Anonymous wrote:So DC should give up its precious right-of-way for the exclusive use of people who don't even live here, who only need that stretch of road for a few minutes a day at 7AM and 5PM?

Tax-paying DC residents and business owners should take a complete back seat to commuters?

Short answer is yes, DC should be encouraging people to commute into the city efficiently and effectively. That’s the way the economy works. Congestion is bad because it hinders the free movement of goods and people. Intentionally causing congestion is highly illogical and will only harm DCs economy. Committing public resources to mass transit is the most effective and efficient means to support movement of people. Reserving significant public resources, such as public right of way, for low efficiency transport is obviously wasteful. Your utopian vision of a an effectively walled city that makes outsiders unwelcome is pure folly. If you consider entropy, following the path of least resistance will give you a good understanding of the outcome.

So DC should give up its precious right-of-way for the exclusive use of people who don't even live here, who only need that stretch of road for a few minutes a day at 7AM and 5PM?

Tax-paying DC residents and business owners should take a complete back seat to commuters?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I worked in planning and highway and traffic engineering for over 25 years, including serving on planning organizations, serving as an appointee under several governors, and serving numerous planning and engineering organization as officer, executive committee member, et cetera.

The idea that one can or must keep building lane miles to support personal vehicles is, plain and simple, unsustainable. Communities need alternatives, to include mass transit, ride shares, bicycles, and others - and dependence on personal vehicles must begin tapering off.

Sorry, but this is a red herring. Nobody is against options. What makes zero sense is to take the most precious public asset that exists, right of way, and set aside for the exclusive use of a few hundred people. They should instead set it aside for frequent bus transit service.

You are uninformed. It's considerably more than a few hundred people. And you keep saying "nobody is against options" yet you do not want bike lanes to be one of the options.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A couple things:

1. The number of people riding bikes is not increasing every year. DC DDOT publishes the data. This is just not true.

2. Every sq inch of public right of way that is dedicated to protected bike lanes with low utilization is a waste of public resources. The funds used to create these lanes would be better dedicated to creating dedicated bus lanes.

You keep talking about the data, but the data is practically worthless as there is only data from barely a dozen locations, with no sensors and no data at all for some of the busiest bike corridors in the city. It is not valid to draw any conclusions from the data.

Also, DC *is* creating dedicated bus lanes.

They have a currently unfunded plan to do so. Meanwhile they are busy taking advantage of a public health crisis throwing up protected bike lanes everywhere to take away road lanes. This is despite WMATA themselves saying that they cannot return to prepandemic levels of service.

DC thinks this is going to “encourage” people to bike, but the recent bike lanes around GWU which is a university and who have been in session all year is a good indicator that is a pipe dream for even a target audience for bicycling.

Instead, the path of least resistance is that people will just avoid downtown. This group includes businesses. It’s incredible that DC could very well be snuffing out it’s COVID recovery to pander to a vocal minority who are evangelical about a niche hobby.

If they used the crisis to make big investments in transit I’d have more hope. Because that’s actually smart, sensible and will have an actual and real positive impact on the economy and climate change.

Anonymous wrote:I worked in planning and highway and traffic engineering for over 25 years, including serving on planning organizations, serving as an appointee under several governors, and serving numerous planning and engineering organization as officer, executive committee member, et cetera.

The idea that one can or must keep building lane miles to support personal vehicles is, plain and simple, unsustainable. Communities need alternatives, to include mass transit, ride shares, bicycles, and others - and dependence on personal vehicles must begin tapering off.

Sorry, but this is a red herring. Nobody is against options. What makes zero sense is to take the most precious public asset that exists, right of way, and set aside for the exclusive use of a few hundred people. They should instead set it aside for frequent bus transit service.

I worked in planning and highway and traffic engineering for over 25 years, including serving on planning organizations, serving as an appointee under several governors, and serving numerous planning and engineering organization as officer, executive committee member, et cetera.

The idea that one can or must keep building lane miles to support personal vehicles is, plain and simple, unsustainable. Communities need alternatives, to include mass transit, ride shares, bicycles, and others - and dependence on personal vehicles must begin tapering off.

Anonymous wrote:A couple things:

1. The number of people riding bikes is not increasing every year. DC DDOT publishes the data. This is just not true.

2. Every sq inch of public right of way that is dedicated to protected bike lanes with low utilization is a waste of public resources. The funds used to create these lanes would be better dedicated to creating dedicated bus lanes.

You keep talking about the data, but the data is practically worthless as there is only data from barely a dozen locations, with no sensors and no data at all for some of the busiest bike corridors in the city. It is not valid to draw any conclusions from the data.

Also, DC *is* creating dedicated bus lanes.

DC is incredibly car friendly. People love cars so much in the district there’s a rash of people violently swiping them from the owners.

A couple things:

1. The number of people riding bikes is not increasing every year. DC DDOT publishes the data. This is just not true.

2. Every sq inch of public right of way that is dedicated to protected bike lanes with low utilization is a waste of public resources. The funds used to create these lanes would be better dedicated to creating dedicated bus lanes.

