For the better part of 2006, District bar-goers furiously debated the idea of a smoking ban. It was freedom of choice versus the nanny state, healthy air and clean clothes versus a tradition that dates back centuries. But now the debate is over, the smoking ban has taken effect, and the arguments on both sides will finally be tested. First among these is whether or not District bars will lose customers to their more smokeful counterparts in Virginia. We think not.

Practically speaking, the Washington region is smoke-free. Pretty much every county surrounding the District to the north prohibits smoking in public places, bars included. The only exceptions are to be found in Virginia, where bars in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax and other localities still allow patrons to light up as they drink. The argument has long gone that smokers will flee the District, heading instead for a number of haunts in the more permissive Old Dominion. We’re not so sure that this will happen, for the following reasons:

>> Access: Bars in the District are simply more concentrated in areas that are accesible by mass transit. Some smokers might decide that their right to smoke is worth a trip to Virginia, but they’ll likely face fewer options and might even have to contend with driving to where they need to go. The most ardent of smokers will make this tradeoff; most everyone else won’t.

>> The Scene: Bars are about more than smoking. Period. Any smoker can head to Arlington or Alexandria and enjoy a number of good options, but they’ll be limiting their options when it comes to clientele, decor, entertainment, surrounding establishments and other factors that help define and shape the bar-going experience. Once again, only the hardest core of smokers will abandon a night out on U Street for a trip to the Four P’s Courts in Courthouse or Whitlow’s on Wilson in Clarendon, but most everyone else won’t.

>> The Reverse Market: If there are smokers who will flee the District for Virginia, there are surely non-smoking Virginians who will want to come into the District more often now to flee their own state’s smokers. We’re guessing there are more of the latter than the former.

>> No One Really Cares: There may be some who are so wedded to their opposition of the smoking ban that they’ll make the decision to boycott all District bars, but there just aren’t enough of those to truly put a dent in the otherwise lucrative bar market in the District. This issue will lose its debatable appeal sometime in the next month, and within the next year a new generation of bar-goers will scoff at the idea that smoking was ever allowed in bars in the first place.

>> Experience: Try as they may, smoking advocates have yet to prove that any city, state, or country that imposed such a ban suffered from it in the long term.

Of course, we may be proven horribly wrong. But that’s the beauty of democracy, isn’t it? Should a public policy be proved to be irrefutably misguided, it can always be done away with. The smoking ban isn’t written in stone, but neither do we believe that the worst of what its opponents claim will come true.