truth is that people inside the system already know that answer, but the rest of us might never know.

The legacy of secrecy lives on. Goldwater, who has an adopted child as well as three birth children, was appalled to see that her adopted child's birth certificate was rewritten to show Goldwater and her husband as the birth parents, a deception that fools no one.

Goldwater and Pertman are both wary of making adoption records public, even in a case that ends in an awful crime. Once an adoption has been completed, they argue, the parents should have the same rights as a birth parent.

But the public has an obligation to children who were placed by the government. Bowman, for example, received $2,400 a month in federal money to defray the cost of raising her three children. In the current system, there is no way to see if that money is being spent as intended.

"There are sound, competent professionals doing this work," Goldwater says. "We have to show people that, not hide anytime something bad happens."

UPDATE (11 A.M.): Matthew Fraidin, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia law school, this morning passes along an email by Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, arguing for opening up adoption hearings, as 15 states have already done:

Even journalists who disagree with my organization on everything else usually find common ground with us on one point: The enormous harm done to children by the secrecy that permeates child welfare - the closed court hearings and sealed records.

So I'm surprised the Post hasn't done what many other newspapers have in the wake of child abuse tragedies - demanded, over and over, that, at a minimum, the court hearings be opened.

One of the reasons the child welfare system in Allegheny County, Pa. is, relatively speaking, a national model, is that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette crusaded to get the courts opened, and then followed up with outstanding reporting on what was going on there.

Since 1980 about 15 states have truly opened these hearings. And even though many of these began as pilot projects with sunset dates, not one of these states has closed them again. And in state after state onetime opponents of openness became converts. It's been harder to get records open, but there has been some progress there as well.

How might that have helped in the most recent tragedy? Here's an excerpt from an e-mail that Prof. [Matthew] Fraidin of UDC Law School sent yesterday to Petula Dvorak [The Post's reporter who's been covering the Bowman case]:

"Petula, don't you want to open up the court's file of the adoption cases to see what is in there? Don't you want to listen to the tape of the adoption proceedings, or read a transcript? The neglect case files of the children would tell you when Ms. Bowman entered the children's lives, what their condition was when they went to live with her, whether the social worker and GAL and judge really gave Ms. Bowman any scrutiny: did the s/w or GAL visit the children regularly before the adoptions were granted? CFSA (and the Board of Child Care, the private agency that licensed Ms. Bowman) have files, too, showing what Ms. Bowman told them, whether they checked it out, how well they knew her, whether they watched her with the children, whether they wondered why her employment ended in 2000, whether they explored her bankruptcy filings in 2000 and 2001. Etc., etc. and so on and so forth.

There is a WORLD of information in the court files and in CFSA's files, and a puzzle in there that, if put together thoughtfully, could save children's lives. What happened? How? Why? Were there shortcuts? What assumptions were made? What pressures were the social worker and GAL (who probably was carrying 75 to 100 cases at the time) under? ..."

In New York State, Family Courts were opened by order of Judith Kaye, Chief Judge of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals. No one has made the case better. Said Judge Kaye: "Sunshine is good for children."

Isn't it time to demand that the courts in D.C. let the sunshine in?

You could barely escape the Palin-Biden vice-presidential debate last night--and who would want to? (Don't answer that question.) But if you're a northern Virginia resident interested in this fall's faceoff between two former governors now running for the U.S. Senate, you can forget about watching tonight's debate on TV as it unfolds in Roanoke at 7 p.m.

In every other market in Virginia--even in extreme western Virginia where the local TV station is across the state line in Tennessee--the debate between Mark Warner and Jim Gilmore will be carried live on local TV. But not a single Washington TV station, despite all their promotional yammering about how much they care about this area, will provide live coverage the only televised debate of this campaign.

(NewsChannel 8 will show a tape of the debate at 11 p.m.)

Our local stations couldn't possibly air the debate at 7 p.m. because of the pressing, essential programming they are providing instead: Channel 7 will fill the hour with "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy;" Channel 5 has late-breaking reruns of "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld;" Channel 4 has NBC network news, followed by "Access Hollywood;" and Channel 9 is busy with local news and then "Entertainment Tonight."

