Cycling on Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park by Adam Fagen licensed under Creative Commons.

What does a road look like when it cuts out the 4,000-pound hunks of metal? In Rock Creek Park, apparently the answer is: very busy.

The northern portion of Beach Drive has been closed to cars since early April, as part of an effort to give people more space for outdoor recreation during the pandemic. The tree-lined road through Rock Creek Park was already closed to vehicle traffic on weekends, but advocates had been pushing for years to close it during the week too.

The change got people wondering how much foot and bicycle traffic there was on the makeshift pedestrian greenway during the week. So volunteers with the People’s Alliance for Rock Creek (PARC) decided to count it themselves. In the span of four weeks, they ended up counting more than 28,000 people.

“I was really surprised,” said Peter Harnik, a longtime environmental advocate who has been working to make Beach Drive pedestrian-only for 40 years (yes, 40). “None of us knew how many people are using the park. It was way more than we expected.”

Volunteers counted at three locations for five hours a day: two hours each in the morning and afternoon, and one at lunchtime. They counted on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays over a period of four weeks in August and September — a total of 12 days.

During those 12 days, over three locations, PARC volunteers counted a total of 28,741 road users, more than half of them on bicycles. They also encountered more than 10,000 runners or walkers, and hundreds of people using other devices like skateboards and wheelchairs.

Harnik said PARC, which formed as an outgrowth of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) has been pushing to close Beach Drive to cars since 1980. The National Park Service agreed to close the road on weekends; but during the week the road has remained a commuter thoroughfare, carrying as many as 20,000 vehicles a day.

PARC has argued for years that the cars taint Rock Creek Park with pollution and noise, and that there is demand for pedestrian access to Beach Drive during the week as well as on weekends. Harnik pointed to what he sees as a major imbalance: according to a 2005 NPS environmental impact statement, while Rock Creek Park hosted about 2 million recreational visitors each year, more than four times as many people simply used it as a route to another destination.

NPS has kept the road open to vehicles because of pressure from car advocates and public officials, who feared traffic could spill over onto other roads. Officials say that eventually, Beach Drive will open to traffic again.

“When conditions allow, we plan to resume regular operations and allow drivers to use the entire road again,” NPS spokesperson Jonathan Shafer wrote in an email. “On typical work days, thousands of people use Beach Drive to travel throughout Washington, DC, and the total rehabilitation project we finished last year improved conditions for everyone on the road.”

The pandemic changed the calculus: social distancing, stay-at-home orders and teleworking have dissipated much of DC’s infamous traffic, and sparked a trend of road closures to create space for recreation around the region. All of a sudden, the weekday closures Harnik had been pushing for 40 years became a reality.

“Of course 99% of me hates that we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Harnik said. “But 1% of me says there’s a silver lining to all kinds of terrible things … it does shake things up a little.”

In that changed landscape, PARC saw an opportunity. NPS is only planning on keeping Beach Drive car-free until DC moves into phase 4 of its coronavirus reopening plan. To try to convince NPS to make the closure permanent, Harnik said PARC offered to count how many people were using the road on weekdays.

They set up a rigorous counting protocol and NPS gave them a permit. Then Harnik and WABA put out feelers and a total of 72 volunteers signed up to help count. They chose weekdays in the two weeks before and after Labor Day and began to count.

What gets counted, counts

Jurisdictions tend to take detailed vehicle traffic counts. But counting pedestrians and bikes is much more rare. DC does have the locations of bicycle counters listed in its open data portal, but the data those counters collect is harder to find. The District Department of Transportation did not immediately return a request for information on bicycle and pedestrian traffic data.

Though bike/ped counters are rare, they are not without precedent in the region: Arlington County started installing automatic bicycle and pedestrian counters in 2009 based on the theory that “what gets counted, counts.” The county feeds data to a public dashboard.

Harnik described traffic counts as a vicious cycle: jurisdictions don’t measure bike and pedestrian traffic because it’s seen as less important; then when decisions are made, the traffic with data attached (vehicles) gets priority. The PARC volunteers, he said, intended to “break out of that mold.”

PARC’s numbers went beyond what Harnik expected. Assuming every person was triple-counted, PARC estimates an average of 880 people were using Beach Drive per day during the five hours counted. If nobody was triple counted, it could have been as many as 2,640 people each day.

Thousands of road users is nothing to sneer at, especially during a global pandemic. In 2004, a National Park Service traffic study counted a daily weekday average of 6,579 cars on Beach Drive north of Broad Branch Road, where today’s traffic closures start. And today, usage of DC streets citywide is at about half of normal levels.

It wasn’t just ordinary people that volunteers counted on the trail. One volunteer saw Mayor Muriel Bowser on a bike, Harnik said. Volunteers also counted 629 dogs, one cat, and one bird atop someone’s shoulder.

So, there you have it. When you take the cars out of the Beach Drive equation, you get bicyclists, walkers, runners, dogs, a cat, a bird, and a mayor. Not bad for a few weeks of car-free road.

This article was updated on Wednesday, November 18 to include comments from NPS.

Libby Solomon was a writer/editor and Managing Editor for GGWash from 2020 to 2022. She was previously a reporter for the Baltimore Sun covering the Baltimore suburbs and a writer for Johns Hopkins University’s Centers for Civic Impact.