To DC Council: Please reject the Mayor’s street safety cuts

Last month, the Office of the DC Auditor reported that, as DCist headlined it, Vision Zero Doesn’t Have Enough Funding, Staffing To Succeed. ’“The Bowser Administration failed to follow the ambitious announcement in 2015 with appropriate resources in both funding and manpower,” DC’s auditor Kathy Patterson said in a statement.

Also last month, the Bowser Administration’s proposed FY 2024 budget requires repealing a two-year-old law that dedicates most traffic camera revenue to Vision Zero projects, cuts three of Circulator’s six routes (and cancels a seventh meant to start service this year), and fails to fund last year’s Metro for DC law to expand bus service and make it free in the District.

A WABA alert this week calls on Council to reverse the Mayor’s transportation cuts. I added a few things, so here’s my version:

2024 is the year the Mayor designated as the year DC gets to zero traffic deaths and serious injuries. We’re nowhere close, and now is not the time to scale back funding for key transportation bills or cut public transit. Yet that’s exactly what the mayor’s proposed budget does—eliminate the Vision Zero revenue set-aside created in the budget two years ago and put money gleaned from automated enforcement cameras back into the general fund, and cut half of the Circulator’s existing routes (and the Ward 7 route scheduled to start this year).

There are a number of reasons why this is a bad idea; I refer you to the testimony of the Pedestrian Advisory Council to last week’s Transportation Committee hearing for several of them, such as reinforcing the popular trope that automated enforcement is a money grab rather than a safety measure. But the bottom line is, we need to make it safe to be on our streets, and make sure that we have safe, accessible ways for people to get around that aren’t in individual private cars. Repealing the Vision Zero funding set-aside, eliminating half of Circulator’s routes, and failing to fund Metro for DC and the ebike rebate program will take us backwards, not advance Vision Zero.

I am asking you to ensure the dedicated funding source in the FY24 budget for the Vision Zero Omnibus bill is not repealed, and to also fully fund the “Electric Bicycle Rebate Program Amendment Act of 2023” and “Metro For D.C. Amendment Act of 2020”.

Combined, these bills will save lives and make our transportation system more equitable. Please reverse the Mayor’s cuts, and fully fund them in the FY24 budget. Thank you!

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{swiderski2023,
  author = {Swiderski, J. I.},
  title = {To {DC} {Council:} {Please} Reject the {Mayor’s} Street
    Safety Cuts},
  date = {2023-04-04},
  url = {https://jski.net/posts/reject-the-mayors-street-safety-cuts.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Swiderski, J. I. 2023. “To DC Council: Please Reject the Mayor’s Street Safety Cuts.” April 4, 2023. https://jski.net/posts/reject-the-mayors-street-safety-cuts.html.