Across the rest of Virginia, stations affiliated with every one of the same networks represented in Washington--CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC--have made the opposite decision. In the Norfolk area, the debate will be on both Fox and PBS (Washington's PBS outlet, WETA, which is actually based in the commonwealth of Virginia, in Shirlington, will carry the NewsHour instead of the debate.)

Especially eager voters will be able to find the debate streaming online--check the site of the TV station that is hosting the debate, WSLS in Roanoke. Here on washingtonpost.com, you can watch the live stream of the debate and check in with our live blog from Roanoke as well. The debate is also scheduled to be picked up by C-SPAN.

Polling shows Warner to be far, far ahead of Gilmore in the race to succeed Sen. John Warner, but that doesn't excuse the decision to bypass the only TV meeting between the candidates in the most important race on Virginia ballots other than the presidency.

When not a single radio station that can be heard in Washington carries the baseball playoffs, as has been the case this week, that's a problem the market should be able to fix--if fans make enough noise, some station will find it worthwhile to pay to carry the games. But when TV stations form a united front against providing basic and important information to voters, that's when the lazy regulators at the FCC need to start throwing their weight around.

When the Virginia Education Association, the state's 60,000-member teachers union, sent an email to members last week encouraging them to wear blue shirts on "Obama Blue Day," the union says it was merely trying to boost voter registration.

Yeah, right.

The union was actually engaging in a sly, none-too-subtle effort to pressure students into accepting teachers' political choices.

The original email to members was frank enough: "Your next chance to help with the campaign is coming up ... and it is very simple to do. Tuesday is OBAMA BLUE DAY!!!"
Teachers were encouraged to "WEAR BLUE -don't wear an NEA for Obama shirt to school, but wear something else blue. 2) REGISTER TWO VOTERS OR talk to two people who may be on the fence/ or a McCain supporter and sway them to become a Obama Supporter). LETS MAKE OBAMA BLUE DAY a DAY OF ACTION!!!!"

If that wasn't clear enough, the email said it straight out: "There are people out there not yet registered. You teach some of them."

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with teachers encouraging students to register to vote. That should be a part of any civics class, and it's also perfectly right for teachers of other subjects to encourage kids to be active citizens.

But wearing blue as a symbol for a particular candidate, in this case, Obama, crosses the line to partisan activism. There may be a legal problem with soliciting votes in school, but I'm far more bothered by the moral violation, the idea that teachers would abuse their authority by putting even subtle pressure on kids to conform to the teacher's political preference.

Of course unions make endorsements and it is to be expected that teachers' unions would rally around the Democrat. (The state Republican party is all in a tizzy about this incident.) I don't see any problem with teachers pushing for their candidates among their colleagues--that's not a problem in most other workplaces, so it seems fair enough in a school. But the relationship between student and teacher is a delicate and emotionally fraught one, and basic professionalism argues for steering clear of the kind of pressure that this partisan campaign implies.

None of this should in any way discourage teachers from engaging students in probing, difficult conversation and debate about the direction of the country, the quality and content of this fall's campaign, and a good, rigorous critique of our politics.

But this lame explanation from the union just doesn't pass the laugh test: "The Virginia Education Association encourages its members to be politically active, but it does not
encourage teachers to use their classrooms for partisan political purposes.... The email did not encourage teachers to talk with students about voting for any specific candidate.... Teachers hold an important and respected role in our society. We would never encourage them to misuse that role for political purposes."

Of course, that is precisely what the union encouraged teachers to do. We can only hope that most of them knew better than to follow their union's overzealous advice.

Virginia teachers: Did you wear blue? Did you see others doing so? Students: Were you aware of this at school this Tuesday? Did it bother you?

The clever folks over at Google are out with Google 2001, a search tool based on their oldest surviving database, the sum total of the web's contents in 2001.

Yes, web nostalgia is here. You can waste the whole rest of the day checking out what we did and didn't know way back in '01.

For example, "Iraq War" brings a slew of entries about the Iran-Iraq War.

