Reply to D.C. needs to get a lot more car friendly

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If we ever get back to normal, L Street NW will be a parking lot.  20th Street also.  in many places there is only one lane that goes through, where there used to be 3 or 4 lanes.  I drive kids to school in the morning  and then proceed to my office downtown.  Metro and biking are not an option.[/quote]

Where do you live that metro and bike are not an option?  Why did you choose a school that requires you to drive your kids to school?  Why did you choose a job that requires you to drive?  Why did you choose to live where you have to drive to school and work?  There are massive amounts of public transportation to get to near 20th and L; the city is not required to make it easy for you to drive there [/quote]
You don’t have kids in DC do you? Half of all kids in DC attend charter schools and about 10-15% of kids attend out of boundary school. For a huge number of parents of kids 12 and under in all DC neighborhoods, their day involves dropping their kids off at school in a car.

Your smug and condescending post belays a disturbing level of ignorance about the very thing you are discussing. [/quote]

DP - for middle school and high school my kid went to a charter in Penn Quarter (BASIS).  We live in Southwest.  Mornings, unless it was bad weather, I'd walk with him every day.  Otherwise the green line or 74 bus worked just fine.  A huge group of kids came from Capitol Hill, many walked or biked.  But all in all there weren't actually all that many cars dropping off and picking up.  [/quote]

Yes, but that's not much of a commute.

We moved to DC mid-year. Taking advice from these boards we selected a neighborhood with a well-regarded in-bounds elementary for our landing in the city. Guess what? It was a trainwreck for our kid. They came out of the year practically suicidal and  so we played the charter lottery.

The school that we landed in (our seventh choice) turned out to be great. But to get there we had to take multiple buses. With wait times it took more than an hour one-way. I wasn't working at the time so that was my day. Take the kid to school, spend a other hour plus walking or taking the bus back, eating lunch at home and then repeating the cycle to be there by four. (I think it was four. Time has mercifully blurred the memory.) I got nothing done. It was excruciating. I have spent a lifetime on public transport. When I was ten and from then on I crossed an entire city solo to get to school. I'm not adverse to the concept.

But DC broke me.

And then the charter school moved. Moved to a location even farther from house, a location about seven miles and three different buses away. Oh, and get this: the buses didn't run in sync with school hours. To get home we had to stand for 20 minutes at one of the stops.

We did this once. Then we took Uber while I learned to drive and we got a car. I know a lot of families who didn't have that luxury. Most of the ones at our charter relied on Grandma or their aunt's car. No one was taking public transportation because it wasn't possible.

I've heard lots of excuses why DC doesn't have busses for its kids. Actually they do have busses. You just need an IEP for your child to access one. They spend a ridiculous amount of money on that system. I looked into it once. A journalist should look more. The truth is, DC spends a ton of money on facilities but very little on things that would actually make lifr easier for kids here.

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