Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk.

Yes, that was the whole point.

-a person who rides a bike a lot

+1. It was a absolute mess with people walking around everywhere. Next time they do this they need to do a much better (and by "much better" I mean "at all") job explaining that open streets doesn't mean that crowds of people can just stroll down the middle of the road like it's a block party. The street is still reserved for vehicles, except in this case that means bicycles, not cars. People should still be walking on the sidewalk, not in the middle of the road. The point of this was to demonstrate that we could use our existing streets to allow use by bicycles-only, getting everyone out of their cars and on nonpolluting modes of transit. People won't realistically embrace a cycling commute if there's still the same hassles from crowds of pedestrians all over road as there were from cars.

Look at any urban area that has a significant road-use-by-cyclist factor, with fewer cars overall (Amsterdam for example). If you examine their "traffic" patterns, you see that the roads in urban cores are more than 90% occupied by bicycle users in some areas. But pedestrians DON'T walk in the street simply because of an absence of motor vehicles. They stay on the sidewalks which were designed for them, while the streets belong to bike users as intended.

The same idea needs to be reinforced here next time they do open streets. Open streets doesn't mean "walk in the street"

It was actually to do anything but drive. So everyone had a right to be in the street.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My favorite part was watching a cyclist barrel into a pedestrian and then try to blame the pedestrian for walking on an open street. Typical DC cyclist asshole.

I hate cyclists. Easily the worst people on the road.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk.

Yes, that was the whole point.

-a person who rides a bike a lot

+1. It was a absolute mess with people walking around everywhere. Next time they do this they need to do a much better (and by "much better" I mean "at all") job explaining that open streets doesn't mean that crowds of people can just stroll down the middle of the road like it's a block party. The street is still reserved for vehicles, except in this case that means bicycles, not cars. People should still be walking on the sidewalk, not in the middle of the road. The point of this was to demonstrate that we could use our existing streets to allow use by bicycles-only, getting everyone out of their cars and on nonpolluting modes of transit. People won't realistically embrace a cycling commute if there's still the same hassles from crowds of pedestrians all over road as there were from cars.

Look at any urban area that has a significant road-use-by-cyclist factor, with fewer cars overall (Amsterdam for example). If you examine their "traffic" patterns, you see that the roads in urban cores are more than 90% occupied by bicycle users in some areas. But pedestrians DON'T walk in the street simply because of an absence of motor vehicles. They stay on the sidewalks which were designed for them, while the streets belong to bike users as intended.

The same idea needs to be reinforced here next time they do open streets. Open streets doesn't mean "walk in the street"

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk.

Yes, that was the whole point.

-a person who rides a bike a lot

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My favorite part was watching a cyclist barrel into a pedestrian and then try to blame the pedestrian for walking on an open street. Typical DC cyclist asshole.

I hate cyclists. Easily the worst people on the road.

Anonymous wrote:Dear Popville,

I wanted to drive my car right next to a major event and had to sit in traffic! Ugh, why don't people get out of my way? I'm going to be late for my Soulcycle Zumba class. Don't these people understand that I have places to drive?

Anonymous wrote:When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk.

Anonymous wrote:When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk.

Anonymous wrote:My favorite part was watching a cyclist barrel into a pedestrian and then try to blame the pedestrian for walking on an open street. Typical DC cyclist asshole.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dear Popville,

I wanted to drive my car right next to a major event and had to sit in traffic! Ugh, why don't people get out of my way? I'm going to be late for my Soulcycle Zumba class. Don't these people understand that I have places to drive?

Dear Popville,

I want to ride my scooter, even though I am definitely not five years old! And I want to do it in the middle of the street! Ugh, can't we shut down the equivalent of a mid-sized city to accommodate ME?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dear Popville,

I wanted to drive my car right next to a major event and had to sit in traffic! Ugh, why don't people get out of my way? I'm going to be late for my Soulcycle Zumba class. Don't these people understand that I have places to drive?

Dear Popville,

I want to ride my scooter, even though I am definitely not five years old! And I want to do it in the middle of the street! Ugh, can't we shut down the equivalent of a mid-sized city to accommodate ME?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Open Streets caused massive traffic jams throughout Petworth, inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of people. But, hey, 50 bicyclists got to ride their bikes down the middle of the street!

I doubt that!

NP. Okay so maybe not hundreds of thousands but it certainly made trying to go north on 13th, 14th or 16th a nightmare today. Can't speak for the other streets. Maybe no parking on 16th streets when they do this? Or come up with other traffic patterns to help?

Easily hundreds of thousands. There's probably 50,000 people who live in Petworth. There's probably 35,000 in Brightwood. Those are just the neighborhoods immediately affected. Now think of everyone, on a Saturday, trying to get anywhere between Silver Spring and downtown DC. And all the people trying to go EOTP to WOTP. Georgia avenue is a major artery and closing it shunts an enormous amount of traffic onto side streets that were never designed to accommodate so many cars.