Tell DC leaders that free parking and lawless driving won’t revitalize downtown

When I wrote last spring about the limited imaginations struggling to generate a future vision for downtown DC, people reached out to say it resonated. Not just parents frustrated with how kid-hostile downtown is, but young people who don’t see a future there; workers who feel they’re being treated as resources rather than people with needs and interests; and veterans of economic cycles who said they’d seen it all before.

Right now is your chance to tell the powers that be what downtown’s recovery should actually look like, via this survey. The survey is part of the “Downtown Action Agenda” planning project, supported by Mayor Muriel Bowser and led by the Office of Planning’s former Director, Andrew Trueblood. In addition to the survey, the project has been convening focus groups (in which I’ve taken part) on how investing in infrastructure and culture can chart a different course for downtown.

Good ideas, bad ideas

Downtown’s future must be more resilient and forward-looking than the office-centric approach that proved woefully vulnerable, for DC and other cities. So far, discussions about what that means for housing and public space have yielded some potentially interesting suggestions, like “create dense residential “nodes” to increase housing,” and “work with the National Park Service and Congress to transfer downtown parks to the city” (we like that).

But tension and bad ideas are also in the mix when it comes to transportation, as reflected in the summary of discussions to date: “Some felt that building multimodal infrastructure with a focus on walkability and fewer car-centric options was critical for the future, while others spoke to the need to remove obstacles that currently prevent people from getting downtown, such as congestion and difficulty finding parking.”

Yes, the thing lots of people talk about but no one seems able to quantify in any meaningful way: the disaffection of the Suburban Commuter (SC) and how it’s impossible to create cities that work for anyone else, because we know what the SC wants and without it, he won’t come back. DC’s still stuck in a rut of fear and Commuter Essentialism about what Kind of Person we want back and what their needs are. Why don’t we constructively build and grow something that’s actually in demand: livable, walkable, bikeable, affordable neighborhoods?

But now is an inflection point: a rare opportunity to change how things are built and prioritized, in an inflexible part of town whose historical dependence on offices has determined much of its value. Use the survey, by the end of the day on Friday, to share your views on what will make Downtown appealing, safe, accessible, and resilient for decades to come.

A car-centric recovery is a weak, old-hat fantasy

Plenty of influential voices are clamoring for a 1950s-style, car-based free-for-all to get 21st-century people interested in spending time downtown again. The Washington Post Editorial Board, within a month, published an op-ed deploring driver lawlessness and its impacts on safety and quality of life, and another one encouraging leaders to make parking free or cheap and “lay off the aggressive ticketing” (I’m not making this up, though reading it caused a fair amount of hooting among the GGWash policy team). “Aggressive ticketing” presumably means assessing penalties for driving and parking in ways that are against the law, deemed as such because of the potential to harm the public good. What happened to their admonishment in July that driving’s “a privilege, not a right”?

What car dependency costs us is quantified, and further quantifiable. We know car dependency slows down economic development, we know it causes excess deaths (1 in 100 people will be killed by drivers; I’m sad to note that you probably know one or more) and sickness, and we know it keeps us from making progress on any other mode of transportation. But when making big claims about the need to endlessly service Suburban Commuters, evidence is suddenly unfashionable. It’s just vibes.

A downtown recovery predicated on access for drivers is a desperate fantasy, and it doesn’t belong in the recovery conversation.

It’s so ingrained that it threatens to derail any good decision about mobility and infrastructure for decades. DDOT’s pumping the brakes on downtown transit and biking projects (seen any new ones there lately?), rocked and uncertain of its direction after the demise of the K St Transitway. The Post’s in on it, crying what my grandma called “crocodile tears” over traffic deaths one day, then loudly championing the precise causes of those deaths the next.

Plus, outside of the defined Downtown area, several DC neighborhoods have become mini-downtowns of their own and are doing quite well, even attracting more businesses, and are vibrant throughout the workday and on the weekends. The key to their success has been the kinds of housing, transit, walking, and biking access, and service businesses that attract and serve people of all ages and work types.

Tell them: downtown needs people

So it’s important that the orchestrators of the downtown recovery agenda hear your voices, too. Fill out the survey as a tribute to future DC, or out of frustration with how progress on safety, livability, and sustainability goals is so often held hostage to the fantastical car-centric model of economic growth, or as a birthday present for my colleague Alex Baca on September 8 (you can tell her at GGWash’s Ward 1.5 Happy Hour this Sunday).

Talk about pedestrianized plazas and car-free streets, or how workers depend on transit. Talk about how there physically isn’t room for most people to drive – especially given the region’s projected growth – unless you want to start knocking down buildings (anyone?). Talk about more dynamic land use and dense housing at a variety of income levels. More importantly than what we suggest, tell them what you value. You, your needs and your ideas are essential to downtown DC’s future.

Thank you.