Why I stopped taking my kid to school by bicycle

It’s 8:30 on a weekday morning and I’m writing this from the Metro Red Line. Normally, at this time on a beautiful, 70-degree post-summer morning, I would be riding my Urban Arrow bakfiets cargo bike, pedaling along R Street NW with my two dogs and nine-year-old son Oliver in the front cargo box, wind in our hair, barking at strangers, etc. But that’s over now.

It’s over because a man driving a dump truck the size of a house put my son’s life in danger.

The details of what happened unfortunately aren’t that remarkable. It was a perfect storm of road rage, reckless driving, terrible street design, and total lack of any kind of recourse, so basically a normal Tuesday on a bicycle in DC.

The dump truck driver drove aggressively and blasted his airhorn over many blocks on R Street NW. He was just feet from a half dozen other people on bikes who could do nothing but cringe and hope he didn’t mash us into pulp.

Oliver was terrified, asking me if we can ride on the sidewalk, asking me if we can stop, almost in tears.

After we turned up 18th Street and jumped the light at S Street to get away from this reckless man, Oliver turned and asked, “Can we take the Metro instead?” And that was it. I decided I can’t subject my son to this traffic violence anymore.

It was the last straw. But it was the also just the latest in countless similar incidents.

I’ve been taking Oliver to school on a bike since 2013. I could go on for days about the angry drivers close-passing us on McArthur Boulevard NW, stuck between trucks at Calvert and Connecticut Avenue NW, endless near-right-hooks on R Street NW, and close calls I don’t even want to think about at Florida and First streets NW.

Endless construction has forced us to merge with traffic all over the city, while delivery and ride hailing vehicles constantly park in bike lanes. I’ve had people threaten to kill me on 14th Street NW. One lady passed Oliver and me within inches on 18th Street NW then got out of her Range Rover to scream at us (that incident did have him in tears).

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how it’s only a matter of time before we get hit, and I’m just not going to wait for that to happen.

This was a really hard decision for me. We have an easy ride to his school. It’s about five miles through residential neighborhoods. In a car, you only average about 15 mph driving across the city when you figure in the stoplights, so a bike just makes sense. It takes up less space, it emits nothing, it gets me exercise, we can say hi to our friends we encounter along the way, and then I can swing by the dog park with my pups on the way back.

But DC streets are so hostile, so angry, so violent, and so dismissive of the needs of people who aren’t in cars, that I can’t justify having my son out there exposed—without a metal cage protecting him—for an hour and a half every day.

The most infuriating thing about this particular incident and many others is that this is how it’s supposed to work. R Street is supposed to be shared by cement trucks, tractor trailers, monster SUVs, dump trucks, and squishy fleshbags on two wheels.

They call it an unprotected bike lane, but in practice, here and all over the city, it’s a little bit of extra space that people on bicycles can use as long as no motor vehicles are using it. It’s a design that squeezes us into sharing a narrow road with literal dump trucks, while fully half the street space is used for car storage (both sides of R have on-street parking).

I’m not going to stop riding a bike in DC. I’m stubborn. But I’ve been doing it long enough to have countless near-misses, see horrible things happen to my friends, and see people killed. I can no longer justify involving my only child in what is a very violent, dangerous fight.

Cycling advocates say that the more people ride, the safer cycling becomes, just because of numbers. But that only gets us so far, especially when it comes to mobility for children and more risk-averse folks who are turned off by the dangers of cycling with poor infrastructure. We need DC government agencies to step up and take actions to keep people safe—not in five to 10 years, but now.

Maybe we’ll get back in the bakfiets when construction season is over. Probably we’ll still mount up occasionally when there’s some errand I have to do, or when the dogs need to go to the vet. But for now, we’re on the Red Line because DC’s streets have failed us, and that I’m not happy about.