And then there's this:

"Your search - 'Sarah Palin' - did not match any documents."

Wayne Gilchrest, the nine-term Republican congressman who represents Maryland's Eastern Shore and parts of Anne Arundel County, has had it, and he's ready to talk.

He's had it with his own party, which he says "has become more narrow, more self-serving, more centered around 'I want, I want, I want.' " He's finished with his party's presidential candidate, John McCain, who Gilchrest says "recites memorized pieces of information in a narrow way, whereas Barack Obama is constantly evaluating information, using his judgment. One guy just recites what's in front of him, and the other has initiative and reason and prudence and wisdom."

Gilchrest, a moderate who was defeated by a conservative challenger in February's primary, hit the boiling point after Monday's House vote rejecting the big financial bailout package. After much struggle and study, Gilchrest voted for the bailout; what appalls him about his many colleagues who went the other way was that they appeared to do so based neither on a close examination of the issues nor on principle, but rather with a finger to the wind and an eye on the e-mail inbox.

The congressman, whose strongly Republican district stretches from the Pennsylvania line to the border with Virginia, tells me that he's had it with colleagues who "don't understand the issues, who not only don't read the Financial Times, they have never heard of the Financial Times."

Gilchrest isn't done. "We're in this bad place as a country because of the evangelicals, the neocons, the nasty, bitter and mean . . . very clever ideological groups that use money, technology, fear and bigotry to lead people around," he says. "Voting according to your knowledge and experience -- that's out the window. Competence and prudence? Forget it."

Before you start cheering on the congressman who finally let loose, his frustration has one more target: Us.

"We've become a country that sits down in front of the boob tube and listens to people shouting about freedom, but now people equate freedom not with the acquisition of knowledge, but with comfort," Gilchrest says. " 'Give me my flat-screen TV, the gas-guzzling car, the goods made in China.' The whole concept of freedom has become the idea of comfort, with a complete lack of responsibility."

So, yes, Gilchrest argues, the Wall Street fat cats and greed heads brought us this economic crisis, but their flimsy financial structures grew out of our collective hunger for stuff we cannot afford. "Maybe living in luxury diminishes the intellect," he says.

Still cheering?

I am. To be sure, Gilchrest's outburst might not meet the definition of a profile in courage. After all, Gilchrest didn't talk like this while he still had a chance to win reelection. And his endorsement of Democrat Frank Kratovil in the race to succeed him could be perceived as less than purely disinterested. But his straight talk is no mere spewing of post-defeat bitterness.

Gilchrest, who was wounded in combat in Vietnam, where he served as a Marine, voted for the Iraq war but came to believe that the Bush administration had bungled it. Gilchrest favors abortion rights and pushed for faster action on climate change, positions that led conservative Republicans to target him this year.

Gilchrest is on his way out, but the Republican Party, long in decline in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia, is now in free fall in this region.

Long-serving members of Congress and the state legislatures are not only leaving office but also blasting their party on the way out. Just a few years after running his party's national congressional campaign effort, Rep. Tom Davis of Fairfax County is leaving Congress embittered by the Republicans' hard-right positions and frustrated that there appears to be no home for moderates who might appeal to suburban voters.

Virginia's GOP "gave me the middle finger," Davis said after party leaders maneuvered to hand its nomination for the retiring John Warner's U.S. Senate seat to former governor Jim Gilmore, rather than allow a primary between the hard-right Gilmore and the moderate Davis. "Anybody who compromises, you go back to your party base and you're an apostate. You're squishy. You're weak."

Two of Virginia's longest-serving GOP leaders, Sen. John Chichester of Stafford County and Del. Vince Callahan of Fairfax, left the legislature this year with harsh words for their own party -- and both have endorsed Democrat Mark Warner in this fall's Senate race.

"I'm extremely distressed by the path it's taking," Callahan told me of the GOP in Virginia. "It could end up being a minority debating society. We can't be a party about immigrant-bashing or gay-bashing or any other bashing. We should be a party of fiscal responsibility, which is how I got into it."

This is more than the usual bitterness of politicians who have lost a race for office or been displaced by a new generation. This is a collective cry for help.

