"Pedestrians are a hindrance" and other problems for motorists on K Street

The coverage by the Examiner on transportation issues is reasonably good. The editorials and headlines tend not to be so good. And the Examiner has a complete disconnect editorially in understanding the link between "congestion" and capacity and throughput and yes, the need for tax monies to pay for transportation--infrastructure for automobiles, transit, walking, and biking. (I keep meaning to write a piece about it, but I never can find the two articles and one editorial that I set aside for the entry.)

Even so the cover photo of today's Examiner is pretty damn alarmist.

The daily sum up of the news from the City Paper's Loose Lips columnist summarizes ("‘Reforming the Reform’: Loose Lips Daily") the actual news article from the Examiner, "District weighs bus lanes for center of K Street" as:

Business folks are upset about the lack of parking and effect on sidewalk cafes. Bikers are upset about the bike lane configurations. The Examiner front page wood: "K Street chaos." As opposed to the current K Street chaos...

The title in this entry comes from my reaction to a 2004 NARPAC report on the K Street Transitway proposal.

I responded to this in themail in 2004:

A number of the statements in the report are troubling. One section is entitled: “Pedestrians are a major nuisance.” Another statement is “Sidewalks are now used inefficiently due to the narrowing caused by curbside trees with their root grates, etc.” And “Lost parking must be accommodated (and expanded) somewhere. It is essential to get people out of their cars downtown, but not by trying to get Americans to give up their second most desired possession.”

On the latter point, I will say that the public space was not originally created to provide parking for personally-owned vehicles. Parking is a privilege, not a right, and providing parking spaces isn't the primary development priority that suburbanites believe we should take up. (Jane Jacobs would say something like, “You are asking the wrong question. The question isn't 'why aren't there more parking spaces?' The real question is 'why are there so many cars?', or 'why do so many people want to drive knowing there aren't more parking spaces?'”)

To truly be a transit city, we must constantly improve and expand transit systems. It is encouraging to see the various initiatives of the DC Department of Transportation to do so, such as via the proposed K Street busway. Another is to encourage the use of transit by making less preferred modes more difficult and expensive to use. Providing maximum parking tears at the urban fabric and streetscape without encouraging the use of transit. Parking tickets are a “positive” disincentive that ought to encourage “rational economic-thinking” people to use other modes of transit. Instead, people blame the ticketer or the situation, instead of their decision to drive and park (perhaps illegally) in the first place.

This relates to a serious concern faced by DC's advocates for a “livable city.” The US is dominated by an automobile-centric planning and development paradigm. Most every person in the region, including those who live in the city, has been imprinted with that paradigm without realizing that it is but one choice. Just one example is that there are plenty of people who think the solution to revitalization of our neighborhood commercial districts is in the demolition of the adjoining residential neighborhoods in favor of parking.

I fall into the trap of arguing with people about this lunacy, rather than just walking away ruing the fact that they've never read Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities. The “teachable moment” so often when the entire worldview of the “student” is shaped by the automobile. It is troubling that forty-two years after the publication of that book, people who allegedly care about the city think that planning for the pedestrian and focusing on urban design and the streetscape is a “nuisance” and that we should be focused on making life simple and free for car drivers.

But the reality in DC is that automobile drivers aren't the primary patrons of businesses along K Street. Likely the primary patrons are people on foot--office workers, residents, and visitors--and these patrons are more likely to use transit to get to the store and they are less likely to drive.

The Bike Portland blog just happened to run a piece on this topic, "Bikes and the bad-for-business rap." In short, some business people believe all their customers-even in cities--come by car whether or not they do. This seems to be the case with one of the people featured in coverage on this issue in Portland, Oregon.

This is also an expressed issue with the closure of 7th Street SE adjacent to Eastern Market on weekends. (Part of the issue depends on the type of business and the nature of their patrons. But also it depends on other things such as parking access and wayfinding.)

And I remember coverage in the Montreal Gazette (e.g. "Time running out: merchants" and "Paths pose no threat to business" from 2007) and the New York City papers reflecting the same reaction on the same issue, as it related to the expansion of bicycle lanes, and the purported loss in business.

The reality is that urban customers are different from suburban customers. Accommodating urbanites helps urban businesses. And expecting your customers to be suburban in distinctly urban settings (such as on top of a subway station, in a dense part of northwest DC, for stores in high demand and not otherwise located close by), such as with the big box stores and the underutilized 1,000 space parking garage in Columbia Heights (see "At NW Mall, So Many Spaces, So Little Need DC Losing Millions On Empty Garage" from the Post) often backfires, as the city becomes denser and more amenities become available as a result. That means more walking, more bicycling, and more transit use, and less car usage.

Basically, all the findings with regard to transit accessibility and compact development are equally applicable to walking and bicycling.

People within 1/2 mile of transit are 5 times more likely to use transit, and to walk to get there. People living in relatively close range (up to a mile say) to amenities that are reachable to them in a safe and comfortable fashion are more likely to walk or bicycle to those "activity centers."

However, certain trips (i.e., groceries) are more likely to involve automobile use. However, with transportation demand management planning (i.e., delivery services) the need for automobiles in such situations can be significantly reduced even so.
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Tonight there is a meeting on the K Street Transitway proposal. Washcycle writes about it here, "WABA Alert: Important K Street Meeting Tonight."