Being for bikes and transit is not necessarily anti-car

When I read this article last night, I read it online where the title is "Transportation chief says bikes, buses are way to go in D.C." which I thought was great and not particularly inflammatory. But the paper version has the title "An anti-car transportation czar?" with the thing about being pro bikes, buses (and trains and walking) below that. Anyway, the Get There blog followed it up with the question "Is DC anti-car?"  Commenters on both the article and the blog seem to think so, but then there's a heavy dose of crazy there.

Dr. G adds some sanity to it by stating

I've never met a transportation chief who was anti-car, and I've met Gabe Klein. Wanting city residents to have more choices for getting around, wanting to reduce the number of solo drivers and wanting to make the streets safer isn't anti-car. If the District's approach to the snow cleanup was anti-car than so was that of the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration, because they were all basically the same.

He then talks about some meeting that bloggers were invited to on Wednesday to talk about the Action Agenda and poke around on the website. And so do DCist and DCMud. [Dr. Gridlock and DCist I can understand, but DCMud got invited and I didn't? They write a real estate blog... It looks like some Stuart Smalley time for me tonight.] DCMud adds this

By 2012 DDOT aims to more than double the bicycle road share

Double from when? From 2010? [What terrible reporting. They should've invited someone else.]

DCist writes mostly about the website(s) adding the link to the Beta testing DTAP, which is now reachable from the Projects and Planning section.  DTAP is freaking sweet! No more getting misreported status information from this blog, you can now go right in and see all the work that a project includes, what's finished, what isn't, what's behind schedule etc... Here's the link for the Met Branch Trail for example - where you can see that there are a few items overdue, but mostly it's on track for a May 1 completion. What will I pester Jim Sebastian about in BAC meetings now? [Don't worry there is still the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, Marvin Gaye Trail and other items not in DTAP yet.] They also had a link to the 2009 Annual Report.

I'll go into the Report and Agenda more in my next post, but if you read them you'll realize that DDOT is not anti-car unless you define anti-car as anything that doesn't commit 99% of funding, planning, time and energy to cars.  This is the point Dr. Gridlock makes as well.

Comments

[O2]

Disagreeing with you is not necessarily anti-bike...

Maybe you didn't get invited because of your stubborn ideologue approach to bicycle advocacy, so everyone already knows where you stand i.e. you have nothing new to offer.

[washcycle]

Yes. I'm sure that's it.

[Froggie]

Michael Perkins, who occasionally writes for GGW, was also invited to that blog meeting.

[Capn Transit]

What's wrong with being anti-car?

[Washcycle]

It depends on how you define anti-car. When I hear it, I think "no cars at all." If your definition of anti-car is that there should be less driving and fewer cars than I'd say there is nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't use that term, because it isn't really anti-car.
As much as we might like to complain about cars, they really are a critical part of our transportation and they probably always will be. If you think of them as a horseless version of a carriage, then you could argue they've been around almost as long as the wheel. Cars are not the problem, an imbalanced transportation system is the problem. If we take cars out of the equation it would make a lot of trips impossible. What I am for, and it sounds like Gabe Klein is for, is a balanced transportation system. Some who are opposed to balancing the transportation system like to frame the other side as wanting to "ban cars" or some other nonsense because it makes us seem unreasonable. It's like accusing Obama of wanting to create "government-run health care" or calling "the Surge" an "escalation". So it's reasonable to say, we'd like less driving and fewer cars, it's crazy to say no driving and no cars.

[ZA]

I prefer "pro-human" myself. Not only has the infrastructure for the car been built, it's been overbuilt. The alternatives need their fair share.

"Pro-car" people should be pro the alternatives too, since it should free up more road space for cars.

[Capn Transit]

I don't think it's crazy to say no driving and no cars. I used to feel that "Auto-Free New York" was an unrealistic position. But then I thought about it, and I think it's fine as a long-term goal.

Yes, it's unrealistic to want everyone to stop driving tomorrow, but I think we need to show some imagination, and be open to the possibility of living car-free. Think about this quote from J.H. Crawford:

I support the New Urbanism but strongly prefer the pure car-free solution, as the advantages are even greater. Once the last car disappears from the street, it becomes a playground for people of all ages. This can be seen any day in Venice or Fes. Peace, safety and tranquility settle over the street, and a rich and vibrant social life takes the place of the stink, noise, and danger of cars.

[bikermark]

I am unabashedly anti car. Cars have tremendous utility, but they have completely taken over the public space (the streets), they pollute the air, they make us fat, they kill a lot of us, and they (generally) bring out the worst in human beings. Hello? Hit & run pedestrian crashes, anyone?
After 50 years of pandering to the automobile driver, we need some affirmative action for cyclists, peds, and transit. (I probably won't use that word choice.) I grow impatient over the slow awakening that our cars are killing us. I mean, we had a higher mode share for cyclists back in the 1970s! Sorry for the rant, but (so far) there are no bike lanes on the high road.

[washcycle]

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can move to a carless world. I can't really see it though. Not even in the city, and certainly not in rural areas.