"I haven't stepped away from my party," Gilchrest says. "The party has stepped away from Eisenhower and Goldwater and Nixon and Ford and even Ronald Reagan. It's been driven away by this anti-government combination of Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell."

In a republic, leaders must occasionally tell the people that they are wrong, just as the people sometimes have to throw the bums out. Last week, we watched as two presidential candidates danced away from any serious discussion about pain or responsibility in this financial crisis. We have no Lincoln, no FDR. But at least we have a few smaller voices on their way out the door, liberated to tell some truths.

Join me at noon today for "Potomac Confidential" at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

For decades, the District and residents wary of overdevelopment have used the city's parking regulations as one of their main weapons in the war against congestion. Complex formulas require a certain number of parking spots for each chunk of new residential or office space.

But now D.C. planners and a growing number of urbanists are proposing to scrap those minimum parking requirements on the theory that big urban parking garages are a destructive and unnecessary public subsidy for car owners. The argument is that building garages in densely populated urban neighborhoods undermines public transit, wastes space that could be used for affordable housing and more attractive retail, and pushes up the cost of housing, guaranteeing lower-quality development.

The city's proposal notes "a growing shift across the nation away from parking minimums as cities realize the hidden costs of over-parking."

The District's planning commission will meet Oct. 16 to consider reducing or eliminating minimum parking requirements, and generally making the city's parking rules more flexible--letting developers use nearby parking spaces rather than building their own, and encouraging builders to provide space instead for car-sharing services and bicycles.

David Alpert, the Greater Greater Washington blogger and urban advocate, has been pushing hard for this relaxation of parking rules, and planning director Harriet Tregoning says she will hold hearings all around the city before any changes are made.

Tregoning argues that the city has diminished its own ability to foster a car-free environment by forcing developers to build enormous numbers of parking spaces that then sit unused. Cases in point: The new DC USA shopping mall in Columbia Heights (Target, Marshalls, etc.) has a huge indoor lot that remains mainly empty, as most customers arrive by Metro or on foot. In Adams Morgan, the new Harris Teeter supermarket similarly has far more parking than it needs.

"I use a granny cart and we walk to the store," says Tregoning, who lives not far from the new market. The new Giant in Columbia Heights has also found itself with more parking spaces than it knows what to do with; I've repeatedly been startled to find that I can park within three or four spaces of the store's doorway, even when the shop is teeming with customers.

"People come from all over the city to Target," the planning director says, "but the parking is hardly used." Similarly, at many new apartment buildings in close-in neighborhoods, the parking spaces required by the city are going unsold--some buildings report selling garage space to only one of every 10 apartment buyers.

Free or nearly free parking induces car usage, the planners say. And in a city with 140,000 parking spaces in garages or other off-street parking, there's a strong case to be made that in some places, there is plenty of parking already. Indeed, if you think about it, the city's most walkable and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods tend to be those with the least parking--Georgetown, Adams Morgan, Capitol Hill. That doesn't mean there aren't tremendously frustrating experiences searching for parking in those neighborhoods, but it does mean that people find ways around that problem.

"Since alternatives to driving are abundant on transit-available streets in the District," the city's proposal says, "dedicated off-street parking for housing should not be required but can be permitted as an option for developers."

Don't build the parking, and residents will be more likely to buy into a transit- and walking-based urban life. That pretty well sums up my experience living in neighborhoods that had very difficult parking vs. those where parking is plentiful. If you know you're going to have to spend an hour roaming around searching for a space, you are dramatically less likely to take the car out on the next shopping or leisure venture.

Do you buy the theory? And do you think the city can get this idea past the neighborhood activists who have long clung to parking minimums as a tool to wield against developers?

In 1985, Tower Records barged into town, and the question was whether Olsson's--John Olsson's locally-owned chain of book and music shops--could survive the big box store on the GWU campus.

From Richard Harrington's story in The Post chronicling Tower's arrival: John Olsson was ready for the big boys. "I told my people it would hurt us for the first six months," he said then, "but that gradually people would be coming back to us because we make such an effort to keep the good stock around all the time."

