Since Mayor Adrian Fenty was elected in 2006, cycling in the District has improved by leaps and bounds. The District’s Department of Transportation has undergone something of a paradigm shift, no longer viewing its role simply as trying to get more cars in, out and around the District but rather as enabling a variety of alternative forms of transit to take hold.
In 2008, the city launched SmartBike D.C., a bike-sharing program that allows people to borrow a bike from a rack in one location and return it at another. Hundreds of miles of new on-street bike lanes have been marked, including a contra-flow lane along 15th Street NW from U Street to Massachusetts Avenue. New bike lanes are slated to open in the coming weeks along
Pennsylvania Avenue NW from 15th Street to close to the U.S. Capitol and along M Street NW from 15th Street to 29th Street. While bike lanes used to start and end with little rhyme or reason, a true network of connected lanes along the city’s most important arteries is emerging.
This should seem like good news for everyone, or at least it really shouldn’t be bad news for anyone. Bicycles don’t contribute anything by way of emissions, and the more people that ride them, the fewer that will be sitting in their cars adding to the usual D.C. gridlock.
But for AAA Mid-Atlantic, all these bikes mean war – literally. Managing Director Lon Anderson fired off an email earlier this week – awkwardly coinciding with the start of National Bike Month – to complain about the District’s “war on motorists.” Beyond increased fines for moving violations and on-street parking, Anderson groused about bike lanes, especially those slated to open along Pennsylvania Avenue. He wrote: “[W]e are going to further shrink highway capacity for cars and trucks and hand it over to bicycles? Is it realistic to think that, at a time when the residents of Beijing are hanging up their bicycles for cars by the thousands every day that our residents are going to hang up their cars for bicycles en masse?”
Beyond the awkward attempt to argue that Washingtonians should be emulating the Chinese when it comes to transit choices, the folks at AAA Mid-Atlantic also tried to claim that more bike lanes simply won’t do much to entice drivers to adopt a two-wheeled lifestyle. In a press release, it argued that an AAA poll had found that 53 percent of District residents wouldn’t feel compelled to ride a bike if more lanes were made available for it.
But, it added, “Even so, 20 percent of surveyed AAA members in the District said the changes would compel them to become regular bicycle commuters.”
Without realizing it, AAA Mid-Atlantic, in the midst of a campaign against bicycling, seemed to make the case for bicycling. Less than five percent of all District residents actually commute on bike, so the fact that 20 percent of D.C.-based AAA members seemed willing to give it a shot isn’t a bad thing – it’s perfect evidence that if you set aside the lanes, people will use them. Sure, getting more and more people to give up their cars won’t be easy, but the more the infrastructure becomes available, the less dramatic a lifestyle change it will seem for most.
And to add to the awkwardness of these manufactured “war against motorists,” AAA’s national office has moved away from the Mid-Atlantic chapter’s aggressive bike-hating, opting instead to publicly state that it favors motorists and cyclists sharing the road.
Not only is Mid-Atlantic AAA’s claim of “war” misguided, it’s also dangerous. As more and more people take to cycling on the roads – which is perfectly legal, mind you – drivers will have to learn to adapt. This process often isn’t pretty, with drivers and cyclists getting into scuffles that can be deadly. The more that Mid-Atlantic AAA argues that there’s a local war against drivers, the more likely it is that those drivers are going to act like warriors. Crowding out cyclists on roads or aggressively honking a horn may not seem terribly threatening to someone in the safe confines of a car, but it’s absolutely terrifying from the perspective of a cyclist playing defense against thousands of pounds of metal.
Given that this a month dedicated to celebrating cycling as both recreation and transportation, it’s worth hoping that Mid-Atlantic AAA tone down the rhetoric and instead accept that times are changing a bit. The District simply cannot accommodate more cars and more roads. In fact, neither can much of the region. Because of that reality, bicycling will eventually come to be seen as a necessity, not a luxury.
When that day comes, Mid-Atlantic AAA better not still be crowing about the war they’re slowly losing.
