The District’s streets will be clogged with automobiles for some time yet. But on an evolutionary scale, slowly but surely, we are shedding the internal combustion engine here in the nation’s capital.
I point you to my colleague Liz Essley’s article last week illustrating that more people are choosing to live in the District, but more of them are choosing not to bring cars into their lives.
Essley cites D.C. Department of Motor Vehicle Director Lucinda Babers as the source of her revelation. The DMV chief says that car registrations have stayed around the 275,000 number for the past decade even though the city’s population has increased by 40,000.
Babers and others deduce the obvious: fewer Washingtonians, especially the newcomers, are choosing to get around in cars.
Stats are useful, but I don’t have to look much past my living room to test the theory. My daughter’s Bianchi bicycle is parked by the railing over the stairs. Two of my daughters have come home to roost for a bit — I hope — after college, as they figure out their next moves. Neither has a car. Neither even contemplated buying wheels not powered by pedals. They walk, they take buses, they ride the Metro. They are the New Washingtonians.
Spend a few hours in downtown D.C. and you will notice that our city is becoming a biking town. Jim Sebastian, who has directed the biking program for the past decade, tells me that the number of people using bikes has increased 64 percent since 2008. That increase has been fueled by the rent-a-bikes in the Capital Bikeshare program. The clunky red bikes are moored in 140 stations in D.C. and Arlington. This summer the rental system will add five stations on the National Mall.
There will soon by 2,200 docks and 1,200 bikes in circulation.
There’s more.
“We want to start connecting more neighborhoods by bike lanes,” says Sebastian, who started under Mayor Anthony Williams and was encouraged by Mayor-biker Adrian Fenty. “We see more bicycle boulevards.”
The next bike lane could be one of the more controversial. Putting lanes down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol was relatively easy. Sebastian is in the midst of marking off a lane on L Street, from New Hampshire east to Massachusetts, right through the heart of downtown.
“It’s on the front burner,” he says.
I worry that car drivers are going to start getting burned up by being forced to share the roads with cyclists. It will require time, patience, and care on both sides. But between bikes and circulator buses and the street cars coming to some parts of town, cars are on the way out.
It is the future — if you look a decade or two ahead.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
