Today for his occasional “Why Not” series, GM turns to the ugliness that is M St. on a summer weekend. So he asks: Why not shut down M St.?

It’s an idea GM thinks about every time he sees gridlock on M St. There is a concept called a traffic tipping point. At the center of this concept is the observation that once the numbers of travelers passes a certain threshold, the entire system seizes up. Thus, a very small increase in the number of cars on an already crowded road can result in huge delays due to congestion. (The opposite has also been observed: a small reduction in vehicles on a gridlocked road can result in significant reductions in delays).

Once it’s warm, on every Saturday by about 2:00 PM, a traffic tipping point is passed on M St. Traffic comes to a standstill. It can take 20 minutes, if not longer, to get from one end of Georgetown to the other.

There has got to be a better way.

What GM proposes is to close M St. to all non-bus traffic from noon to 8:00 PM on weekends during June through August. Wisconsin Ave. would remain open, however all traffic would be directed straight down to K St. (and out to either Rock Creek Parkway or downtown).

Drivers would still be able to come in to Georgetown from P St., Q St., Reservoir Rd., and Wisconsin Ave. Drivers coming from Virginia would be directed to either Foxhall or the Whitehurst. From Foxhall they would circle around and come in from Reservoir. Those who head down the Whitehurst could come through the West End up to P or Q St.

Cars coming down Pennsylvania Ave. or M St. from the east could be routed down 29th St. to K St. Ideally they’d go straight into one of the many garages on K St.

Would that be a pain? Absolutely. But it probably wouldn’t be worse than the current situation. And the best part is that we could then reclaim four lanes of M St. for pedestrian use (two lanes would be used for buses, which would be a great thing in and of itself). We could host a Feet in the Street like DDOT is proposing for K St. Georgetown shopkeepers and other vendors could set up tables and tents all along the street and we’d still have a ton more sidewalk space than we have now.

GM firmly believes that by shutting down M St. we wouldn’t be cutting off our nose to spite our face. We’d have bigger crowds, they’d just come different ways. And by keeping Wisconsin Ave. open, residents wouldn’t be trapped (and GM also believes that by removing all turns at M and Wisconsin, there won’t be nearly as much of congestion on Wisconsin as we have now).

It’s a plan that would have to be thought out a lot more than GM has (for instance, do we close off 34th St.’s access to the Key Bridge?) and it would take a huge amount of courage to implement, but the situation we have now is unacceptable and hurts both residents and visitors.

Previously:

• Why Not: Secede From Washington?
• Why Not: Build More Bike Lanes?
• Why Not: Bring Performance Parking to Georgetown?
• Why Not: Allow Some Streets to Return to Cobblestone?
• Why Not: Bring Back Those Old Street Names?

The basic idea behind performance parking is that if you raise the cost of meter parking high enough, people who plan on parking for a long period will simply use a pay garage instead of searching for a cheap spot on the street.

The first thing to establish is that there is not a shortage of parking in the heart of Georgetown. Not by a long shot. It’s just mostly located in pay garages. Look at how many pay garages there are in around M and Wisconsin:

That map may even be leaving out one or two that GM missed. And with the possible exception of the small outdoor lots, these garages are almost never full. And why should they be? As long as it only takes 5-10 minutes driving around our residential back streets to eventually find a free parking spot, why would somebody choose to fork over money for parking?

And that’s the central thrust of performance parking (a philosophy put forward most effectively by Donald Shoup in his book the “High Cost of Free Parking“). So long as the city is giving away free or virtually free on-street parking, people will: A: keep driving around in circles looking for the free spot, and B: leave their car in the free spot for as long as possible. Doesn’t that sound a lot like Georgetown on a Saturday?

So why not install parking meters throughout the neighborhood (in particular, multi-space meters like the ones we already have on M St.) and make people pay a lot more to sit their car in front of our houses for hours at an end? Residents would be exempt from the meters, plus they would be given guest passes so that their visitors (including nannies and nurses) could stay longer without having to pay. We could even make some streets resident parking-only. (If you don’t even like the idea of multi-space meters outside your house, DDOT Director Gabe Klein recently spoke about a “pay by cell-phone” idea that would only require the installation of signs).

It’s already being done in other parts of the city with success. The first place to try it was neighborhood around Nationals Park. Check out this map:

Image Courtesty of JDLand.com

Each colored street has different rules. For instance, on the purple streets they allow only residents to park on one side of the street and limit the other side to two hour parking (residents exempt). The green streets prohibit all parking during game-time. The red streets have variable rates: ordinarily it’s $1 for the first hour and $1.50 for the next two (three hour limit) but on gameday it’s $2 for the first hour and $8 bucks for the next three. In other words, you can park there, but it’s not much cheaper than using the stadium’s garages. Each household is given one guest pass that acts as a resident pass. (There haven’t been many reports of abuse of the visitor pass. Although maybe that’s because the Nats are just so bad.)

