Photo by debaird.

I spoke too soon about the Washington Post moving away from “war on drivers”-style reporting. Today, Lisa Rein and Yamiche Alcindor mar the Metro section with a biased article about Arlington’s performance parking proposals that not only inflames suburban-

urban divides but gets the policy issues completely wrong as well.

Like Amy Gardner and Sandhya Somashekhar’s stereotype-ridden “racquet clubs are paradise, living near stores is blight” story in July, Rein and Alcindor start out with clear assumptions about what kind of living is good and what’s bad, and aren’t ashamed to show their bias on their sleeves:

It’s a renter’s dream: a swimming pool, a washer-dryer right in the apartment and a 24-hour Giant across the street. And at the foot of Wildwood Towers, a high-rise building off Columbia Pike in Arlington County, a glorious, free parking space.

Now the Post claims to know your dreams? I think a lot of people think a renter’s dream is to live within walking distance of work, or right near a Metro station (or both). Not to knock Wildwood Towers, but it’s in a fairly car-dependent area with a lot of big box buildings and huge parking lots. Most of the stores around Bailey’s Crossroads aren’t walkable from there. If that’s your dream, great, more power to you, but it’s far from the typical renter’s dream.

Rein, Alcindor, and their editors seem to think nothing of pushing a clear bias right from the start. You wouldn’t see that in other policy areas. The Post did not start today’s front-page story on Deeds with “It’s a voter’s dream: A conservative candidate leading in the polls despite President Obama’s support for the other guy.” That might be a Republican voter’s dream, but the Post would never dream of asserting it’s everyone’s dream.

Rein and Alcindor go on to exhibit a primary sign of windshield perspective: assuming that “you” are a driver. They write, “When you do park, you’ll pay what the market will bear.” Too many articles introduce an issue with language like, “Your commute may get longer with the construction on I-95.” That’s totally true, if you are a driver. But not every reader of the Washington Post is an auto commuter. A large percentage of people in our region commute in other ways. Assuming that “you” only drive is like assuming every Virginian voter is a Republican.

Besides looking at this issue through a very thick windshield, Rein and Alcindor then go on to get the policy issues entirely wrong. Start with the “dream” parking space at Wildwood Towers. They write, “The amenity that makes residents swoon is likely to disappear soon, though — along with thousands of parking spaces in office buildings and shopping districts across the county.” But this is completely false. Under Arlington’s plan, no buildings will have to give up their parking spaces. No existing private lots will suddenly go up in price. Large, private lots surround Wildwood, and Arlington’s proposal would not touch that. It’s as if Rein wrote that under Obama’s health care plan, government squads would come to your door and infect you with H1N1. It’s not just wrong, it’s comically wrong.

Fact-free, inflammatory assertions thickly fill the first few paragraphs:

The goal of today’s planners and politicians is maximum inconvenience for drivers. The District is pulling up parking lots and putting in expensive meters to get drivers out of their cars and onto a train, bus, bike or their feet. Montgomery and Fairfax counties are thinking along similar lines, considering changes to codes to reduce the number of parking spaces builders have to include.

The only correct sentence is the last one. Montgomery and Fairfax are indeed considering reducing requirements. But reducing requirements isn’t the same as banning parking or “pulling up parking lots” to create “maximum inconvenience for drivers.” Reducing parking minimums only avoids debacles like the DC USA garage, which Paul Schwartzman just covered earlier this month in the same pages. Rein, on the other hand, uses scare quotes around words like “underparked” (where she really means “overparked”) as if developments with unnecessary, expensive parking were just some planner fiction instead of a reality of many developments in jurisdictions with inappropriate minimums.

The insanity goes on and on. When introducing performance parking (scare quoted, of course), Rein and Alcindor write, “If it cost $100 a day to park in Friendship Heights (a hypothetical price), drivers might reconsider.” If it cost $100 a day to read the Washington Post, people might not do it, either. So? Nobody has ever proposed prices anywhere near $100 a day for any parking. Even market rate garages in downtown DC cost about $15 a day.

“Market rate” doesn’t necessarily mean “really freakishly high rate.” Most of the time, it doesn’t mean that at all. But Rein and Alcindor seem to react to the concept of a “market rate” and assume that it means major pain. In fact, a market rate at many locations is lower than the current rate. We’ve written about many examples in the past.

Market rate pricing also increases driver convenience, rather than creating “maximum inconvenience.” If it’s too hard to find a space, a driver won’t go somewhere. The 85% occupancy target of performance parking isn’t an attempt to force people out of cars, but to provide a real choice between actually finding a space (for a fair price) and transit, rather than no choice because there are no spaces.

Arlington is going to base their policy on actual data. They’ll measure real parking usage and set policies appropriately. Rein and Alcindor, on the other hand, simply go off the deep end because someone said the word “market” or “reducing” in the same sentence as parking, and because the narrative about governments waging war on “you” drivers is good for a rise if completely ridiculous. The Post Metro section should hold its reporting to a higher standard.