Making streets safer for people could also slow the spread of the coronavirus

In an ideal world, every individual would have the ability to stay home to protect themselves and their families from exposure to coronavirus. But this isn’t the case. There’s an even greater imperative for lots of space for people to walk, bike, and, if necessary, take transit, given the challenges posed by COVID-19.

Even without accounting for necessary trips to the pharmacy or the grocery store, thousands of residents make the journey from their homes to work every day. These are our front-line, essential workers. They staff our grocery stores, work as custodians in apartment buildings, are construction workers, care for our children, provide critical transportation services, fulfill the delivery of online orders, and work directly on the front lines in hospitals and health care facilities.

For most of these folks, staying home is not an option. Plus, people who aren’t essential workers will leave their houses. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s stay-at-home order, which went into effect on April 1, reflects this reality. Even though her administration repeatedly hammers the point that people should stay home, the order itself acknowledges that people will go outside, and says when they should do so:

Our message remains the same: stay home. Staying at home is the best way to flatten the curve and protect yourself, your family, and our entire community from COVID-19. Many people want to know how they can help right now, and for most people this is how – by staying home.

The mayor’s order specifies that residents may only leave their residences to:

• engage in essential activities, including obtaining medical care that cannot be provided through telehealth and obtaining food and essential household goods;
• perform or access essential governmental functions;
• work at essential businesses;
• engage in essential travel; or
• engage in allowable recreational activities, as defined by the Mayor’s Order.

The order goes on to say:

Any individual who willfully violates the stay-at-home order may be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, subject to a fine not exceeding $5,000, imprisonment for not more than 90 days, or both.

Two parts of a “stay at home” order, two challenges

There are two components of Bowser’s order: a list of acknowledged reasons for which people may leave their homes, which includes not just essential work and travel but also recreation and exercise, and a discretionary criminal penalty for violating the order.

DC’s stay-at-home order has been extended to April 24, but now that the city’s peak for COVID-19 cases is projected for July, it’s likely that our government-mandated social distancing will be extended far beyond April. Just as people will go outside, the mayor’s order will likewise dictate—more so than probably any other policy—how people interface with their city and with each other.

The two components of the order each come with their own challenge: How can we ensure that people who have to leave their homes are able to do so safely? And, how can we ensure that the discretionary nature of enforcing the stay-at-home order does not disproportionately impact people of color?

In a press briefing on Monday, the mayor made it clear that people across the city are still congregating in open spaces and struggling to maintain adequate social distance, requiring police intervention. She did indicate that the primary role of the police should be reminding people to social distance, not penalizing them for failing to do so.

If social distancing in public space is necessary to protect the health of our residents, if our residents are struggling with the realization of that goal, and if we want police to be educators rather than enforcement agents, an obvious solution is to clearly indicate which spaces are available for public use, whether it is sidewalks, parks, streets, or someplace else, and provide guidance on how to use them.

When asked if she would consider expanding space for people to walk so that they could be outside safely, Bowser said, “I’m not convinced by this open streets argument, I have to tell you, I think if we shut down a street then you would be asking me why are so many people in the street, so I gotta tell you I’m not convinced by that.”

The idea that every single District resident will cloister themselves at home during this time is not realistic. The output of the order is that, until April 24, people are functionally allowed to do nothing more than a handful of things. Top of the list of that handful of things is staying at home. But it also includes going outside for groceries, going outside for essential work, and going outside for exercise—just as the weather turns toward spring, and just as lots of people have lost their jobs.

A transfer of public street space from drivers to pedestrians, in strategic locations throughout the city, would allow District residents to safely comply with Bowser’s order.

Staying at home is also a luxury

Though it’s easy to cast getting outside as a luxury, and say that DC’s young whites are crowding public spaces for their personal benefit, it’s just as much of a luxury to stay home, order everything via delivery, and stay healthy and sane.

The latter benefits are accruing to knowledge-economy workers, like GGWash’s staff, whose workloads can be easily adapted to working from home and who are better financially equipped to pay a bit more to access goods and services in ways that are more likely to avoid the spread of disease. That’s unequal and unfair, and one way to mitigate the fact that people are going to go outside, whether it’s to walk, bike, or walk to their car, is to make outside safer.

If you don’t believe any of this, fine. And if you are willing to discount calls for safe streets because they come from mostly white advocates, also fine.

Nonetheless, low-income, essential workers, the majority of whom are people of color without reliable access to a car, are most at risk due to the components of Bowser’s order and the city’s refusal to create more space for people.

We are asking essential workers to put their personal safety on the line to keep our region functional, while simultaneously failing to provide adequate space for the people who are making essential trips. This puts everyone who’s complying with the mayor’s order at risk. Most critically, black and Latino New Yorkers are twice as likely to die of coronavirus; the same patterns will likely emerge in DC, if they haven’t already.

We could more strictly enforce a stay-at-home order — or a six-foot distance in constrained public space — by greatly beefing up policing and enforcement. As with all intensified surveillance efforts, this would have a disproportionate impact on DC’s black and brown residents. Or we can make it safe to go outside by giving people enough space to spread out at the minimum required distance of six feet.

