‘Car-friendly neighbourhoods aren’t kid-friendly neighbourhoods’

Washington DC can count itself in many ways to be a pro-child city: universal pre-K, paid parental leave, and diverse, accessible parks and recreation offerings. But one area where DC and many other cities could perform better is designing public spaces that prioritise children over cars.

Experts agree: a city designed to let kids live and thrive would have far fewer cars and safer, more walkable and bikeable streets. So why can’t we let go of the old trope that “parents of young children” need to not just drive, but to drive and park wherever we like, even in one of the country’s most walkable cities?

When we put cars first, we put children last

What these arguments boil down to is that the convenience of drivers – even in objectively walkable neighborhoods – should take priority over the lives and health of children. Parents should run a mile from such logic. Motor vehicle crashes kill and injure more kids than any other cause in America.

Let that sit for a minute. Kids aren’t dying because their parents were circling the block looking for parking, or they had to leave the house slightly earlier for art class. Those are inconveniences, not dangers. They die when drivers’ convenience is prioritised over their lives, and their ability to exist safely in public, says Caitlin Rogger of Greater Greater Washington.

If there weren’t any alternatives, putting cars over kids would still be deeply sad, but it might at least be considered integral to our economy (whose performance is also pretty important for kids’ health and well-being). But we in the Washington region have a terrific transit system, and a relatively dense footprint that makes walking and biking far more plausible modes than in most of the US. Our economy would only benefit from shifting mobility away from cars.

All of these strengths could be built on, extended, and made accessible for more people. It takes leadership and it takes support from the public.

“I want my city to become a place where you can let go of your child’s hand,” observed David van Horn (using a quote from the mayor of Paris) in a Post column reflecting on recent traffic violence. If we’re going to get there, we have to give something up: not cars, but car dependence.

We have what it takes to protect our kids, but we need to want it

What does putting kids over cars look like? It looks like dedicating road space to other types of transportation, particularly those known statistically to be used by people on lower incomes (like buses), many of whom are children, and children across the board (like walking and biking). It looks like roads designed for safety first, through engineering the spaces drivers travel through and the speeds they are allowed to travel at. It looks like public spaces, such as biking and walking facilities, that children can use independently, throughout the city, not just in the places they are expected to be like schools; because children should be allowed to be everywhere without risking their lives. It looks like acting to stop drivers from breaking the law with impunity, a problem which has increased dramatically during the pandemic.

The good news is that DC has made strides in many of these areas in recent years, dedicating millions of dollars for bus lanes and biking facilities, and automated traffic enforcement cameras that should better monitor and respond to reckless driving.

Investing dollars into improving transit and active transportation infrastructure and services, like bus lanes and shared bike services, gives people – even parents – real options that aren’t cars. That has benefits beyond safety. With the lion’s share of carbon emissions coming from transportation, no amount of composting gets around the destruction wrought by a cars-first approach in our own neighbourhoods.

But more than any individual upgrade, even citywide ones, we need to shift our societal mindset to expect streets to be designed safely as a matter of course, not as a separate feature or an add-on that requires endless discussion.

Pedestrians First, a resource for making urban areas more walkable (GGWash Contributor D. Taylor Reich is the primary author of the site) outlines why designing cities to be safe and accessible for young children is good for everyone at any age:

“When our streets and neighborhoods are safe, comfortable, and useful for babies, toddlers, and their caregivers, they are more likely to be safe, comfortable, and useful for everyone. Babies and toddlers are not the only people in cities who are sensitive to unhealthy environments. Toddlers need extra time to cross streets, but so do the elderly and those with physical impairments. Street trees and public art are good both for a baby’s neurological development and for an adult’s mental health and sense of community.”

Below: Kids on the way to school in DC. Image by sglazerman licensed under Creative Commons. Image used with permission.

Safe streets are a parent’s best friend

In the meantime, parents need to step up to the plate for our children’s safety and wellbeing. We’re being held up again and again as a core excuse for preserving parking and driving not just near wherever it is we supposedly want to go, but directly in front of it.

That’s not a luxury. It’s a trap that keeps us from asking for something better.

We saw this in the fight over the North Carolina Ave NE bike lanes, for example, where DDOT proposed seven different options for one single block to connect bike lanes on C St NE to Lincoln Park and the westward bike network, and to slow down traffic (Disclaimer: The author serves on ANC 6A’s Transportation and Public Space Committee, which considered the issue).

Some residents raised the spectre of having to walk to their parking space instead of having it on their own block, or having car traffic restricted to one-way only, as compelling reasons to reject (in favour of their own proposals that were rejected on the basis of safety and infeasibility).

When you peel away each layer, what you find is an essentialist idea that children – and older adults – cannot be expected to live without extremely, almost uniquely-convenient-in-the-world access to cars. Yes, cars are necessary for some types of trips: I own a car mainly so I can hike on the weekends and the occasional grocery trip. Some members of society need them more often. But very few people in other countries have access to anything like our level of ease and low personal cost of driving, yet somehow, they carry on leading thriving lives. Even kids.

This misplaced fear of losing access to a cars-first system is extremely common, especially in the very neighborhoods that should reject it to protect our children. When some community members around Alabama Avenue in Ward 8 complained in 2019, DDOT removed bike lanes it had installed one month earlier in an area known for risks from traffic.

Northwest DC has some single-family-home communities known for resisting, of all things, sidewalk improvements. I recall visiting a friend in Tenleytown where I had to push my stroller in the street for the six-block walk from the Metro.

Car-dependent kids: An idea whose time has gone

The idea that kids need car-friendly neighbourhoods is not only an outdated and false trope. Because of the externalities of driving in terms of the environment, health, safety, and mobility of those not in cars (the number one reason buses travel slowly), buying into it will always retrench cars at the top of the priority list and children’s safety and well-being below.

We can’t afford to keep cars at the very top of the local transportation hierarchy if we want to preserve the lives and environment these very children are inheriting. The standard-bearers for tomorrow are here today, and they’re watching our choices.

First published by Greater Greater Washington and republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

Greater Greater Washington is a nonprofit organisation which advocates for an inclusive, diverse, growing Washington, DC region where all people can choose to live in walkable urban communities.

Caitlin Rogger is deputy executive director at Greater Greater Washington.