In a report that will not surprise any Antiplanner reader, a Washington Post survey reveals that “the car is still king in the Washington area.” The survey of 1,507 DC-area residents found that 85 percent frequently drive for their travel needs, a number that ranges from 64 percent in DC itself to 92 percent in Virginia suburbs. The article notes that these numbers are confirmed by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, adding that the survey’s results haven’t changed much in the past decade.
Unfortunately, the writers have been infected with anti-auto planner rhetoric, referring to people’s preferences for auto driving as “car dependency.” Are the writers themselves computer-dependent because they no longer use manual typewriters (or ink and quill)? Are they Starbucks-dependent if they no longer brew their own coffee each morning? What’s so bad about being “dependent” on something that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the alternatives?
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As the Antiplanner has noted before, there are two ways of planning transportation systems. One is to look at people’s actual transportation habits and needs and plan to meet those needs. The other is to fantasize how you want people to travel and plan to meet those needs. As long as places like Washington are locked into the second method of planning, they are not going to solve their transportation problems.
Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—the most European—of large American cities. Ecologically and systemically, though, it’s a mess. L’Enfant’s design of expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and the low, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destinations and made housing stock impossible to build. Most people who refer themselves as DC residents infact occupy it’s surrounding exurbs.
There are many pleasant places in DC to go for a walk, but the city is difficult to get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross, the traffic circles are obstacle courses, the diagonal streets intersecting between otherwise perpendicular blocks are traffic accident magnets, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians by acting as deserts to human contact; Assuming there’s a destination to go to. Many beautiful buildings, but good luck finding a chinese takeout joint, a dry cleaner, a Daycare center. These vacuums, which nature abhors…..are empty of any personal vitality, the result they re-wild or atrophy. (DC is also heavily wooded which is also a detterent to urban vitality because no one wants to walk into a forest at night for fear of getting mugged or raped) Which is why decades of ignored maintenance have made the National Mall, need over a Billion dollars in repairs. The car is King of DC because it’s the only way to get around; where as other grid cities did a healthy job of mixing cars, transit, cycling and human foot power…..in DC pedestrianism is for losers and it’s transit systems is a slowly falling apart death trap. DC’s public buildings in the last 50 years also evoke that same level of dystopian anxiety.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ugly-government-buildings-in-washington
“to look at people’s actual transportation habits and needs and plan to meet those needs.” Until you defy the laws of physics……….Unless you double deck Every Avenue in DC you’re not gonna fix traffic. The Metrorail was built for two reasons, shuttling federal bureaucrats unimportant enough to warrant a limousine. And bicentennial pride. Some pride, 40 years later Metrorail is the ugliest installation ever made.
Both public and private buildings associated with public outdoor spaces confirming their accessibility to all citizens. DC does not follow this. It’s vacuous and devotes too much land to Public attention via oversized monuments and memorials. DC is a outdoor museum, not a city. Before the explosive growth of the federal government after the 1930’s, Washington DC was nothing more than a little podunk town where few things ever caught the public attention. It wasn’t til after the 1930’s that the city turned to the Leviathan that consumed the much of the daily news in both scandals, coming attractions and those that wish to “Show off their wares” or beg for money. The trimming of government would definitely bring traffic down.
One positive project is the 3 lane HOV which is congestion priced. At rush hour you can pay $25.00 or so for a 30+ mile drive. But as you see bumper to bumper traffic on the main highway for all 30+ miles, it is worth it. 2 hours of your life is worth the $$.
At those rates, they can pay to keep expanding the HOV all the way to Fredericksburg.
After midnight the same ride might be a $1.00 or so, which is how congestion pricing should work.
The lane directions switch depending on which way the traffic comes from.
These lanes must be hated by the DC planners.