Boot up dc.gov, the District’s award-winning Web site, and the first photo you will see is Mayor Adrian Fenty astride a bicycle to inaugurate the city’s new “bikeshare” program.
During his four-year term, Fenty has put the capital city at the forefront of the global crusade to get people out of cars and onto bikes, to cut nasty greenhouse gasses, to fight obesity. All at the same time. You know the drill.
Take Capital Bikeshare. It establishes a system of bikes in racks — mostly in downtown — where people can sign up to grab a bike and ride it to another docking station. The feds provided the $6 million. It matches up to a bikeshare system in Arlington.
Add this system to the Fenty administration’s efforts to create 80 miles of bike lanes and bike paths down Pennsylvania Avenue and across downtown D.C., and you start to understand why we are becoming known around the world as one of the most “bike friendly” cities.
So why did Fenty’s devotion to bikes and biking become an epithet during the recent mayoral campaign? Fenty’s enemies spit out “bike lanes” as a reason to vote against him in the primary. How could something as clean as bikes become an angry call to throw the bum out?
Drill down through the rhetoric and you will drop into our city’s toxic brew of race and class divisions. Fenty’s foes used bike paths as a way to insinuate the mayor was favoring white folks who live west of Rock Creek Park; they, after all, are the ones who bike.
Right? Wrong, according to Gabe Klein, head of the transportation agency that stripes the streets.
“If anything, it’s about age,” Klein argues. “The newer and younger types coming into the city are demanding a livable, bikeable town. I visit Ward 7 and people say “We need more bike lanes over here.”
So why are most bike lanes downtown and uptown in white neighborhoods? Klein and his assistants say they stripe streets where the population density is high and streets are broad and crowded, as they are in the “old city.” Most neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, they say, are bike-friendly already.
It might shock bike path naysayers to know the city has spent most of its bike money east of the river. The Watts Branch Trail in Marvin Gaye Park soaked up $3 million. The Anacostia River trail needed $7 million. Millions more went into trails along Alabama Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue East, according to transpiration officials.
“Where we put trails has nothing to do with race or class,” Klein says. “It has more to do with density and parking pain. Race is a red herring. We want to create equal opportunity for everyone to choose what they want.”
Perhaps ragging on bike lanes wasn’t about fear of Fenty as much as it was fear of the future — with fewer cars, and new Washingtonians.
And for the record, 10 of the 100 docking stations in Capital Bikeshare are located east of the Anacostia.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
