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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I actually agree with OP even though I think DC needs to reduce it's car infrastructure and would be in favor of drastic measures like shutting down parts of the city to cars or taxing cars using city streets during rush hour. I just think DC's current transportation trajectory, which seems to rely on continually increasing the number of cars moving in and out of the city, is totally unsustainable. I've lived in LA. At some point you have to invest in public transportation and car alternatives or you just wind up living in this sprawling traffic jam that decreases the quality of life for everyone on a daily basis. It's miserable. It's hard for people to transition to other forms of transportation but especially for commuters, it's really the only longterm option that makes economic and environmental sense. We can't just keep increasing road capacity. There is an upper limit.

[b]But I find the bike lobby in DC tedious because it does often feel like all they want to do is add bike lanes and promote more biking.[/b] I bike places and even I think this is dumb. We do need to change streetscapes to make them safer, and bike lanes should be part of that. But the main goal should actually be pedestrian safety and reducing car speeds within the city. Instead we just stick a bike lane on an existing road where cars already go too fast. Great? This doesn't actually solve anything even if the bike lane is amazing for cyclists.

I wish the bike lobby would stop taking about bikes and instead focus exclusively on pedestrian safety and better infrastructure. If you do that, the city will naturally get safe for cyclists. But the truth is you are not going to convert a bunch of people into bike commuters. You might be able to convince them to take regional trains, light rail, metro, and buses, if you invest money in these options and make them affordable and convenient. Some people might also choose to bike. But why would this be your main focus? It's dumb.[/quote]

You need to actually spend more time in public meetings and talking to people, and less time on twitter and DCUM and wherever you are getting your impressions.  There is no "bike lobby." There is a broad coalition in favor of making DC streets safer and reducing emissions.  Bike lanes just get vastly more attention because of the few paranoiacs who fixate on them. But DDOT is also working on all sorts of other things, like speed humps, bus priority projects, etc. Furthermore, adding bike lanes is a traffic calming technique for *all users.* You seem to think it's done for the "bike lobby," but it is actually often a integral part of slowing traffic for everyone.

Improving Metro and bus service is, unfortunately, not entirely within the control of DC, apart from changes to DC streets to improve the flow.  I don't know a lot about that, but would be great if people actually investigated what's going on instead of frothing about the "bike lobby." [/quote]

Thanks, I actually go to public meetings and work on these issues in my neighborhood all the time. There is a broad coalition working on street safety that includes lots of people like me who are focused on pedestrian safety and especially child safety. There are also a small number of [mostly male, entirely white, entirely UMC] people who view everything through the lens of biking in DC and often direct broader conversations about safety to the impact on cyclists because that is their experience. I am in agreement with them on many things BUT I think their voices are too prominent and that much of the backlash against safe streets initiatives is in part due to how much oxygen these folks take up.

One feature of this group is that they have an outsized expectation of how many people are going to adopt biking as a primary means of transportation, and this tends to focus them much more on bike infrastructure and insufficiently on public transportation and pedestrian safety. It's not that they don't care about these things -- if I said "we need more bus infrastructure in DC and we need to find more ways to incentivize bus ridership especially in areas not well-served by metro" they will agree with me! But then when it comes time to talk about policy initiatives, this is like #13 on their list of wants. And they are also happy to talk for hours about getting harassed as a cyclist but seem entirely ignorant of the experience of many bus riders who deal with safety threats on a daily basis, for example.

Half the time these arguments wind up just being a mansplaining, conservative middle aged man arguing with a mansplaining, liberal middle aged man about bike lanes. If you find yourself on EITHER side of that dynamic, consider being quiet for a while and instead elevating the voices of people who don't ride bikes but still want safe streets. There are a lot more of them.[/quote]

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