About Access Washington DC

What this site is

Eighteen sights in Washington, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving by air and by rail, getting around on the Metro, the buses and on foot, reading the plan, the National Mall and its museums, the seasons, what to eat, where to stay, what to book ahead and the day trips across the rivers. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how a visit works, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Washington means here

This site keeps to the District of Columbia: the city inside its own boundary, from the Capitol and the Mall to Georgetown, the cathedral on the heights of Northwest and Anacostia across its river. Arlington, Alexandria, Mount Vernon and Great Falls are across the Potomac in Virginia, and Annapolis is in Maryland; they are much visited, but they appear on the day trips page rather than as sights of the city.

The name causes confusion, and the photographs and facts here are checked for it: Washington State, the many other towns called Washington, the universities and sports teams that carry the name, and George Washington the person are not the city, and nothing about them appears as if it were.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out. Visits are described as mechanics, such as timed entry, screening and requests through Congress, not as opinions about the government or the people in it.

Access Washington DC is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. It is independent: it is not connected to the federal government, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian or any museum, and it does not use their emblems. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Washington show another state, a replica or an event somewhere else, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission. This site does not sell, book or reserve anything.