Because people are going to go outside. They just…are. Sure, condemn someone for being irresponsible to society and stepping outdoors for trips that are sanctioned by the government anyway. They can’t hear you, and they’re still going to do it.

Yes, of course, the ultimate safest thing to do is never leave your house, because we don’t know who has coronavirus, because there isn’t robust testing. But most people are not perceiving their risk of a bad outcome as being particularly high right now. We don’t endorse the validity of this idea. But it’s a central driver of behavior.

If general concern for others’ well-being was higher on most people’s hierarchy of needs—high enough to outweigh the fundamental need to move, breathe outdoor air and allow our children to do the same over an indefinite, but at least months-long, period—then our society would work a lot differently. (Plus, under New Zealand’s heralded approach to vanquishing, not just flattening, its coronacurve, people are still walking and biking.)

So we can plug our ears, and shout at people to stay at home, and ignore what people are actually doing, thereby worsening the spread of COVID-19, or we can recognize that public policy can and should be expansive, generous, and meet people where they are, rather than trying to bend their behavior into what some perceive as ideal.

Which of these approaches is more likely to sustain public tolerance and observation of the distancing guidance?

A word on “Open Streets”

Bowser is repeatedly treating requests for more public space as if they are requests for more Mayor Muriel Bowser Presents: Open Streets DC.

This could be an honest mistake. The mayor drives everywhere, and lives in Colonial Village, a deeply suburban neighborhood. It’s hard to be self-reflexive about your own windshield perspective, so it’s fair to say she’s the kind of person who could easily mix up a festival-like one-day event called “Open Streets” with a request for “streets that have been opened up to allow more space for people to do things other than drive because, right now, we’re all supposed to be six feet apart from each other all the time.”

It could also be a willful misinterpretation. Open Streets was absolutely wonderful, and it’s a shame that DC took as long as it did to match the efforts of cities like Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Denver. But it’s pretty clear that the kind of thing that we’re suggesting (and that’s at least enough of a public interest that it hit WAMU) is not a festival, but allowing, simply, more space, and more protocol around that space

This can be achieved quite cheaply and quickly; DDOT already has lots of “street furniture,” like flex posts and cones, that can be put out by employees that it’s already hired, and already paying. This is not a budget drain that will siphon off funds from social services, and it’s disingenuous to suggest that this is some sort of large-scale infrastructure project.

We’re talking about more clearly defining space for people on neighborhood streets, where many people are already walking in the road, to safely distance themselves from others.

It’s also odd to treat street closures as some sort of newfangled liability or difficulty. DC has a great deal of experience with closing streets, sometimes with street furniture and sometimes with a police presence: Big, corporate-titled marathons like Rock and Roll shut off neighborhood streets all across the city—more equitably than the city on its own has managed to implement bike lanes and traffic calming—though their organizers pay the city a hefty sum to do so.

Were you thinking bigger than neighborhoods? We routinely close Pennsylvania Avenue for deeply polarizing events like the March for Life, as long as they pay.

Allowing more space for people to be mobile, or just be outside, is actually quite simple. It should in fact be even simpler now than it was before coronavirus.

Historically, taking space away from drivers is a political nonstarter. (It certainly has been for Bowser, a Green Team surrogate whose focus has long been sterling constituent services, which often manifest as resolving complaints about parking.) But, right now, we have more road space than we ever have before. Currently, far fewer people in the region are driving, which means that much of the 1,100 miles of streets in DC are going virtually unused while sidewalks and parks are becoming health risks.

This means that we don’t really have to take space away from drivers, because there are far fewer drivers right now. DC could easily convert some streets to one-way, announce that speed limits are lowered, or convert parking lanes to “sidewalks” and travel lanes to parking lanes, while hardly inconveniencing people in cars.

The most politically contentious thing about street changes—that they might disproportionately affect people driving, or people who think they deserve to always park in front of their house—has been virtually eliminated.

There’s just one last snag. Mayoral administrations run on announcements—on making things things. Once the Bowser administration bought into Open Streets, we finally got an Open Streets event, with the attendant press releases, banners, and T-shirts. What we’re asking for isn’t an event or a festival, or even an initiative.

For this to work appropriately, it should be much quieter: a policy follow-through to the already-established mayoral mandate that people can go outside for essential trips and recreation and should maintain a six-foot distance when doing so.

The only way to avoid the crowding issues the mayor is concerned about is by approaching this in a way that is normally anathema to this administration: repurposing excess road capacity in a lot of places and doing so unceremoniously. We don’t want this to be a thing. We just want DDOT to be allowed to change the way that people are allowed to access street space for the foreseeable future.

The administration, the media, advocates, and civic commentators should all be clear about what they’re talking about. The mayor shouldn’t conflate Open Streets with open streets, journalists should do a little less tut-tutting and a little more questioning about how other cities and countries have managed to do this while we have not, and chatterers should admit that they’re either uncomfortable with where the calls with this are coming from or that they don’t like what the change might mean for them.

Because, fundamentally, we know that people just aren’t going to stay inside for months. This is a realistic understanding that is itself acknowledged by the mayor’s order. We also know that it’s space between people that public health experts say we need, not no people outside ever.

We can address the safety issues around public space by giving people more of it.