Photo by World of Oddy.

Shortly after the parking minimums debate, anti groups started echoing a common theme: The DC government is trying to get rid of cars. At many individual meetings, from Historic Dupont Circle Main Streets to the ANC 2F task force on the ARTS Overlay, some residents have made statements like, “DDOT’s declared policy is to get rid of cars,” as though this were simply established fact.

That’s baloney. Designing public policy to shift our transportation mix slightly away from driving and slightly toward transit use, walking and bicycling isn’t a plot to ban cars. When airlines announce that they plan to cut capacity by 10%, people don’t roundly declare it a secret plot to eliminate planes entirely. DC also reduced the loan guarantee assistance it provides to help lower income buyers get mortgages, but nobody wrote that this is a “war on homebuying.”

Why does much of the rehetoric imply that either everyone must drive, or nobody? In a Capitol Hill email list discussion of David C’s Safeway post, one resident argued that we need a lot of parking, saying, “It is naive to think that shopping at Eastern Market by using Metro or our feet, while holding down full-time jobs and raising families should be the norm. I happen to live on a subway line and it is still inconvenient.”

And I know many people who do shop at Eastern Market by using Metro or their feet (or their bicycle). I also know people who drive. The beauty of a multi-modal transportation system is that not everyone has to use the same mode. There needn’t be only one “norm.” Maybe this particular resident does need to drive. She should be free to. But many people very easily fall into the trap of thinking that because a life choice wouldn’t work for them, it must be bad. If we followed that thinking, then we’d have outlawed computers years ago, since large segments of the population still find them very confusing.

Similar thinking pollutes CakeLove founder Warren Brown’s thinking about parking. He responded to our criticism yesterday, saying that Metro doesn’t really work because to get from U Street to National Harbor, he would have to take a lengthy trip by train and bus. Of course, as we know, National Harbor is especially transit-inaccessible. Warren might be the only person in the region who regularly goes between U Street and National Harbor. I have no objection to him driving when he does.

Warren also writes that “driving is a fact of life.” Eating salty foods is a fact of life, too, but no government agency hands out free pretzels, and when health advocates suggest we try to cut back on sodium, nobody claims they’re trying to stamp out salt from the earth. For some reason, an argument keeps surfacing that because driving is part of life, the government ought to spend billions of dollars to remove whole buildings and replace them with empty spaces for them to put their vehicles. Moreover, nobody should have to pay to use that space. And if the government refuses to build those garages, or expects to recoup its costs by charging a market rate, it must be evidence of a secret plot to wipe out all cars and force everyone to ride a bicycle.

Update: I removed a mention of Tom’s comment, as he clarified that he didn’t mean it in the way I interpreted it.