In 1990, Borders came to town, and Olsson's again was assumed to be toast. "I don't think biggest is necessarily best," Olsson said that time. Anyway, he'd heard that Borders was "arrogant."

In 1995, Barnes and Noble opened its megastore in Georgetown, a couple of blocks from Olsson's store on Wisconsin Avenue. Olsson's reacted by shifting to a more literary and scholarly focus.

Somehow, as independent bookstores shriveled and died all around the nation, Olsson's managed to hold on, through Tower, Borders, Amazon, the whole revolution in retailing.

Yesterday, the chain finally died, victim of--well, the whole shebang, the iPod and the web generally, the megastores and the decline in book reading, the collapse of the CD and the troubles of independent retailers. It was the kind of death that won't shock anyone. The Penn Quarter store had closed in June, and the Georgetown one in 2002, and truth be told, anyone who went to any of the remaining stores in recent months found a shrinking stock, fairly empty aisles, and little of what had made Olsson's so special through the decades.

John Olsson was a student at Catholic University in 1958 when he started working as a clerk at a Dupont Circle shop called Discount Records. He would spend 14 years there, ending up as the manager. In 1972, he opened his first store of his own, and what was initially called Records and Tapes Ltd. would eventually morph into OIsson's. As recently as 2001, he was adding stores, in Rosslyn and at National Airport, to bring his total to nine.

For a time, it looked like he--like stellar independents such as Politics and Prose in upper Northwest and Kramerbooks in Dupont--had figured out ways to beat the big guys and the web. P&P turned itself into a salon, a gathering spot for folks who love to read, with a sparking series of author talks. Kramerbooks focused on food and drink and live music, as well as providing excellent people-watching.

Olsson's made it by letting each of its stores adopt the personality and interests of its neighborhood, and by hiring clerks who knew their stuff cold and had an evangelical interest in spreading the word about the coolest new books and music.

At the Dupont location, the people-gazing was primo. The place always seemed busiest late in the evening, when college kids and new arrivals in town would hang out toward the back, around the music and over near the travel books. There was something of a middle-aged pickup scene, centered around the new non-fiction and the literary section. Kids would sprawl on the floor and music clerks would excitedly play the latest classical and jazz releases, often more interested in educating than in selling.

The Georgetown outlet had unusually good biography and history sections, and I often saw visiting professors from around the country in conversation there.

Olsson's had more than 40,000 members on its rolls--handwritten cards, as I recall--and for those who saw the arrival of chains such as Crown Books as an intrusion that would surely dumb down the book business, frequenting Olsson's was an act of intellectual pride.

But hanging out there didn't necessarily help the stores' bottom line. And as Amazon and its online cousins went to war against the megastores, it became ever more difficult for small independent shops to win enough of the business. They couldn't begin to compete on price, and although the service was infinitely better at Olsson's for many years, once the decline set in, it became impossible to maintain that service.

Still, my sense was that what finally did in Olsson's was the fact that it was simply no longer a place where you could go and soak in the feel of the city. The quality of people-watching naturally slipped as the crowds thinned and as younger customers did their book browsing and buying online.

Astonishingly, in the Internet era, no one in retailing has found a formula that recreates the unique allure of shops that combined music, reading, people-gazing and mating. Of course the Starbucks/indy coffee house category has taken over some of that role, but it's not the same thing. The magic of the books and records combination is that you spent the bulk of your time standing and moving about. That made for infinitely better people-watching, eavesdropping, browsing and imagining than plunking yourself down in a comfy chair.

Somewhere in there is a chance for someone to concoct the next kind of public hangout. What would that place look like? And what did Olsson's mean to you?

Tommy Wells, the Ward 6 D.C. Council member, had to deal with Marion Barry moving Wells' bicycle out of a parking space in front of the Council's offices so Barry could park his car there.

Ward 3 council member Mary Cheh, who didn't own a car back when she lived in San Francisco, manages to bike to work in the District once a week, but says the city is still a ways from becoming an easy place to go car-free.

