Here’s what GGWash’s advocacy team said at the DDOT Director’s confirmation hearing

Last week, the Council’s Transportation and Environment Committee held a hearing for the confirmation of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s appointment of Everett Lott as Director of the District Department for Transportation (DDOT). Serving in the Interim Director role since January 2021, Lott previously served as DDOT’s Deputy Director under Director Jeff Marootian, and earlier worked in several management, administrative, and financial roles for the DC and US governments.

As a local advocacy organization, we engage in the oversight process through testifying at hearings on topics relevant to our mission: mainly transportation, housing and land use. At this hearing, Alex Baca testified on behalf of GGWash and Caitlin Rogger testified on behalf of DC Sustainable Transportation Coalition (DCST, which GGWash manages) in support of Lott’s confirmation.*

The confirmation process comes at a critical time for transportation planning, engineering and policy, all areas in which Director Lott must lead an agency of more than 1,100 people and manage an annual budget of over $1 billion.

In the first half of 2021, data just released by the USDOT shows a national increase of 18.4% in traffic fatalities over 2020, making it the year for the most traffic fatalities since 2006. That’s extremely bad news, including for us in DC where fatalities reached 28 in September. This could potentially put us on track to equal or pass 2020’s high of 37 traffic related deaths since DC passed Vision Zero in 2015. In other words, zero is our goal for numbers of traffic fatalities and major injuries and we are nowhere near it, a failure that has prompted an inquiry by the DC Auditor, with published analysis expected some next year.

DDOT’s also responsible for achieving several major transportation goals to support sustainability and equity in the next 10 years, through mode shift and other approaches. By 2032, the Sustainable DC plan sets out as goals:

• 50% of trips should take place via public transit;
• 25% via active transportation like walking, biking, scooting, and rolling;
• and 25% by private vehicle.

DDOT is the agency most responsible for ensuring we meet those targets. At the moment, the majority of trips in the city take place via private vehicle. At the same time, DDOT has a substantial influx of funding through the FY2022 budget (augmented by federal COVID relief funds) that the DC government has chosen to invest more heavily than before in public transit, active transportation, and public space projects.

You can find the GGWash testimony here and the DCST testimony here.

We support Director Lott’s appointment because the reasons why DDOT has not made more progress on Vision Zero or mode shift goals - despite substantial investments in recent years - are as complex and systematic as they are political. They require an experienced and adept administrator who understands why and how bureaucracies produce particular outputs. Public sector management can seem a frustrating maze of inefficiencies, but fundamentally administrations are institutions designed to run deliberate and methodical processes that produce results that leaders say they want to see. We need political leaders truly incentivized to reach these goals and we also need skilled agency leaders who know how to make the system work toward that end.

Judging from testimony during last week’s eight-hour hearing, many in transportation advocacy hold Lott and Mayor Bowser responsible for the higher rates of traffic violence in 2021. But with rates higher across the country, it would be both a mistake to attribute DC’s strain of the American public health crisis that is traffic violence to the appointment of DDOT’s leader. Traffic violence requires systematic, public-health, evidence-driven approaches undertaken over decades. It requires above all a broader political and social understanding that in cities, single occupancy vehicles must come off the top of the “modal hierarchy” and be replaced by transit, walking and cycling to reduce traffic violence.

But public agencies are monumental and complex, and change has to work against a decades-long history of American DOTs in promoting cars at the top of the food chain that reinforces this prioritization in every job, every relationship, and every decision-making process. It requires not just energy and vision but an expert at the processes, roles, and relationships that make a bureaucracy tick. A top-notch administrator, in this case, is as important as a “true believer” if the vision is clear enough.

The advocacy world has every chance to make our preferences known in this respect; the confirmation hearing was a great opportunity to do so and we were pleased that so many sustainable transportation advocates did so. We believe the goals embedded in Vision Zero, MoveDC, and Sustainable DC make the need for accountability in mode shift, equity, and sustainability crystal clear, and we, as GGWash and DCST, will continue to hold DDOT and Director Lott accountable to them.

*Editor’s note: GGWash maintains a firewall between its advocacy and editorial activities, and editorial staff are not involved in advocacy. To learn more, see our editorial policy.