Thursday was Car-Free Day in the Washington region, and near as I could tell, it was traffic as usual in downtown D.C. Construction choked a half-dozen streets. Delivery trucks flashed their hazard lights and narrowed thoroughfares into one-lane affairs. Cars ran red lights, horns blared, K Street was a parking lot.
What would downtown look like if the Car-Free Day were not voluntary? If it were, in fact, mandatory?
D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells — father of the bag bill and champion of sustainability — put the question to Scott Pomeroy at a public roundtable at the Wilson Building on Thursday. Pomeroy is the sustainability manager with the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District.
“If downtown was car-free,” Wells asked, “would it shut downtown down?”
“No,” Pomeroy responded, “but there would be far fewer people.”
Not necessarily, and not if those of us who work downtown were weaned from the internal combustion engine slowly; not if it cost us much more to drive in and park rather than get around by other “modes,” such as buses or bikes or Metro or foot.
Cards on the table: I was about half-free of my car on Thursday, which means I drove to my downtown apartment, dropped the car off and biked the rest of the day around town. More and more people are using bikes and buses. Most are of the younger generation. Which leads me to this prediction: In 20 years, more of us will get around D.C. on bikes or foot than behind the wheel of a car.
Harriet Tregoning, the city’s planning director, doesn’t favor a car-free city. “We have to train the automobile, domesticate it,” she says. “This is a habitat for people, not cars. Our priority is pedestrians. But we all have to share. The ideal is that we need to get to a level of accommodation.”
The nation’s capital is in a race to the top of the sustainability charts against New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other big cities. Tregoning, who was appointed by Adrian Fenty and has stayed as the city’s top planner with Mayor Vincent Gray, told Tommy Wells at Thursday’s hearing that D.C. is stacking up very well. “We are the number one green power city in the nation,” she testified, because we get 8 percent of our electricity from wind power and half from renewable energy sources.
And though cities such as Portland and Minneapolis are better places to bike, D.C. is in the race for best biking town. The Capital Bikeshare system is the nation’s biggest and most successful. As a biker, I can attest to the fact that cars are getting used to sharing the road with bicycles.
Why not take it up a notch? Why not make Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the foot of the U.S. Capitol car-free on Sundays? Imagine the inaugural route, American’s Main Street, a peaceful parade of strollers, bikers and walkers.
Why not be car-free for real?
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
