The tyranny of the parked car in Washington, D.C.

OPINION:

The novel coronavirus and the resulting quarantine have revealed just how much deference we give to the automobile (or to be precise, parked automobiles) in Washington, D.C., to the detriment of nearly every single form of transportation — pedestrians, drivers, cyclists and bus riders.

Traffic flow is much better than before since we have a fraction of the traffic, but as we get used to traversing the city by foot rather than by car or bus, what becomes just as noticeable as the lack of traffic is the dramatic reduction in the amount of cars parked on major streets. That diminution has been an unexpected boon for the surfeit of pedestrians — and everyone else as well.

D.C. permits cars to park almost anywhere along its streets, even in places where it is inconvenient for pedestrians or buses or moving traffic. What’s more, the District is not terribly vigilant when it comes to enforcing its parking regulations, and illegally parked cars create even bigger traffic problems.

Restrictions on rush-hour parking lanes are routinely flouted in many places and completely ignored elsewhere. Efforts to prevent cars from parking on newly created dedicated bus lanes were already waning before the novel coronavirus struck. Postal trucks remain above the law, and their drivers take full advantage of it.

The city’s indifference to enforcing its parking restrictions, along with its ill-thought-out legal parking spots, creates frequent, daily, predictable gridlock throughout the city. While the D.C. Council recently increased the tax on ride-hailing apps in an misguided effort to reduce congestion, its lawmakers remain blissfully unaware that during much of the day, I Street’s four lanes in Northwest are reduced to one lane because of the surfeit of parked cars. It’s a reality the lawmakers no doubt missed when they collectively took a well-publicized bus trip along I Street’s supposedly dedicated bus lanes and declared them a rousing success.

I would like to use a Churchillian analogy to describe deference given to parked cars in this town: Never have so few imposed so much a cost on so many.

Bus commuters pay the highest price for the city’s parking beneficence, as parked cars not only slow traffic but also make it more difficult for buses to enter and leave stops. While the council continues to profess a desire to get more people to travel on buses, and seems to comprehend that people don’t take them because they are slow and unreliable, they don’t realize they are slow because parked cars impede buses.

A former colleague from my days as a congressional staffer refers to the Senate as the Favor Factory, because he felt that he spent his time there doing nothing but listening to lobbyists explaining to them why they needed a special favor — and then reporting to his boss what they wanted. And, he observed, the more powerful the entity asking, the more likely it was that their request was granted.

Washington operates in a similar way: The city has effectively chosen to give over vast tracts of public property to wealthy car owners — who are more likely to give money to politicians, show up at meetings and write letters to their politicians. Much of this public property is dedicated for them to use to store their cars when they aren’t using them, for which they pay virtually nothing. The city’s middle- and lower-class denizens who don’t own cars not only fail to receive any benefit from this largesse but actually pay a steep price, as these parked cars slow their commute.

Apparently, if we can help a single car owner keep from having to park in a garage and walk an extra block it’s worth a few thousand bus riders being delayed in their commute an extra couple of minutes.

What’s more, wealthy car owners organize to fight all new development in dense communities in order to reduce competition for on-street parking, albeit in the guise of “protecting the neighborhood.” If you ever wondered why there are one-story buildings abutting the Tenleytown Metro Station or why expanding a rowhouse in Adams-Morgan invariably triggers lawsuits and protests it’s because of these people. Our ostensibly progressive city’s subservience to a small class of elite car owners is nothing less than astounding.

Washington, D.C,, could radically transform itself by effectively banning parking on all major streets and anywhere else where it interferes in any way with bus traffic. In one fell swoop traffic jams would evaporate, buses would travel faster and more reliably, pedestrians and cyclists would find it safer to traverse the city, and smog, along with carbon emissions, would decline.

Such a step would nudge some drivers to mass transit — especially buses — while others might eschew the hassle of parking a car and opt for Uber or Lyft, and still others into moving closer to their work. Still others would choose to simply park in a garage, like the vast majority of those who commute via automobile currently do.

Charging people a couple thousand dollars a year to store their car on the street in dense neighborhoods would also make sense. The many people who store a car on their street solely for the occasional jaunt to Costco or as a storage container (there are many such vehicles in my neighborhood) would sensibly opt to go without — just as the majority of residents in Adams-Morgan and Dupont Circle currently do.

Let me propose a thought experiment: If all 671,000 residents of Washington arrived en masse in this fully constructed city for the first time tomorrow and had to make all our rules anew, there is no chance that we would collectively decide to give such deference to parked cars. But because we have always done this, and because the people who own cars are wealthier and more politically active than the rest of us, it is hellishly difficult to take their long-granted, valuable privilege away from them.

Good politicians work hard to form coalitions and persuade voters to support them in making decisions that are best for the collective good of a community and resist the reflexive protection of entrenched interests when they run counter to our collective well-being. Bad politicians accept the status quo and pretend there’s some politically-painless technological fix that will solve their problems.

Perhaps one day the District of Columbia’s Favor Factory will close.

• Ike Brannon is a senior fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation.