On Beach Drive

Last month, the National Park Service proposed ending the 28-month experiment with a (nearly) car-free Upper Beach Drive in DC’s Rock Creek Park and, in order to “improve recreational opportunities, minimize impacts to natural and historic resources, and address the needs of people who drive and those who use non-motorized transportation”, re-allow through traffic between Labor Day and Memorial Day every Fall, Winter, and Spring. Comments were accepted through midnight (Mountain Time, for some reason?) on August 11. Here’s mine.

The first two years I lived in DC, I was on 16th St NW at Longfellow, around the corner from the Morrow Drive entrance to the Park. However, if I ever wanted to get from the Carter Barron area down to Beach Drive, I could walk in the road on Morrow Drive, or walk in the road along Military and Joyce, or I could…..fly, I guess?

You write that “This [pandemic-era] closure has … increased the creation of informal, unofficial trails, which can cause natural resource damage.” First of all, this conclusion suffers from mistaking correlation for causation: The closure didn’t induce the creation of informal unofficial trails, the pandemic itself and the rapidly and vastly increased need for safe, outdoor recreation spaces away from other potentially-infectious people did! There was a critical need, and NPS largely failed to meet it, so people met it any way they could.

Moreover, the solution to informal and unsanctioned trails isn’t to reintroduce cars and scare off the people and others cutting new trails any more than it would be in one of the great Western parks. The solution to people making bad trails is to provide good ones! NPS should work with PARC, WABA, or other Park neighbors to create more official trails so folks east of the Park can get to it safely and without harming the environment.

Similarly, as at other parks NPS “manages” elsewhere in DC, the failure to provide space for people to exercise their dogs, combined with a failure to enforce leash laws and other regulations, has allowed some bad actors to run their dogs freely in the Park. Again, the solution is not to bring back commuter through-traffic, it’s to provide a dog exercise area and get people to use it.

I am a transportation planner, not an ecologist, but I can virtually guarantee that reintroducing through traffic, with cars’ exhaust and rubber particles from eroding tires and brake dust, not to mention drivers’ propensity to hit animals, people, and each other, will cause far greater harm to the Park’s environment than limiting drivers to accessing picnic areas from one end or the other.

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The offer to provide car-free access to Beach Drive from Memorial Day to Labor Day is almost an insult. As the last week has shown, high summer is the worst part of the year to be outside in DC. Just as the outside becomes tolerable again, NPS proposes to push joggers, bike riders, walkers, and others to the side so people in their climate-controlled boxes can drive the length of Beach Drive in peace. If anything, the fall and spring are when it’s most pleasant to be outside — and winter, when bike lanes and sidewalks are often treacherous to downright impassible (especially on NPS properties affiliated with Rock Creek Park, from 16th & Morrow to W Street below Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park, where it is often necessary to get DDOT or Congresswoman Norton’s office involved to have sidewalks cleared…), is when it is most important to have safe, car-free routes to commute and exercise.

Going forward with this plan would not achieve the Park Service’s goals to “improve recreational opportunities, minimize impacts to natural and historic resources, and address the needs of people who drive and those who use non-motorized transportation”, and in fact would diminish all of them.