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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's one problem.  DC and the mayor are lamenting the decrease in inhabited office space downtown and support for small businesses downtown.  They are trying to encourage businesses to RTO and to bring employees back to the downtown area to revitalize the patronage of the many businesses downtown that rely upon the workday workforce population, like restaurants.  If they want to do this, then they need to make the commute downtown more commuter friendly to incentivize having offices in the downtown area.

Conversely they are trying to encourage urban mixed use, like transit, biking and pedestrian friendly thoroughfares.  [b]But those mixed use thoroughfares make it harder for workers who live outside the district to commute in to work.[/b]  Plus the real estate costs downtown, whether purchased or rented, are more expensive.  So, why would businesses want to move their business back downtown when it is more expensive and less convenient to get their workforce to work?

The district needs to come up with a plan that supports incentivizing businesses to return to the downtown area.  And the current Conn Ave plan is not it.  This type of change is discouraging businesses that moved out of the downtown area during the pandemic from returning.[/quote]

No, it doesn't. At worst, it makes it harder for workers who live outside the district to [u]drive in their own cars[/u] to work. There would still be plenty of options for commuting, even if the entire length of Connecticut Avenue were turned into bus-bike-walk only.[/quote]

Seems like it would be better if we started removing bike lanes. It's a lot of space for reserved for a very, very, very small number of people. They're almost always empty. [/quote]

If you look at the data, cycling is becoming LESS popular, even after controlling for rise of remote work. Driving is grabbing more market share. [/quote]

I'd love to look at this data you speak of[/quote]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/27/biking-to-work-isn-t-gaining-any-ground-in-the-us/67b4a9e2-5d32-11ee-b961-94e18b27be28_story.html[/quote]

This article? Which is based on answers to the question "How did you usually get to work LAST WEEK?"? (Because obviously the only place anybody ever goes, by any transportation mode, is their place of paid employment.)

[i]New York City has greatly improved its bicycling infrastructure over the past two decades, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers — 2% of  those who commuted in 2022 — have responded by cycling to work (myself included most days). Put another way, 9% of US bike commuters in 2022 were New York City residents, who made up just more than 2% of US commuters overall. The city’s bike transformation does feel as if it’s at something of a turning point this year, with high-powered electric and gasoline two-wheelers posing new risks for pedestrians and other riders. But through 2022, the commuting statistics show it has clearly been a success.

Many other cities seem to be stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground where biking to work is more plausible than it was 20 years ago but still not pleasant and safe enough to be many people’s first choice. Given how small the public investment in biking has been so far, with a little more than 2% of federal transportation spending going to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in recent years and the bike/pedestrian share of the much-larger state and local transportation spending pie harder to estimate but probably less than 1%, my natural impulse as a bike commuter is to argue for more such investment.[/i][/quote]

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