Gordon Chaffin: DC’s bike lane plan reflects political calculations and exploitation

Protected bike lanes are an extremely important element of a safe transportation system for DC: They’re significantly safer than the paint-only bike lanes that have been the favored approach locally for the last two decades. Both protected bike lanes and multi-use trails off the street create much greater comfort for cyclists as well as pedestrians. This invites many more people to choose bikes, scooters and walking for transportation — a desirable outcome for myriad reasons.

At last month’s DC Bike Advisory Council meeting, staffers from the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) outlined their plan to build more than 20 miles of new protected bike lanes (PBL) and off-street trails in DC before the end of 2022. DDOT announced this goal on the heels of last year’s 20×2020 Campaign by the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA). 

“I know WABA has their 20 by 2020 plan,” DDOT staffer George Branyan told me last autumn, “but it’s more like 20 by 2022.”

A meager minority of the people using urban and suburban transportation systems in the U.S. — about 8% to 20%, depending on the city — are strong, fearless, enthusiastic and confident cyclists who are quite willing to ride in unprotected bike lanes. The vast majority of people are interested in city biking, but concerned. They won’t bike — or even walk — in the absence of substantial safety features. Protected bike lanes and off-street trails provide that comfort for novices and hesitant users, including those who are currently underrepresented — women, parents with children, people of color and older residents. (A 2018 study showed that white men represent more than two-thirds of cyclists in Seattle, and national 2014 data showed men three times more likely than women to commute by bike.)

And women cyclists have reason to be concerned: A new study from the University of Minnesota “found that drivers were significantly more likely to encroach — i.e., to pass closer than 3 feet — on female cyclists than on male cyclists.” Protected bike lanes also improve pedestrian safety by increasing visibility and reducing conflict zones with cars. In short, protected bike lanes are the best practice: infrastructure that suits all ages and all abilities.

DC must build many times more protected bike facilities than currently planned to meet its targets for bike and walk commuting — not to mention its climate goals of reducing car trips and quelling traffic congestion caused by ride-hailing. Then there is DC’s goal to zero out traffic deaths by 2024. To meet those challenges, DDOT’s 2022 plan includes 38 projects totaling 26.08 miles of new bike lanes protected from car traffic, counting 1.06 miles installed in 2019. Starting this year, the transportation agency plans to increase project installation substantially: 6.11 miles this year, 8.77 in 2021, and 9.15 in 2022.

While reviewing the list, DC safe streets advocates noted how skewed the draft project list is toward areas of the District already filled with painted and protected bike lanes. For instance, Ward 2 is slated to get 11 projects for 8.79 miles, and Ward 6 is slated to get 17 projects for 12.14 miles. These areas, covering much of the city’s core, already benefit from protected bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 15th Street NW and Florida Avenue NE.

Ward 7, in contrast, made it into this project list only because a small piece of the C Street NE reconstruction scrapes its territory in Kingman Park. And Ward 8 only makes the list because of the tentatively named Malcolm X Trail, which follows South Capitol Street out to Congress Heights. However, that project faces significant land-use challenges related to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Notably, this trail is the only project DDOT plans to undertake east of the Anacostia River, making up only 3.5% of the lane mileage and only 2% of the total project.

DDOT is moving in the right direction, however. The agency resolved a major concern I had by producing an actual list of projects to implement to reach the 20-mile threshold — work they hadn’t done when they boasted of the goal in November to The Washington Post. When I spoke with DDOT’s public information officer in December, the agency was still figuring out how to get to 20. I’d prefer the due diligence before the earned media.

The project list is impressive. It builds on the department’s work in 2019 on planning and public outreach across DC and promises to install lots of big additions:

• The western downtown north/south cycletrack using 20th and 21st streets NW
• A G Street NW connection from the Roosevelt Bridge to 17th Street NW
• Virginia Avenue NW from Constitution Avenue to Rock Creek Parkway
• Two phases of a crosstown cycletrack connecting Columbia Heights to Brookland
• Extending the 15th Street NW cycletrack south from the White House to the 14th Street Bridge
• Protecting the painted 4th Street route all the way from Pennsylvania Avenue NW down to M Street SW
• Protecting the painted M Street route from the Southwest waterfront to 11th Street SE
• Flipping E Street NW’s paint-only bike lanes with the parking lane and adding protective barriers for cyclists going east/west in south downtown
• PBLs along West Virginia Avenue NE from Florida Avenue to New York Avenue — connecting the Trinidad and Ivy City neighborhoods to Florida Avenue NE’s recently installed PBLs

Unfortunately, however, the 20×2022 list does not extend DDOT’s ambition beyond the obvious and politically possible. Wards 2 and 6 have the most bike infrastructure because those areas have the most energy among advocates and support from elected officials. DDOT staff have confirmed to me that they developed this list — and excluded other projects — with consideration of the difficulty and length of time required for community outreach. Projects slated for 2022 are complex enough to need extensive resident input campaigns, and those left off the list — including several projects in wards 7 and 8 — were seen by staff as politically infeasible within that timeframe.

Meanwhile, advisory neighborhood commissions in wards 2 and 6 — as well as Ward 6 DC Council member Charles Allen — have all built community support and generally won’t veto projects weeks before the planned installation, although ANC 6D did try to do so with the P Street SW cycletrack installed last year. And Ward 5 is slated for a big increase in PBLs thanks to its relatively wide roads and still-plentiful industrial land uses — the combination of which enables the projects to proceed without threatening the political dominance of on-street parking and Maryland car commuters. 

