“LOL. You are tied so tightly to your car that you don’t see the point. I live in a walkable, bikeable, close-in neighborhood.”
Yeah? So do I. I live where people are paying over the asking price of homes for sale by thousands because of that fact alone.
Guess what? Everyone else does not, and their businesses are not here either.
And unless you want to live on boutique food, craft beer, and coffee, you have to go to a real supermarket, and a bike is not how that is done.
And I used to actually bike to my job. The problem is that I’m on a hill, the job is in a valley, and it only is pleasant on one of those trips. It was not worth coming home exhausted and sweating like a pig.
Co-workers really do not appreciate stinky bike riding cohorts, trust me. And yeah, they stink.
Now we're talking the same language. I have lived for nearly 40 years on Capitol Hill and have my share of war stories from Marion Barry days. Since then, the Hill has become a celebrated gentrification success story, and the turnaround is spreading in all directions. Several nearby neighborhoods that for decades have been synonymous with squalor are coming back, and linking up. It has been exciting to watch.
The biggest contributing factor is probably traffic congestion in the suburbs, plus high housing costs in northwest DC. Now Capitol Hill has become expensive as well. If your alternative is to live in Germantown or Woodbridge and spend most of your non-work waking hours in a car, close-in gentrifying neighborhoods start to look attractive.
Bike trails and bike lanes are yuppie bait. Yes, they're nice for recreation for the kids. Yes, they're great for retirees with time for long, rambling rides. Yes, they can get some commuters out of their cars and at least marginally reduce rush hour traffic congestion. But first and foremost in my book, they are value-added amenities that can attract young, still-active adults to neighborhoods with potential, of which we have many.
Every city is different. An important part of the bike action here consists of linking up existing trail systems so that the local trails become integrated into a broader regional network. Suddenly, instead of doing laps around your local park, you can actually get somewhere. Some people will use this to commute to work. But even more will find it as the hook that puts some long-bypassed neighborhoods on the map.
Biking won't be everyone's cup of tea, but more people would ride if we made it easy. This applies to the suburbs as well. There are great neighborhoods all over the metro area, even in the suburbs. But it is crazy how major suburban destinations are essentially unreachable by bike, or reachable only with lengthy and circuitous, thread-the-needle routes.
Those great suburban arterial roads easily become barriers. There are few crossings. Over yonder is Tyson's Corner (the biggest office park, plus much more, in Virginia), or some other major destination. All around are wonderful residential neighborhoods. And none of it connects, except by car. Forget bikes; try to walk somewhere in the suburbs, outside of your little subdivision. (Suburbanites walk? Well, try to imagine.) Even if a road conveniently goes where you want it to, there is no bike lane or sidewalk. That's foolish.
It's neither hard nor expensive in new construction to provide for a wide shoulder or an adequate sidewalk. That should be standard. The problem we so often face here is that the shoulders and sidewalks that used to provide non-motorized accessbililty were long ago sacrificed to create another traffic lane. That's how roads become barriers, and it's an area where the suburbs have some expensive retrofitting to do.