Arlington County government agencies produce some pretty cool stuff.

I’m not the creator of the below video, but I found it online recently, and recognized that it was created when I was a consultant for Mobility Lab, a think tank funded by Arlington County government. The whole point of Mobility Lab was to persuade DC metro commuters to take public transit rather than drive alone to work. The time period in which the below video was produced was a special time in Arlington County, with management prone to thinking outside the box and taking risks. Then the Arlington streetcar debacle happened and, well, those days were over.

Arlington remains a small but influential and wealthy county in Northern Virginia directly across the river from Washington, DC. (in fact, the county makes up the bottom left portion of the diamond shape originally conceived as the boundaries for the nation’s capital).

Arlington had more money than God in those days and an ability to spend it in creative (and sometimes wasteful) ways. The top management in the commuter services bureau was like a venture capitalist, discovering talent and startup companies to partnership with and invest in. It was that kind of environment that led to Arlington and D.C. to create the first ever bicycle sharing system, Capital Bikeshare, that was no means guaranteed to be a success. When it was, they proliferated throughout the U.S. and now number at around 60.

Arlington is a tiny county and densely populated, or “compact” to use the less loaded term preferred by politicians. There are 11 metro stations in Arlington and even with reduced ridership, without the metro D.C. would grind to a halt. But I digress. Let’s get on with the video.