When it comes to ease of travel without owning a car, Washington is not quite New York, but it is the closest you'll find among big cities in this country. More than 90 percent of American households own at least one car, but in the District, that figure drops to 63 percent, and in some close-in neighborhoods, the number is under 50 percent. (The District actually ranks #1 in the U.S. in percentage of population who travel to work by public transit, at 36 percent, but the comparison is to entire states, not to cities, so it's not exactly apples to apples.)

"A lot of people coming to the city say the first thing they do is give up their car," says D.C. planning director Harriet Tregoning, who does bike to work every day from her Adams Morgan home. When Tregoning started her job, she gave up the parking space that came with the position and converted it to parking for 12 bikes.

(As this chart shows, Washington is actually the one U.S. city in which transit use shoots up way higher than the level at which the population density would justify.)

As I sat with Tregoning, Cheh and Wells the other day on a blocked-off chunk of G Street NW, where they were celebrating D.C. Car-Free Day, Segways and pedicabs whizzed by, bicycle activists handed out maps and information and Zipcar hawked its car-sharing service, which now offers its 32,000 Washington members a choice of 700 vehicles in 26 city neighborhoods.

Which is all dandy, except for one big caveat: "It still feels dangerous downtown," Wells is the first to admit. "We get honked at still. We're absolutely not yet at the point where people expect to share the road with bikes."

Wells, an evangelist for biking in the city, managed to persuade the Washington Nationals to provide bike valet parking at the new ballpark. To the team management's surprise, Well says, the service picked up a corporate sponsor and has had a strong and steady clientele. "The team's objection was that nobody would use it," Wells says, "but it's been really popular."

Were it left entirely to District residents, the city would be a strongly bike-friendly city, Wells and Cheh argue. "But most of the car traffic in the city is not from the District," Cheh says. "So this is like most of the things the District does: We can be as progressive as we want, but if we can't get the region to go along, it's largely wasted effort."

The problem is not suburban governments, several of which have been aggressively pushing for alternatives to dependence on cars, but suburban drivers who are accustomed to having the roads for themselves, Cheh and Wells say.

"To get the suburbanites to understand this aspect of urban living is a challenge," Wells says.

He tools around his ward on two wheels in good part to be able to take a closer look at neighborhood problems--a dead tree, an overrun yard, an abandoned property. Similarly, when she was touring the schools in her ward to check on their readiness to open last month, Cheh made the rounds by bicycle.

The council members' sense of urban superiority is to be expected, of course, but the truth is that many city dwellers are as car-centric as their suburban neighbors. And the relative paucity of retail in the District means that many residents still must travel--generally by car--to the suburbs for basic needs.

The goal, Wells says, is "five-minute living," in which all D.C. residents can find basic amenities within five minutes travel time from their home.

But reaching that goal will mean beating back the vociferous opposition to development in many residential neighborhoods, especially in more affluent parts of town.

"In Ward 3," Cheh says, "we're pushing in the wrong direction," a reference to residents who lobby loudly and strongly against development in areas such as Cleveland Park, Tenleytown and Friendship Heights.

As an example, Cheh cites the planned Commerce Bank branch on Wisconsin Avenue on the former site of the Outer Circle movie theaters. The bank is designed with a drive-thru--a suburban model that is exactly the opposite of the kind of retail that the District wants to encourage. "I opposed it because it's inappropriate development," Cheh says. That was a rare case in which the council member found herself on the same side as neighborhood activists who fight against what they see as moves toward unacceptably high density. "They opposed it because they oppose things."

A few blocks south, at the controversial corner of Wisconsin and Albemarle Street, where Mayor Adrian Fenty has been pushing for a public-private partnership to build a public library and apartments across the street from the Tenleytown Metro station, Cheh says the opportunity to create the density needed to support more retail and a more walkable community appears to be dissipating.

"It's a shame," she says, but the proposal from the developer Fenty chose, LCOR, involves too long a delay in rebuilding the library that was torn down four years ago. "It gets a little unrealistic. By all accounts, the deal is falling apart. And that's too bad, because the area is a dead zone and it doesn't have to be."

TOMORROW: Build less parking--and they will come.