Dear Neighbors,
I’ve heard a lot of things over the past 90 minutes. Let me start by saying that I don’t appreciate the personal attacks. For some reason, you’ve chosen to make me the villain of the story you are telling about the traffic issue.
The only reason I’m presenting the data here is because I am a professional data nerd. We did the car count study over three weeks in March and April 2017. I stand behind those numbers.
Regardless of your ancedotal, COVID-lockdown observations from the past year, nearly 2,600 cars used the alleys to travel southbound during a defined “morning rush” period over the course of 15 days that year, and 2,200 of those used the alley in my block.
We did this study because our ANC rep at the time who is on this call can most charitably be described as uninterested in anything except her on point of view on issues that personally affected her. We knew that without data, DDOT would never pay attention to our concerns.
What I’ve heard in this meeting is your concerns – about damage to your vehicles, about safety, and about parking access are legitimate and that our concerns – about damage to our vehicles and our homes, about threats of physical violence and at least one person hit by a car, which are directly caused by the fact that traffic is using alleys that were not designed for that traffic are “selfish.”
It is human nature to prioritize your own concerns. To devalue others’ concerns as selfish when they are, in reality, the same concerns you have, is beyond selfish. It’s hypocritical.
To the person who commented that she bought her house because the street is one way: I understand. I bought a house on a dead-end street. I now live one door away from a busy corner. I was not given a choice in the matter.
To the person who commented that only the addresses in these two blocks are affected by this traffic flow: I will tell you that is bullshit. Every home on every side street in the adjacent two blocks and our neighbors in the block to our south on the street in question are affected by this. Please, ask your neighbors on our most narrow block about their vehicle damage sometime.
We have a traffic problem in this neighborhood, a traffic problem directly caused by the actions of one conniving old man who, ironically, had off-street parking behind his house.
If you are so concerned about the volume of traffic and the speed at which cars travel through our neighborhood, what have you actually done about it?
My guess is nothing. My guess is that you have sat comfortably in your homes and said to yourselves: Someone else will take care of this.
Someone else attempted to take care of it but since you don’t like the solution – putting cars back on the street where they by objective fact of civil engineering actually belong – you have chosen a villain.
Consider this: We asked for this study in May 2017. DDOT finally executed it via pressure from our current ANC member in January 2020. It took them until February of 2021 to release a recommendation.
Do you honestly believe this is because DDOT had a multi-year backlog on analyzing 48 hours’ worth of speed counter data?
Whether you like it or not, something is coming. And if that something requires that this street accept two-way traffic, there is fuck all you can do about it.
I look forward to watching this play out over the next few years. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
I started 2021 with six habit tracker programs installed on my phone. Not from any obsessiveness, because I discovered something interesting about myself last year: I’m one of those people who is motivated by continuity.
