Thread by @alexbaca

Good evening. Seems as good a time as any to discuss D.C. and gentrification and change and biking, a thing I thought I wouldn’t have to talk about much at this point. But I realize I’ve been saying I’ve been doing this shit for a decade. I have. That feels significant.

My big career breakthrough was this painstakingly reported City Paper story. It led to a job at WABA. More importantly, I heard that it quelled a good deal of intra-administration anti-bike politics; lots of people said this story was a neutralizer. washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/1…

Cool! That was really cool. It also...didn’t matter? Bc the collective we—the paid nonprofit advocates—went to do extremely *good* work. But I often question if it was move-the-needle work. I think a needle moved, but not the one that saved lives or, really, improved them.

I am going to skip over a lot. But we both didn’t broaden the movement—claims about biking for transportation being white totally land—*and* didn’t galvanize it. There is no “bike” councilperson in D.C. That strikes me, given our, uh, condition, as totally bonkers.

And now it’s 2019. We are running out of years to mitigate climate change. It turns out that prioritizing parking for drivers over creating safe, healthy streets didn’t save authentic, black D.C., because the city didn’t build homes people could afford. It was all a proxy.

So we demonized bike lanes. We demonized safe, slow streets. We targeted that shit as the bogeyman of change. What an insane and awful mistake when we could have done it all—could have said, wow, let’s redistribute wealth, let’s make this city good for who lives here.

We didn’t talk about that ten years ago. I say that anyone who will listen every day of my life now as that streets that you won’t die on, and nice housing that you can afford, and buses that arrive frequently aren’t fucking commodities but things that everyone deserves.

I know that stuff became stand-ins for gentrification and trash ignorant white newcomers, but it’s criminal, honestly, that it did. Saying bike lanes were econ dev was a horrible misstep and I cringe at it now. I hate that’s what elected officials could be convinced to buy.

Anyway this city caters to an invisible constituency that doesn’t exist and sticks with the status quo. I didn’t write about redesigned streets saving lives in 2011 because I didn’t know, but I know the counterfactual is human lives picked off because hard thing is hard.

In six months I bet we are going to be numb to the rage from Dave’s death and carefully considering how to restack the DDOT org chart while we have 90 million meetings about bike and bus lanes are years-planned but will be installed ?????

I think we will try hard to fight all of this but I think everyone needs to scream and show up and vote out people who don’t change the way that D.C. works. Not just for safer streets but for housing and health and families and policing and everything.

The people who get big mad about not parking in front of their house are ruling everything. I deeply feel the equity concerns. But making different, better ways of getting around responsible for displacement when we don’t build affordable housing close to jobs is fucked.