Photo by JamesCalder on Flickr.

For the last three days, I’ve experienced DC from the inside of a windshield. It’s far from the first time I’ve driven in DC, of course; we own a car, which we use to get to the airport, Greater Greater Fiancée’s parents’, Tysons, interesting ethnic restaurants in Virginia, the DMV, and other auto-dependent destinations. But this week, with my parents in town to help out with home improvement tasks, we also drove to, and parked in, Adams Morgan, DCUSA, 14th and U, and the Home Depot.

Before you ask: no, I haven’t decided to become a suburbanism booster. Shopping by car is very convenient. It will always hold a place in our society. But it also reinforced an important idea: my convenience while driving always came at the expense of others. Here are a few examples.

DC USA. If you’re going to buy a lot of bedskirts, trash bags, and towels at Bed Bath and Beyond, it’s nice to have a trunk to put them in. But at 2 pm on a Tuesday, the 1,050-car DC USA parking garage has approximately 20 cars in it—enough that everyone can park at most a few spaces from the elevators. We know that even at peak times, a whole floor is never used. Taxpayers spent $42 million to build the thing, and I only paid $1 to park there while spending about $100 at the stores. Everyone who doesn’t shop there, or shops there without parking, is subsidizing the garage.

The Home Depot. People certainly need cars for many of the things they buy at the Home Depot. We didn’t though; we just ordered carpet installation and picked up a few light bulbs. Manhattan’s Home Depot is very successful in three floors of a very urban building in Chelsea. Why couldn’t we have something similar, along with a modest underground garage, in a more walkable development at Rhode Island Avenue?

Rock Creek Parkway. The shortest route from Dupont to National Airport is via Rock Creek (I think), and it’s a beautiful drive. Unfortunately, it’s not such a beautiful walk or bike ride. To get to the nice trails in Rock Creek Park, you have to walk alongside a highway as far as about Tilden Street; to get to the C&O Canal or Capital Crescent Trail, it’s highway in the other direction until you reach K and cut over to the Georgetown Waterfront Park. Taking my parents to the airport, we enjoyed Rock Creek for five minutes; going for each of the two above walks, my dad breathed the fumes of cars for much longer. We need our parks for parks, not for highways.

Neighborhood retail. I like to patronize the 17th Street hardware store as much as possible. Of course, they don’t have everything I need. That might lead some to always drive to the Home Depot, but having a store nearby is much more convenient. Unfortunately, and largely because so many people do drive to shop, there’s no hardware store in many neighborhoods. Suburban big-box convenience hurts neighborhood retail. We don’t want to take away consumer choice, but we also need to help the retail succeed.

The Brass Knob. This is an urbanism success story, not a failure. I got a great doorknob at Adams Morgan’s amazing architectural antique store (turns out my door has an original “Columbian” mortise lock). And the multispace meters on 18th worked great. I paid a quarter to park and spend a couple hundred on merchandise. If it had been more crowded, like on a weekend, the meter could have cost more and still not deterred a trip to this great store. If I hadn’t been with my parents, I could have biked there, and will in the future.

The Zipcar alternative. I didn’t need to own a car to do all this. I could have rented a Zipcar; there’s actually one behind the house next door to me. And if more people used them, they’d be able to have more cars to make it more convenient for more people. I choose to keep my car and own a parking space, which is my right, but DC taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing that. For the above reasons and many more, they are, heavily.

Much of this requires a cognitive leap. For my parents, who live in a classic suburban area, Home Depot is the first stop rather than the stop after walking to the neighborhood hardware store. A $1/hour garage doesn’t seem too cheap. And the idea of depending on the uncertainty of getting a Zipcar when you need one is a little scary.

At the same time, they, like many other people, love the European feel of DC. There’s a bakery (Firehook) a couple blocks away. There are at least two places selling crepes in the neighborhood. The beautiful and diverse buildings, combining moderate-density townhouses and higher density apartment buildings on the avenue, are a lot like Paris (but a few floors shorter).

Driving convenience and walkable urbanism are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. We could ensure everyone has a parking space all the time and that every store has lots of parking, but then traffic would cripple the city, housing costs would rise due to the underground construction costs, and neighborhood retail would die out. Or, we can focus on improving shopping choices so that people don’t have to drive to Home Depot and Baileys Crossroads to fix up their houses.

I’m fortunate to be able to live in an area with two supermarkets, creperies and bakeries, and a hardware store. Not everyone is. We must give more people the choice of a walkable neighborhood with local retail if they desire it. They can decide that paying more for parking or having to park a bit farther from home, and a longer and less convenient drive to Home Depot is worth the tradeoff. Only good planning and transportation policies, however, can ensure more people of all income levels can make that choice.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.