Get Around

Metro is going to remain vital to residents of the District as a way to get around, but the system was constructed as hub and spoke, designed to get people into the heart of the metropolitan area. As suburban growth continues and places new burdens on that system, District leaders need to find other ways to allow people to move about the growing core. If things remain as they are, new density and a crowded Metro will mean more people opting to buy cars. More cars will mean poorer bus service, curtailing the benefits of the only other real public transit option available to those in the District.

The new go-it-alone strategy for transportation planning in the region means we have to look out for ourselves. Here’s a short list of humble suggestions for the District. Do add your own policy ideas in the comments.

1. It’s still worth our while as a city to pay for a detailed study on the options available to us for Metro expansion within the core. Expansion may be too disruptive, or it could be that the cost of tunneling through the District given current technology is prohibitive. It would be nice to know, however, one way or another. We can’t expand alone, and we can’t start negotiating with the suburban jurisdictions if we don’t know what we need or can do. So by all means, we should study. It’s time, too, that Mayor Fenty move forward on the Anacostia and H Street streetcar lines. Delay won’t make their completion any cheaper, and the sooner the city can boost investment around those lines by improving the transportation infrastructure, the sooner the city will start realizing the benefits of new tax revenues from dense, inviting areas that previously struggled with poor connectivity to the city at large.

2. What then? The city desperately needs to begin thinking about these matters in a comprehensive way. Many of the most promising areas for dense development don’t lie along existing Metro corridors. The proposed Abdo development near the National Arboretum, for example, could be a great thing for a long neglected part of the city, but the residents who’ll live there will not be able to walk easily to a Metro station. Similarly, the development that will take place along North Capitol, at the McMillan Sand Filtration site and the Armed Forces Retirement Home property, will add people to an area that could use new energy but will also stress existing infrastructure. Already, the Brookland station, which I use daily, enjoys high ridership relative to the residential density around the station, because every morning hundreds of workers exit there and take buses to the massive Washington Hospital Center complex, which sits between the McMillan and AFRH sites. Brookland residents are rightly concerned about the effect of North Capitol development on both street and metro traffic. In addition to developing around transit, the city needs to figure out how to bring transit to developing areas that will need it.

The city should designate special transit corridors and begin working with residents and businesses to determine how to improve transit along them and how to pay for capacity upgrades, through designated bus lanes and, eventually, light rail. We should also allow large developers to build more densely in exchange for the payment of fees to be used for transit improvements. We already allow density boosts to developers that add affordable housing units; development in D.C. is a rich enough game that big projects can afford to chip in towards transit, especially since better connections mean better returns to new projects.

3. Other issues need to be considered with an eye toward how they’ll affect transit in the city as a whole. It looks like Mayor Fenty is willing to consider a plan to levy tolls on those entering the District from the suburbs. Assuming the city can find a workable system for doing that, then fine, I don’t have a problem with recovering some revenue from suburban commuters. But Fenty and the Council also have to think about the side effects of such a plan. Unlike congestion charges, tolling plans will likely not involve payment by District residents. As such, reduced congestion in the city from the tolls might result in more driving by city residents, who’ll have to spend less time sitting in traffic and fighting for parking.

If the city is determined to reduce traffic through tolls, they might consider setting space on major roads for dedicated bus lanes. Reduced congestion would make bus commutes much faster, while less lane space for local drivers would give District residents an incentive to stay on transit when they can. Dedicated bus lanes could also act as placeholders for light rail on lines where use is particularly high.

4. We have to take the easy steps. We need to improve trails and move forward on bike friendliness. We need to fix our taxi system and work to accommodate car sharing services. We need to quit giving government employees free on-street parking, and we should stop allowing or encouraging surface parking for new projects, especially when those projects are within sight of a Metro station--more drivers will only mean slower buses, less room for bikers, and fewer walkers. These are no-brainers, where small efforts and spending can make real contributions toward making the city an easier and better place to get around. Let’s quit shuttering clubs for a moment and get this stuff done.

5. Most importantly, the city needs to abandon its practice of separating uses. Large portions of the city are currently designated for residential development only, and that’s unlikely to change in the near future. Elsewhere, new growth should include residential, retail, and office development. Developments need to be created with an eye toward friendliness to walkers and users of transit. If you build huge parking lots, people are going to drive. If you build giant office blocks with no shops or homes to break the monotony, people aren’t going to walk around them any more than they have to. By combining walkability with mixed uses, new developments can minimize the extent to which new residents mean new car trips. Sometimes it seems like city planners understand this; other times, it doesn’t.

The city needs to start thinking about transportation as key to the economic vitality, aesthetics, and quality of life of the city, and as something that feeds into everything else the city does. We need to think about the kind of city we want, and we need to figure out how to get there. We have already passed the point where suburban style growth is an option; moving back in that direction erodes our advantages over the suburbs and reduces the amount of growth we can comfortably handle, limiting our market and dooming us to rump status in a metro area where other jurisdictions sometimes seem more serious about getting away from total car dependency than we do. That’s not what we deserve or, I have to think after listening to discussions here and around the city, what we want. Let’s plan ahead for once! I don’t want to be writing these same things in Julys five and ten years down the road.