It’s awfully complicated around Nationals Park because of the huge differences between days with or without events at the park. Georgetown’s system could be a lot simpler. How’s this?:

Here’s what the colors mean:

• Red: Variable meters, residents exempt (except for Wisconsin and M). Weekdays: $1 first hour, $2 second hour. Weekends: $2 first hour, $5 second hour. Max 2 hours for non-residents at all times. Those rates are still well below the garage rates, but it should discourage a good number of parking trollers.
• Blue: One side of the street: residents only. Other side of the street 2 hour maximum parking for non-residents. If the street only has parking on one side then those will be resident parking only (maybe this should be only the case for weekends?)
• Green: 2 hour limit, residents exempt (i.e. what it is now. These areas don’t have as severe of a parking problem as the other areas. Obviously if these got a lot worse with the new parking regulations, they could be re-evaluated.)

This is just a brainstorming map. It may not make perfect sense. It’s just an example of what we could do if we applied the performance parking concept to Georgetown.

As long as we give away free parking on our residential streets, people will endlessly drive around our blocks looking for it. This causes traffic and pollution and is dangerous since the drivers are often concentrating more on finding parking rather than looking out for pedestrians.

This is an idea that’s working in other parts of our city, but there may not be a neighborhood better suited for and more in need of performance parking than Georgetown.

Last week we asked why not switch back to the old Georgetown street names; this week GM stays on the nostalgic side of our streets and asks: Why not allow some of the smaller and quieter streets in Georgetown to replace their asphalt streets with cobblestone or brick? There are many benefits to cobblestone or brick streets beyond aesthetics. Find out after the jump:

Asphalt roads first appeared in Washington in 1877 with the paving of Pennsylvania Ave. Thus the initial wave of paving was not performed for the benefit of automobiles but rather the horse and buggies that still dominated the city’s roads. 

Theodore Roosevelt riding down Pennsylvania Ave. to his second inaugural. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Eventually, it was for cars that the roads were ever improved. But the thing about roads is that when you engineer them for speed, that’s exactly what you get. But it doesn’t have to be that way for every street. Some streets should be driven very slowly on. Georgetown has several quiet roads that would fit that bill.

One of those quiet little roads is the diminuitive Poplar St. It is only about 100 feet long and is a dead end. There is no rush to drive down that street because there’s nowhere to rush to. In fact the recently formed Poplar St. Neighborhood Association had much the same thought. As the Current reported last summer, the residents of Poplar St. wanted to take advantage of a routine road rehabilitation to bury the bird’s nest of overhead wires beneath a brick paved street. Well, as a trip down that quiet lane now demonstrates, DDOT wasn’t interested in the neighborhood association’s wishes. The ashphalt and wires remain.

Why not allow the citizens of Poplar St. to trade a smooth ride for beauty and a little speed reduction? Other streets that could benefit from this move include:

• Cambridge St.
• Dent Pl.
• Avon Pl.
• Scott Pl.
• Sutter La.
• Jones Ct.
• Pomander Walk
• Cecil Pl.

Some of these are just alleyways (some may already have brick pavers), but the point remains, why not allow the residents to remove the asphalt? It slows cars down, it’s more in keeping with our historical neighborhood, and it requires less maintenance than asphalt.

The Georgetown Metropolitan is proud to present the first in an ongoing series of thought pieces titled “Why Not”, wherein we explore different ideas for our neighborhood that are not typically discussed. The first installment relates to the street names. As described ad naseum last week, most of the streets in Georgetown used to have different names. They were changed in 1880 to be consistent with the rest of the District’s street grid. In the interests of celebrating Georgetown’s past as an independent city, should we consider changing them back?

Of course not, but there’s another option for recognizing the past that comes from the Crescent City. Find out after the jump:

Just about every street in Georgetown used to be called something else. You can see from this map below all the old names:

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Changing the names back to the old names would be silly and confusing (and probably expensive). But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something to highlight the 120 years Georgetown spent as an independent municipality.

Down in the French Quarter in New Orleans, there are a series of signs on the walls announcing what that street was called when the city was under Spanish control. Here’s an example:

It’s impractical to ask people to install similar signs on their houses here in Georgetown, but could we install alternative street signs below the official names? In the Capitol Hill Historic District they have emblem signs on the sign posts; Georgetown really has nothing like that. First of all: we ought to do something like that. Moreover, in whatever we do we ought to consider putting in an acknowledgement of what the old street name was since it’s an expression of Georgetown’s independent past.

P.S.: Was R St. really called “Road Street”? Did they get up that high and just run out of ideas? That’s one of the few cases where a plain letter’s probably better…