War is not the answer. Photo by MatthewBradley on Flickr.

Post reporter Eric Weiss went trolling for suburban elected officials to condemn DC’s pedestrian-friendly transportation improvements, creating an article that casts DC’s efforts to improve pedestrian conditions as hostile moves against suburban commuters. It’s a classic newsitorial, sporting this opening line: “The District is escalating what some suburban commuters are calling its war against workers who drive into the city.”

Weiss bases his findings on a number of pro-pedestrian proposals being considered, some more seriously than others: cutting I-395 back to Mass. Ave., replacing the reversible lane on 16th Street in Columbia Heights with a median, increasing fines for failing to yield to pedestrians, and the Clean Air Compliance Fee. They’ve already removed the rush-hour one-way operation on Constitution Avenue in Capitol Hill.

The suburban drivers—often, perhaps, drivers of Suburbans—Weiss hunts down to comment on DC’s plans have plenty of vitriol. “The District is moving toward becoming ‘the most anti-car city in the country,’ said John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. ‘They see commuters as the enemy.’” Your emergency towing memberships at work. And here’s NoVa Congressman Jim Moran: “D.C. could wind up as an island isolating themselves with these policies. Don’t pray too hard for fear that all your prayers will be answered.”

Weiss’s editorializing masquerading as news continues:

Auto commuters have long suspected that the city’s speed and red-light cameras, along with its famously aggressive ticketing policies, have more to do with filling city coffers than with safety. The city’s new parking meters, for example, can be programmed to charge escalating rates.

That’s quite a non sequitur. Parking meters have nothing to do with safety, expensive or not. Despite Weiss’s slant, performance parking is not about soaking drivers to “fill the city’s coffers”; it’s about ensuring people who wish to use curb space pay a market price to use a scarce resource instead of just making spaces impossible to find. Which is exactly what DDOT Director Emeka Moneme says, as a matter of fact:

Moneme said the city will continue—and increase—the use of market pricing when it comes to allocating such scarce resources as on-street parking. “Putting the real price of driving out there allows people to make better decisions,” Moneme said, not a subsidized rate of $1 an hour.

Moneme, Councilmember Tommy Wells, and MWCOG Transportation Director Ronald Kirby all sound eminently sensible in their defense of complete streets policies over the blind promotion of high-speed traffic that all suburban drivers crave in Weiss’s world. But the gold star on this article goes to the one suburbanite who made it into the article despite her refusal to roundly condemn the District:

“You’d like me to lambaste the District, but we’re all in the same boat,” said Montgomery County Council member Nancy Floreen (D-At Large). “I am sympathetic to some of these initiatives. But the challenge is finding the right balance. Not everyone can ride Metro or walk to work.”

She placed blame for the problem, in part, on the federal government, which offers many of its employees free parking in the city.

Floreen makes an excellent point. Free parking does indeed cause problems; policies that mitigate its negative effects are restoring balance, not part of a “war against workers.”