Finally got around to sending the letter to Council i drafted after Aimee was hit last week….
I’m writing as a pedestrian, bike rider, resident of Ward 1, and someone who almost lost a second friend in barely six months last week. Aimee Custis, as you’ve likely heard by now, was doored last Thursday night on 17th St NW in Dupont, blocks from where I live. Hers of course is far from the first incident on this road, even this year; for one, ANC 1D05 Commissioner Chelsea Allinger was hit by an SUV on 17th near L St NW in July.
Despite the fact that my own home is [just off] 17th St NW, I ride irregularly on 17th. This is in part because I’m mostly heading west, to the Key Bridge to go to class in Ballston, so I ride down 18th to N St, or Florida to Q St, then head into Georgetown. But even when I’m heading east, I ride Florida Avenue across to 11th St and work my way down from there.
If you’re familiar with the streets between U St NW and the climb to Columbia Heights, you might notice that none of the streets I regularly use to get to and from my home have bike lanes. Incidents like what happened to Aimee last week are a significant part of why. As you may have heard my friend Rachel Maisler say in the Vision Zero hearing last month, paint isn’t protection, and as a relatively strong rider, it often feels safer to ride on roads that don’t have any bike lanes than to deal with the regular blocking of the 17th, 14th, and other nearby bike lanes by delivery drivers who ignore flex posts (repeatedly) or taxi and ride-hail drivers and their passengers who ignore, well, the entire outside world around them. In fact, my favorite option, 18th St, doesn’t have any parking at all for significant stretches—this is not a coincidence.
For someone who doesn’t consider themselves a strong and confident rider, their choices are to roll the dice or…what, simply not ride? If DC is serious about its oft-expressed goal to increase non-auto mode split, it needs to make it easy, safe, and efficient to ride and walk in the city. The relatively flat topography in the center of town makes it pretty easy, but the lack of protected bikeways do not make it safe—and the circuitous paths forced by what few bike lanes the District does have often make it less efficient than it should be to ride, especially north-south. This is why we need a protected and connected network, across the entire District, and need it as soon as possible.
After Dave Salovesh was killed in April, I wrote to you in part:
“Stop accepting excuses and half-answers and years of endless study and planning for projects that will sit on the shelf for years, as plans for a calmer Florida Avenue NE have done.
“It is time for Council to take its oversight role seriously and force DDOT to stop slow-walking safety.
Parking cannot be more important than people’s lives. Period.”
I’m glad that Florida Avenue NE has now gotten some much needed work. But we cannot just keep filling the holes in the lives our dead neighbors leave behind with asphalt and paint and K-71 delineator posts. Plans like the long-delayed Eastern Downtown Protected Bike Lanes, or the long-planned reconfiguration of 17th St NW itself, should not, cannot, must not wait for another person to be killed.
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