Earlier this year, I met my first archnemesis in my new neighborhood. She and I accompanied our daughters to school at around the same time every morning, but while I pushed my then-2-year-old in a stroller, she put her 6- or 7-year-old on the back of an electric scooter and zipped along the brick sidewalks at 15 miles per hour. More than once, she almost ran us over.
After a particularly close encounter a few blocks from home, I’d had enough. I released my inner native New Yorker, disturbing the genteel Georgetown corner with a stream of profanity. She sped away unbothered and proceeded to park her scooter directly in the middle of our driveway.
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For weeks, she kept up this routine: After dropping off her daughter at school, she’d park her scooter in our driveway. If it had been her personal scooter, my husband and I would have tossed it into the Potomac. But alas, all we could do was drag it to the curb as it beeped furiously in protest and then file complaints with Lime, the e-scooter rental company. To their credit, Lime seems to have taken our complaints seriously. I have not seen this psychopath on a scooter in some months.
Even as Washington, D.C., crime rates have fallen, casual everyday lawlessness is ascendant in the city’s most affluent enclaves, thanks especially to this winter’s snowstorms. Trusting that the government wouldn’t fine them, homeowners throughout Georgetown never bothered to shovel the snowcrete from their sidewalks, leaving the rest of us to slip and slide and struggle — until one industrious mom threw up her hands and paid to have all of P Street shoveled. Others, frustrated by the lack of street parking, began parking their cars on the sidewalk and never stopped after the snow melted.
And then there are the dog owners who treated the snow as an opportunity not to pick up after their dogs. They may have resumed picking up, but in recent weeks, a neighbor was forced to hang a sign to chastise those who have now made a habit of throwing poop under his stoop.
Still, there is no match for the lawlessness of e-bike and e-scooter users, who enjoy the privileges of both pedestrians and drivers without any of the consequences. As one D.C. father tweeted last month, an e-bike on the sidewalk collided with his 3-year-old daughter and then rode off: “And of course there’s no hope of finding him.”
Allow me to propose my version of broken windows policing: Arrest (or, OK, ticket) anyone on a bike or scooter who fails to dismount or, at the very least, slow to a walking pace when approaching pedestrians on a sidewalk. And for God’s sake, ticket anyone on a bike or scooter who goes the wrong way on a one-way street.
For the record, I own an electric bicycle. I love my electric bicycle. We have a driveway and a car, yes, but I don’t actually know how to drive it (remember, I’m a native New Yorker). And even if I did drive, I’d still argue that an e-bike is the best way to enjoy much of what D.C. has to offer. Some of my happiest days in our new hometown have been spent on my bike, with my daughter secured to the back, cycling along the waterfront to the National Mall, where we pause to wave at the ducks and the police horses before stopping in at one or another museum.
It is precisely because I am a regular rider that I am so judgmental of those who do not respect the rules of the road and the rights of pedestrians. I know that it takes no effort to dismount a bicycle or scooter — just a little courtesy and common sense.
And don’t even get me started about the people who abandon their rental scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, including on busy Wisconsin Avenue, thereby blocking all access for strollers and wheelchairs. At a recent get-together, the women of the neighborhood must have spent 20 minutes discussing this scourge. Then we had to laugh at ourselves. As one put it, when did we all become such Karens?
For my sins, a construction crew is currently replacing sewer pipes under my street, so cyclists and scooter users feel even more entitled to use my sidewalk. Rarely can I go for a walk without a close brush with death. Young guys in sweatshirts, middle-aged men in suits, mothers with children: e-recklessness knows no bounds. I have screamed at so many of them that my 3-year-old often now beats me to the punch: “Mommy, why is he biking on the sidewalk?”
Out of the mouth of babes. Good question, little one.