The D.C. Council’s recent vote to provide each resident a $100 monthly transit subsidy may appear to be a worthy effort to boost mass transit use, but the reality is that it is a costly and ineffective gesture that ignores a much bigger problem with mass transit in the District, which is that the D.C.’s default policy of accommodating on-street parking wherever possible effectively reduces bus speeds so much that few people bother with buses unless they have no other choice.
In most dense D.C. neighborhoods like Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle, there are groups devoted to protecting the primacy of car owners to store their cars on city streets at virtually no cost. These groups oppose bus lanes, bike lanes and most new housing developments, since each of these either threatens the number of available parking spaces or else creates new competition for the existing street parking spots.
Street parking is scarce in these neighborhoods because D.C. charges residents a fraction of the…
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