Anonymous wrote:This thread was disheartening. Just wanted to add my own anecdotal experience and observation. Firstly, I'm surprised at the lack of discussion about climate change- didn't seem to factor in much. For me, learning from bike advocates opened my eyes to the fact it's not only about bikes it's more about rapid bus Lanes and better public transit, so I think the idea that bike advocates are all white men is a bit outdated.
Also I do bike commute almost every day (own a car, have a child in a WOTR school, and live EOTR, but within Metro range.)
I see SOOO many families biking, that's what made me want an ebike. Ebikes are seeing a huge growth in demand so yes, people ARE biking, and not for recreation. In better weather I see dozens of families on e cargo bikes each direction, on trails, lanes, streets, etc. The numbers increase each year, I've been biking in DC for over 20 years. Also, I took public transit from SE to NW high school, and yes kids carried their backpacks, gym bags, violins and yes, gasp, lunch on the train and bus, on their person. Humans are built to haul and carry. I think this thread must be heavily dominated by commuting suburbanites because some of the observations are just off. They should be advocating for better rapid rail systems to bring them in, and safe streets once they arrive so they can walk to their destination.

+1000

Anonymous wrote:This thread was disheartening. Just wanted to add my own anecdotal experience and observation. Firstly, I'm surprised at the lack of discussion about climate change- didn't seem to factor in much. For me, learning from bike advocates opened my eyes to the fact it's not only about bikes it's more about rapid bus Lanes and better public transit, so I think the idea that bike advocates are all white men is a bit outdated.
Also I do bike commute almost every day (own a car, have a child in a WOTR school, and live EOTR, but within Metro range.)
I see SOOO many families biking, that's what made me want an ebike. Ebikes are seeing a huge growth in demand so yes, people ARE biking, and not for recreation. In better weather I see dozens of families on e cargo bikes each direction, on trails, lanes, streets, etc. The numbers increase each year, I've been biking in DC for over 20 years. Also, I took public transit from SE to NW high school, and yes kids carried their backpacks, gym bags, violins and yes, gasp, lunch on the train and bus, on their person. Humans are built to haul and carry. I think this thread must be heavily dominated by commuting suburbanites because some of the observations are just off. They should be advocating for better rapid rail systems to bring them in, and safe streets once they arrive so they can walk to their destination.

Yes, they should. And for school buses to bring their kids to school, which would eliminate about half of DC's morning traffic.

But DC's streetcar was a massive failure. The purple line is a boondoggle.

I grew UP taking the trolley to the subway. Light rail is not that complicated. But people in this area are wedded to their cars. Some of it is a class thing. Only poor people take the bus... And for the person who said my commuting system on the bus isn't unusual... You're a sweet summer child. That's the case for all the kids crossing the Anacostia for school. DC is only ten miles wide, perhaps, but its transit has not been designed to bring people across neighborhoods. It's convenient to go downtown, yes, less so to a charter school located in Brookland or Petworth. It isn't only that the buses don't always stop near the school, it's that they are timed for kids to be able to catch them after school. It's that there aren't crossing guards across the busy roads where kids have to catch the buses. And these kids DO spend an hour plus doing these commutes. True, so did my friends who went to Bronx Science... But that's because they were crossing NYC. And their hour-plus commuted didn't include twenty minutes of standing on the side of Michigan Ave in the rain waiting for a bus that was going to be late because of the rain.

DC has a horrible transit system. Since only poor people take it, you have no idea how it is beyond the tourist metro stops and the circulator.

And I haven't even touched on crime.

This thread was disheartening. Just wanted to add my own anecdotal experience and observation. Firstly, I'm surprised at the lack of discussion about climate change- didn't seem to factor in much. For me, learning from bike advocates opened my eyes to the fact it's not only about bikes it's more about rapid bus Lanes and better public transit, so I think the idea that bike advocates are all white men is a bit outdated.
Also I do bike commute almost every day (own a car, have a child in a WOTR school, and live EOTR, but within Metro range.)
I see SOOO many families biking, that's what made me want an ebike. Ebikes are seeing a huge growth in demand so yes, people ARE biking, and not for recreation. In better weather I see dozens of families on e cargo bikes each direction, on trails, lanes, streets, etc. The numbers increase each year, I've been biking in DC for over 20 years. Also, I took public transit from SE to NW high school, and yes kids carried their backpacks, gym bags, violins and yes, gasp, lunch on the train and bus, on their person. Humans are built to haul and carry. I think this thread must be heavily dominated by commuting suburbanites because some of the observations are just off. They should be advocating for better rapid rail systems to bring them in, and safe streets once they arrive so they can walk to their destination.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can’t wait for bikers in DC to learn how to ride and respect basic traffic rules. Also for the ATVs, motorbikes and other lawnmowers driven illegally and unsafely to clear out. Until then I will happily advocate for cars everywhere in DC.

Has anyone presented a practical way to make DC more car friendly? Aside from removing bike lanes but that doesn’t do much except put another couple cars on the road.

Have less need for cars. That makes it so that the few cars there are find it more "friendly."

Anonymous wrote:Can’t wait for bikers in DC to learn how to ride and respect basic traffic rules. Also for the ATVs, motorbikes and other lawnmowers driven illegally and unsafely to clear out. Until then I will happily advocate for cars everywhere in DC.

Has anyone presented a practical way to make DC more car friendly? Aside from removing bike lanes but that doesn’t do much except put another couple cars on the road.

Can’t wait for bikers in DC to learn how to ride and respect basic traffic rules. Also for the ATVs, motorbikes and other lawnmowers driven illegally and unsafely to clear out. Until then I will happily advocate for cars everywhere in DC.