Sustainable DC Transportation Meeting

Bikes cueing
Photo by theDCeye

The Sustainable DC Working group is an effort by the District government to make a city that makes better and lasting environmentally progressive decisions.

The transportation group is meeting at 441 4th St, NW (One Judiciary Square), Room 1114 from 6p to 8p Thursday, December 15.

We encourage member of the bicycling community to attend these mettings so that bicycle facilitates can be included in the Mayor's proposed fiscal year 2013 budget and contribute to a more sustainable District.

November 30 was the first opportunity for the public to provided their opinions and expertise on 9 major topic that hope to make the District more environmentally friendly according to the event organizers:

1. Built Environment: Buildings and infrastructure and their relationship to transportation, energy, and water
2. Climate: Government and community greenhouse gas emissions reductions and adaptation to a changing climate
3. Energy: Energy use, generation, efficiency, providers, and financing issues
4. Food: Local food production, distribution, access, security, and community benefits for health, education, and jobs
5. Nature: Natural systems, parks, habitat, biodiversity, and wildlife
6. Transportation: Transportation systems, infrastructure, modes, efficiencies, access, and delivery
7. Waste: Waste recycling, reuse, hauling and collection, composting, and waste to energy
8. Water: Watershed protection, stormwater management, water quality and reuse, and sewers
9. Green Economy: Job creation and retention, economic development, and local business development

The first transportation meeting allowed attendees to voice their thoughts about major transportation factors facing the District and offer suggestions on how to make improvements.  The transportation meeting hopes to bring the best minds and those who use the District's transportation infrastructure most to have the opportunity to voice their opinions about future transportation facilities, in particular bicycling infrastructure.

Related to bicycling, the group mentioned the following:

1. Include more modes of transportation in the range of options to plan for, including electric bikes, scooters, small cars, motorcycles and mopeds
   
   
2.  Provide better separation bikers and drivers
   
   
3. Allocate street space proportional to the modes of transportation we need to build a multi‐modal, resilient, efficient system
   
   
4. Create a system that would allow city residents to evacuate by bike (or other modes) in emergency situations
   
   
5. Build covered bike lanes or bike tunnels so that people will still bike in adverse weather
   
   
6. Align the health benefits of biking or walking with an incentive (through health insurance for example) to get people out of cars
   
   
7. Adopt a program similar to the 2x2012 program in Columbus, OH, where employees all biked or walked to work on the same day twice a month. The program was popular enough that employees exceeded the twice a month goal
   
   
8. Make bike lanes more visually distinctive to delineate the separation between car space and bike space
   
   
9. Allow the ole ‘Idaho Stop’ for bikers who can safely roll through stop signs and red lights  

Meeting notes can be found here.

If you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below.