A quick note: As you may have noticed, this newsletter did not run on its normal Friday timeline last week. The plan was to run Pretty Good Links, then have something different for you come this Friday. That plan is a bit in tatters right now, so you’ll get PGL on the final Friday of the month, as usual, and this in place of last Friday’s edition. Pretty Good Inc. apologies to those of you who crave structure in your inbox.
Driving is not a right.
This is something that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly aware of and militant about. Our processes for attaining a driver’s license in this country are far too lenient. Our structures for retaining those licenses are criminally lax.
Earlier this month, there was a horrific crash on Rock Creek Parkway, the ostensible highway that runs up the spine of the city, from Downtown to its northern reaches. A Lexus SUV (of course) fled a late-night traffic stop and ripped onto the parkway at high speeds, where it smashed into a sedan at 1:43 a.m., killing all three of those inside, leaving both the driver and passenger of the SUV injured, but alive.
Two things to know:
The sedan was driven by a rideshare driver. The two passengers were on their way home from a night out. Everyone was, by most standards, doing the responsible thing by providing and using a means of getting home that did not involve them driving drunk.
The Lexus had 44 — forty-four — unpaid camera speeding and red light tickets, totaling $12,300 in fines, including nine just from the first two months of 2023.
I am sympathetic to the idea that fines can be a regressive way of legislating traffic violations, and that they can end up punishing poor people while the rich can simply pay them off without changing their behavior. I understand that American cities, and especially suburbs, are not terribly well-planned with public transit to facilitate life without a car. But it is a complete failure of our public policy that the driver of that SUV still had a license to begin with.
Just as we have a glaring, unique-to-us gun problem in this country, we have a driving problem. As pedestrian fatalities fall all around the rest of the developed world, they continue to rise in America.
Solving this requires a major shift in the way we hold drivers accountable for their actions. But it also requires a change in mindset about getting behind the wheel in the first place, especially for those of us who live places that actually do have decent public and alternate transportation.
Perhaps you heard about the cherry blossom disaster this weekend.
One of Washington’s biggest tourist attractions each spring is the seasonal blossoming of the cherry trees that surround the tidal basin, the body of water around which the MLK, FDR and Jefferson Memorials sit. Many, many people, both locals and visitors, matriculate to a pretty small physical footprint to see them, walk among them, and take photos.
If you don’t already, please take a moment to understand the geography of the tidal basin. It is, as the name suggests, a body of water, with very limited crossings. Coming south from Independence Ave., the thoroughfare that buttresses the south end of the National Mall, there is one way in and one way out on each side.
All of this is to say: Even if you knew — despite all warnings to the contrary — that you wouldn’t spend four hours at a standstill and that traffic would be as light as possible and that parking actually wouldn’t be a hassle and that you’d be able to pilot your hulking vehicle around as you pleased…why would you? Why would you want a drive-thru cherry blossom experience? On a perfect spring day? When the entire point is to get out and walk among and enjoy the trees, why would you drive your car when you could be NOT driving your car?
Driving in and around Washington is both an occasional necessity and also an enormous fucking drag, as anyone who has ever done it can attest. We have a bevy of one-way streets, theoretically helpful traffic circles that turn into Machiavellian torture devices the second that road volume hits a critical mass, seemingly endless and never actually helpful road construction, and Maryland drivers. Any time you can not drive in Washington you should be aiming to avoid doing so. On one of the busiest tourist weekends of the year, in a city that saw nearly 25 million tourists in the final pre-pandemic year? AYFKM?
I think our drive-thru culture is at least partly to blame for this. Once the provenance of fast food chains, drive-thrus have expanded in recent years to include coffee shops, banks, pharmacies, liquor stores, and even funeral homes.
The internet is full of useless, borderline insane suggestions for drive-thru businesses you (yes, you!) can start in 2023, including a gas station (seriously, what) and a strip club. We are truly the dumbest country on the planet.
This is all predicated on the idea that driving is both faster and more convenient than alternate ways of doing things. But this is increasingly untrue, especially in population dense, urban areas.
Even outside of cherry blossom season or summertime, it is nearly always just as fast if not faster to bike from my house to anywhere else within District limits than to drive, even without accounting for time spent looking for parking. Our oft-derided and occasionally aflame Metro system has stops within close proximity to all major tourist attractions, as well as each of our sporting venues, while reaching 11 (!) different arms into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. This is an extremely convenient city, by American standards, to navigate without a car, and still a very difficult one, by those same standards, to navigate within one.
Unfortunately, even this week’s disaster will likely not dissuade enough people on its own from creating the same mess again next year. Instead, the District should invest in a plan to close the roads to traffic, perhaps providing some shuttles from nearby transit stations to help facilitate access for those who need it. Everyone else can Metro and walk, or bike, or scoot, or do anything other than try to wedge their big, stupid, polluting metal machines into the middle of an arboretum.
It’s become an annual tradition in our house, on a nice day sometime around peak bloom, to take the bikes down to Hains Point, pedal through the rows of blooming trees, and snap some lovely photos.
The only bummer? Having to weave through the lines of some of the most miserable-looking people you’ve ever seen, stuck, idling in their cars.
Stories like the Rock Creek Parkway crash happen and are forgotten about almost immediately. There are so many traffic deaths in America that each individual one gets drained of its significance, a dynamic we saw play out on an even grander scale over the course of the pandemic. And while sitting for four hours in a traffic jam of your own creation is a far less awful fate, hopefully those who did and paid the price will take a moment to reflect on why that was such a bad idea and how they can reduce their own car use moving forward.
Or at least they can leave the car at home for next year’s bloom.