BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

 My Democratic friends and one very close relative often ask me why I’m a Republican.  Another of the many reasons revealed itself to me recently from the window of a cab.  I was traveling down historic Pennsylvania Avenue on my way to Capitol Hill.

             Pennsylvania Avenue is America’s Avenue.  It is a great corridor of history linking the nation’s Capitol and the White House, and then winding its way westward into Georgetown, the village on the Potomac River that predates Washington.  On either side are the Treasury and Commerce departments, District of Columbia city hall, the Old Post Office and Evening Star buildings, the Canadian Embassy, the FBI, the Newseum, the Navy Memorial and the majestic Willard Hotel where Ulysses S Grant used to go for a cigar and brandy in the afternoons.

 Pennsylvania Avenue is wide, four lanes going each way with a blacktop boulevard in the middle, where the trolley car tracks used to be.

             The avenue is a sight to behold, an American treasure, especially in the golden hour of early evening when the orange and yellow hews of the setting sun turn the Capitol dome into one of the most beautiful American portraits you’ll ever see.

 But I digress.

             Part of Pennsylvania Avenue’s character was its lack of urban congestion.  The only traffic jams on the avenue were those created by Presidential motorcades, the movement of important international visitors and Washington’s occasional snowstorms.   Not so anymore.

             That was until earlier this year when the Washington D.C. City Government, one of the most liberal, exclusively Democratic, and–dare I use the word–socialist-leaning in the country, decided to close off two lanes and restrict them to bikes only. The former  motor vehicle lanes are now bike lanes going in each direction, complete with their own turn lanes and those brightly painted turn arrows and go-straight arrows. 

           

  Ya gotta see it to believe it.  I did.  Out the window of the cab.  I had plenty of time to look at the new bike lanes, because traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue was snarled by buses, cars, cabs and trucks trying to squeeze into the remaining lanes.  “Wait ‘til summer and the tourist buses get here,” the cabby snarled. “He’s a lost cause,” he said, referring to the city’s cyclist Mayor Adrian Fenty, who, you may have guessed, rides his bike down Pennsylvania Avenue.  The Pennsylvania Avenue initiative is one of many to expand bike lanes to already overcrowded streets like L and M, Ninth and 15^th.

 The bike lanes are yet another attempt by the D.C. government to engineer social behavior.  They are part of a long-term strategy to get people out of cars and onto bikes, buses, motorcycles, subways or their own two feet, whether they want to or not.   It is classic liberalism to engineer behavior through public policy, regardless of what collateral damage it causes or to whom.  The history of our country is replete with examples of the utter failure and heavy cost of political paternalism.

 The D.C. government is anti-car and, like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, it has for decades engaged in public policies intended to make driving a car in D.C. so miserable, people will abandon them.  

             That’s despite the reality that DC keeps growing.

            Commercial development in the District of Columbia has flowed over the city, section by section, like a giant wave.  There’s hardly a time the skyline isn’t obsured by the sight of construction cranes. But with every new building, there’s been no effort to allow for the additional traffic that the people who will occupy those buildings generate.  Streets haven’t been widened.  Few if any new lanes of traffic have been added.  The same is true for parking lanes for cabs and delivery vehicles.  The city has had historic opportunities  in its urban renewal to accommodate the increased traffic that new development inevitably produces, but it has steadfastly refused to do so, in one of those misty-eyed ‘you’ll thank us in 50 years’ mentalities.

             Approximately 700,000 people work in D.C. and I read that about two-thirds of them commute from Maryland and Virginia.  The vast majority of those who live in D.C. still drive cars to work.   Commuter traffic is growing not lessoning.  I also read that bikes represent less than one-half of one percent of vehicular traffic and I would guess that number is exaggerated.  Everyone wants to ride a bike, stay healthy and cut down on pollution, but few do and few can.

             Hundreds of thousands of people in cars every day with an average back and forth commuter time of at least an hour and a half on the road, every day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.  Instead of reducing pollution, the city has contributed to it, by forcing motorists on the road for longer periods of time, idling longer in traffic jams, spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The social engineers simply turn their back on the unintended consequences of their actions.  How can they pretend to be reducing pollution by causing more of it? 

             It isn’t just the pollution, though.  There is a more onerous consequence of what they’ve done.  Most every D.C. commuters can attest to the physiological and psychological injury done to them and their families by the relentless pressures and frustrations of ever-increasing traffic congestion and longer hours on the road and less time at home.  Their sacrifices are significant and costly to society. And they are only made worse by bike lanes along busy streets.

 Add to that the economic toll as well, a serious loss of productivity and higher costs of car operation and maintenance.  Imagine not only the hundreds of thousands of work hours lost, but the quality of the hours worked after an hour-long commute.  Then multiply that by the number of commuters in every major city in the country that has failed its commuting population to the degree Washington has.

 Liberal paternalism, and the perpetual state of denial about life’s realities that it engenders, has turned Washington D.C. and countless other metropolitan areas into gridlocked islands where only the wealthy and the poor or left unscathed by it.

             According to AAA, all 50 states have laws that give bicyclists the same rights and privileges of motor vehicles on the road, but the states also require bikers to obey the same traffic laws that motorists do. 

             Not so in D.C.  If those laws exist in D.C., they are a bad joke on motorists and pedestrians.  They are not enforced. Bicyclists, including the Mayor, have free reign on D.C. streets.  Most bicycles have no licenses, no lights or reflectors, no mirrors, no fenders.  They run red lights, play dodge ‘em with pedestrians on sidewalks, skip in and out of lanes, go the wrong against traffic.  They cross in front of cars to shift lanes or turn a corner, and they slip past cars in the same lane. Most bicyclists don’t use hand signals, except that one with the protruding middle finger, which indicates they’re going to cut you off.             They make driving highly dangerous and aggravating.  The D.C. response is an ad campaign asking the rest of us to “share the road.” 

 The D.C. experiment in social engineering has been a miserable and very clostly failure that people of the metro area will have to cope with and pay for well into the future.  And it will only get worse.  Personal observation isn’t very scientific, but the city buys more buses, but they are seldom full.  The subway appears full during rush hour, but fares keep going up, so ridership isn’t yet profitable, and the D.C. government has been a partner to letting the once-admired Metro system become one of the least safe in the country, so ridership is likely to decrease rather than increase. 

 This experiment is not a failure because encouraging people to ride bikes and reduce pollution are bad objectives.  It is a failure because public policy objectives are never realized in the absence of simple logic, perspective and common sense.  As a great philosopher once said, ‘common sense isn’t very common.”

 Mayor Fenty has his own private bike lane to work at city hall now, and the Washington Post continues to write embarrassing puff pieces about the great strides the city is making promoting bicycling, but neither will face up to the harsh realities of travel in the nation’s capital or the illogic of spending money on freshly painted bike lanes when the city budget is facing a $500 million shortfall. Both are monuments to why people all across America think government is dysfunctional and out of touch. 

 Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.