The other five wards, though, are all in the single-digit percentages with this initiative. Wards 3 and 4 are left almost entirely off DDOT’s 20×2022 list. Ward 3’s two projects — Dalecarlia Parkway NW and a section of Arizona Avenue NW — are disconnected from other cycling infrastructure. Both will encounter significant opposition from residents and ANCs, according to my reporting. Ward 4 residents will benefit only from the north-south section of the crosstown cycletrack, while critical, long-distance corridors sit with only painted bike lanes: 14th Street NW, 16th Street NW, Military Road/Missouri Avenue NW, New Hampshire Avenue NW, Kansas Avenue NW, Piney Branch Road NW, Alaska Avenue NW and Rock Creek Church Road NW. Ward 4 Council member Brandon Todd is known to intervene with installation of safer biking facilities, while Ward 3 member Mary Cheh frequently speaks out for better bike infrastructure but then defers to the opposition of some residents in Upper Northwest.  Given that she’s chair of the council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, why hasn’t she pushed for more — and better-connected — bike projects?

Reporting every day on the political fights for these projects, I know that the primary obstacle to more bike infrastructure isn’t the residents, long victim to unsafe roads. The blame goes to elected officials — advisory neighborhood commissioners and DC Council members. I’ve heard from multiple sources that Ward 8 Council member Trayon White and staff intervened to stop several projects that could have made the 20×2022 list. Among them are no-brainer safety projects like Mississippi Avenue, where the road is dangerously wide and adding protected bike lanes wouldn’t reduce parking. Others are critical projects that would connect to the expanding off-street trail network.

In short, DDOT produced a list of projects that were far enough along in terms of study or design — and that hadn’t drawn strong political opposition from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, council members, or ANC members.

The first of those two criteria relates to understandable resource constraints and timing issues. DDOT only has so many planners, engineers, and dollars for protective barriers. The agency also has a severely flawed — some say broken — procurement process, rife with delays and mistakes. DDOT would need a lot more staff and funding — plus procurement reforms — to add a few dozen more miles of protected bike lanes to this list with any realistic prospects of bringing them to fruition by 2022. I believe that kind of workforce surge and infrastructure reinvention is necessary for the District to meet climate and safety goals, but I understand the agency has to be realistic on resource constraints. 

The second constraint I infer from DDOT — an unwillingness to challenge political power — is less deserving of our understanding. The reason wards 7 and 8 have so few bike lanes is that their elected leaders oppose them. Council members Vincent Gray and Trayon White, and almost every ANC in Ward 8, rarely return correspondence by DDOT staff during the planning and community outreach processes.

Once a project nears installation — having been found to have merit after thorough study — the ANCs and council members in these two wards react negatively behind the scenes and in public. They are loud: We don’t want bike lanes; bike lanes are social engineering; bike lanes don’t make people safer; you never heard from us on this project; and the like. There isn’t one single reason for the opposition. There are many reasons for the opposition — including resistance to change, a desire to preserve maximum space for cars and car storage, and the belief that bike lanes are for non-native, primarily white people. The weighting of each reason depends on the project.

The truth is that DDOT is staffed by very passionate, thorough staffers who thoughtfully study and seek to solve DC’s transportation problems. The agency isn’t perfect today and did regrettable things in the past by omitting and neglecting the desires of poor and minority Washingtonians. One such case is Kenilworth Avenue NE, which DC turned into a highway in the 1970s and ’80s, dividing Ward 7 communities. Another case is S Street NW in Shaw, where DC widened the roadway — cutting down trees and shrinking sidewalks — to facilitate use as a highway approach, part of a project that otherwise never came to fruition. DDOT’s greatest fault right now is that it fails to challenge the politicians who exploit identity and cultural distrust. There’s plenty of this political exploitation west of the Anacostia River, too. 

DDOT omitted the eastern downtown cycletrack from its 20×2022 list because Mayor Bowser has made sure the DDOT she rules over doesn’t build it. Beverly Perry, a senior mayoral aide on policy and legislative affairs, belongs to a powerful church on 9th Street NW and has lobbied fiercely against bike lanes. Shiloh Baptist, and a few other churches in the vicinity of the project, initially objected to it because of lost Sunday morning parking spots. They remain opposed today even after DDOT updated designs to preserve parking spots.

The simplest way for DDOT to create safer, equitable, climate-forward streets is to install pedestrian, transit and bike upgrades en masse. Countless international, national and local studies provide data to support this approach. But too many elected leaders utilize the anger of some constituents who are unrepresentative of the broader good. The leaders then portray bike and pedestrian improvements as nefarious and claim a majority of the community is opposed to safer street designs. DDOT reacts by recoiling.  political backlash is probably coming for many of these 20×2022 projects as well.

To implement even half of the 20×2022 vision — and we need more than that for the sake of our safety and our climate — DDOT leaders will have to prod and perhaps even challenge their elected overseers. Safety advocates will have to organize without exhaustion until the final plastic bollards are installed, making clear to politicians and the community at large the issues at stake. And finally, DC voters must keep candidates’ stances on transportation safety in mind when casting their ballots in this year’s DC primary and general elections: June 2 and Nov. 3.

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Gordon Chaffin is a reporter for Street Justice, a daily email newsletter covering transportation and infrastructure throughout the Washington region, especially in less privileged, rapidly changing neighborhoods. Street Justice produces a free, weekly digest on Sundays and publishes daily reports for subscribers that include a story, a calendar of local public meetings, and a list of projects open for public comment. To submit a pledge for a subscription, click here.