How DC’s Vision Zero—And Much Of The DC Government’s Agenda—Gets Trumped By On-Street Parking

Four years ago DC started a program to eliminate pedestrian traffic deaths called Vision Zero. Since that time there has been no progress whatsoever on reducing traffic deaths, which remain where they were four years ago. Why has there been no progress?

One problem is that there is not, in fact, a large constituency for improving pedestrian safety. While the families of those killed in traffic may insist upon safety improvements, relatively few others recognize an urgent need to address this problem. Few people are outraged that this number has scarcely changed, and this means that the political benefits of reducing traffic fatalities is minor.

What’s more, the political cost to take tangible steps to fix the problem in many areas of town is quite steep, because nearly all steps to address the problem would invariably entail limiting the ability of DC residents to store their cars on residential streets to some degree—either by closing certain streets to traffic, reducing parking along other streets, or removing it altogether on more heavily-traveled roads.

And while members of the DC Council profess their desire to reduce pedestrian deaths, they have shown themselves wholly unwilling to take on the wealthy, politically active, and social-media adept constituency of car owners who live in the dense, wealthy neighborhoods of the District, and who fiercely oppose anything that might impact their ability to store their cars on city streets for next to nothing.

The basic problem is that the city charges just $50 a year for people to store their cars on the street. At that cut-rate price—for perspective, reserved parking spaces in population-dense neighborhoods like Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan rent for $3,000 per annum—-there is a marked surplus of cars whose owners want to store them on the street: in many neighborhoods there are hundreds more cars registered to be stored on the street than there are spaces to put them.

Many of these car owners are forced to park blocks away from their home, sometimes in completely different neighborhoods, or they park illegally, abutting intersections or crosswalks. The status quo frustrates them, but the obvious solutions are unpalatable to them.

One such solution would be to charge a market price for the right to store a car on the city street, rather than the current $50 fee. If residential on-street car storage cost $1,500 a year, many residents in these dense, transit-rich neighborhoods would forgo cars that they use infrequently.

And the simple reality is that these communities are replete with cars that are little more than storage containers. Numerous cars in Adams Morgan have not moved in months; one car parked along Kalorama Park has not moved in a decade. Several Adams Morgan residents own more than ten automobiles with an on-street parking permit.

However, increasing the cost of on-street parking would be met with collective outrage from the affected cohort, and the DC Council fears the opprobrium such a move would bring from the on-street car owners. While car owners would welcome a trade off that entailed paying more for on-street car storage in exchange for making it easier to find a spot, previous attempts to raise parking permit fees by just $15 a year were met with loud protests.

Instead, politicians and the car-owner lobby masquerading as neighborhood associations devote resources to pressure the city to increase the supply of street parking. What makes this problematic is that this craven and hopeless attempt to solve the parking shortage nonetheless results in the District extending parking permits to places where it interferes with traffic, buses, or pedestrian safety.

The DC government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on efforts to improve housing affordability, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve mass transit access, and reduce traffic deaths. However, the city’s parking problem is the biggest hindrance to furthering each of these goals, and the fact that the DC Council evinces no appetite to do belies the unfortunate reality that it places a higher priority on appeasing a small group of politically connected residents than advancing its ostensibly progressive agenda.