NCPC has preliminary plans online for a new watefront park at The Yards, a new development next to the Navy Yard in Southeast. The park has many very nice features including a large terraced lawn, a landscaped garden, and a cool-looking pedestrian bridge (though one NCPC staff recommends be made to look more open, light and inviting). But the designers seem to have forgotten about bikers, runners, and rollerbladers entirely.

Unfortunately, as The WashCycle notices, the bicycle path is detoured around the park, through what look like very sharp-turning, narrow paths not designed for bicycles but rather just crammed into the very edges of the park (see pages 6 and 8). The doc says “this was deemed necessary to separate bicyclists from other park users” but gives no reason for it.

As with mixing any modes of use, like pedestrians and cars, there are differing opinions on how much to mix bikes and pedestrians. Aggressive bikers can intimidate walkers and many bikers who want to go fast to get exercise don’t want to be dodging people right and left. On the other hand, the park should be for everyone, and making one group stay to the edges while designing the entire space for another group isn’t fair.

It might be that separating bike facilities is the right choice (I’m skeptical), but the park designers don’t seem to have even considered bicycles at all, nor runners or rollerbladers. The pictures of people using the park contain people walking, sitting at tables, lying on the grass, and walking slowly, but nobody getting any exercise. If it’s necessary to separate the bikers and rollerbladers and runners, they could design a path that perhaps cuts through the edge of the park, with wide space and gentle curves, to get people from the path to the west of the park up to River and Water Streets and back again on the east. They could have shown how River and Water would be designed for various modes of transportation.

But the current document looks as though the designers simply came up with a plan for a park suited only for sitting, and then, since the space was all full with sitting uses, stuck all other uses on the thin path on the edge and called it a day. Park designers need to do better.

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.