Car Free Day Seeks to Showcase Urban Life
D.C. Council members Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) and Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) and District Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning met with reporters this afternoon at a miniature street festival designed to highlight today's Car Free Day event. F Street NW between 9th and 8th will continue to be closed to motor vehicle traffic until about 3 p.m. while vendors meet with residents to promote various businesses that can help D.C. residents live in the city without a car.
Not too many people were on hand for the festivities, which includes live music, yoga demonstrations and booths from vendors like Zipcar. But the low turnout didn't stop Wells and Cheh from exuding optimism about the future of Washington as a place where suburbanites will want to move in order to ditch their cars. Wells said that the growing annual event (about 1,000 people signed up to participate last year, versus roughly 5,200 this year) is really intended to promote car-free, urban living in the District.
"You have to get people to break patterns, break habits," Wells said.
Both Wells and Cheh regularly ride their bicycles to work at the Wilson Building (Cheh once a week; Wells more often), and they genuinely appear to be passionate about pushing progressive development policies in the city that will encourage more and more residents to adopt car-free lifestyles. They said those policies include things like getting more and better retail services close to where people live, improving public transportation access, promoting car-sharing services like Zipcar, and working toward ending parking minimums in new residential developments.
Getting rid of parking minimums - zoning policies that force developers to include a certain number of parking spaces in new buildings based on projected occupancy numbers - has been a hot topic of late.
"What do you do when you don't use a parking space? It's not like you could house someone there," said Tregoning. "How much cheaper would that housing be without the parking?"
Cheh acknowledged that it isn't yet realistic to expect the once a year Car Free Day event to have a measurable impact on traffic congestion, since most of the weekday traffic inside the city comes from Maryland and Virginia. This year, the District spent $150,000 to promote the event, and for the first time, Maryland and Virginia contributed $50,000 each. But a general lack of cooperation between the three jurisdictions to promote car-free lifestyles is "part of the problem," said Cheh. Getting more cooperation just might be difficult, though, considering juxtaposing the lives of city dwellers who take advantage of being able to walk, bike and ride public transit to those in the nearby suburbs is part of the point.
"The thing is to get suburbanites to understand urban living," Wells said.