DISREGARD THE RENT GRADIENT AT YOUR PERIL.

In the Federal Capital, the provision of bike lanes on arterial avenues becomes a racial flash point.  Marc Fisher, an associate editor with Washington's Post, argues those lanes are not about the bikes.

Despite its reputation as a liberal enclave, D.C. is not and will never be Amsterdam, Portland or one of those college towns where the streets teem with more bicycles than cars.

But sometimes, it’s not for a lack of trying.

The District’s planners are intent on putting many of the city’s most important streets on what’s called a “road diet,” which sounds healthy and nutritious but is actually a recipe for traffic constipation and commuter headaches — and maybe a stealth mechanism for encouraging a wholesale shift in race and class in certain neighborhoods.

The bike lane wars have been cycling through the city for about as long as the endless battles about gun ownership, weed legalization and abortion funding. And though they might seem a narrow concern, bike lanes have proved an enduring and powerful symbol of Washington’s central divide: Who is the city for? Is it forever Chocolate City, proud capital of Black America, or is it a fast-morphing magnet for hyper-educated young people — most of them White — who migrate to the city to populate think tanks, law firms, nonprofits, and government and its contractors? Can it be both?

On either side of Rock Creek Park, bike lane battles become seething debates about home prices, gentrification, school quality and crime rates. In affluent upper Northwest, residents and business owners have pummeled the city with protests against narrowing Connecticut Avenue to install bike lanes. For the moment, the people are winning.

Isn't it simpler to think of the Federal Capital as the Federal Capital?  And as long as that Capital becomes more involved in the generating and dissipating of rents, the migration of those "hyper-educated" people is going to continue, and with it, the bidding up of housing prices.  Whether that will lead to more motor vehicle ownership or not is a separate matter from whether or not the road diets will tame traffic.  You can pick your form of congestion: the stroad with lots of turn lanes and traffic light delays, or the shared road with bike lanes and rotaries.  But you will get congestion.

Across town, on South Dakota Avenue NE, the fight is ongoing, and, as The Post’s Rachel Weiner reported, this squabble reveals an essential truth about bike lanes as weapons of civic planning: They are often installed not to satisfy the barely measurable trickle of residents who pedal to work but mainly to make car traffic worse enough that people will be discouraged from driving.

A popular crosstown route, “South Dakota Avenue is a very dangerous roadway,” says VJ Kapur, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in the Langdon area of Northeast and a road diet advocate. “It’s very common for residents to have cars crash up onto their lawns. And any driver attempting to observe decorum and drive 25 mph is swerved around by reckless drivers.”

South Dakota features four through lanes, two in each direction. The city proposes to slim that down to three narrower lanes, one in each direction plus a turn lane where needed and room for a bike path.

“Just as the big, wide lanes we have now induce speeding and reckless driving” Kapur tells me, so too would bike lanes induce slower driving — and maybe more bike riding.

That "weapon of civic planning" is a common canard.  Does anyone ever complain that those traffic lights and left-turn-only cycles that hold everybody up are some conspiracy to discourage people from driving?  Has anyone considered that perhaps building a stroad through a residential or commercial area, then posting it at 25 mph, simply invites people to drive fast?  On the other hand, unless those bike lanes are protected from motor vehicles, Washington might experience what we understand as the "Milwaukee slide," people using those bike lanes to pass on the right and they sometimes wind up on lawns.  Change the visual cues, change the reckless driving.

The Federal Capital is older than Dallas or La Jolla or Los Angeles, all places famous, or notorious, for car culture, and yet each of those cities has made arterial streets safer.  You have to do the design work first.  It's about the road design, though.

In Milwaukee, that "slide" sometimes has a racial connotation to it, and that might be creeping into the Washington conversation.

Rodney Foxworth, a longtime civic activist who now leads an anti-bike lane group, says the city “has a bias in favor of bike lanes no matter whether residents or businesses want them, and a lot of these lanes are being installed in Black, low-income communities. There is a nexus between bike lanes and gentrification.”

Many of Milwaukee's traffic taming measures are being built in such communities as well, often at the urging of local adults worried about their children or their aging parents.  But bike lanes accompanying gentrification?  No.  Gentrification in the Federal Capital is part of the rent-seeking that goes on in the swamp.