Ignorance Really Can Be Bliss
I was recently struck by a rather profound realization about just how irrelevant driving is to my circle of car-free friends in the nation’s capital. Taking advantage of the change in seasons, several of us piled into a ZipCar last weekend to visit one of the many apple-picking farms just outside the city. I was the navigator, so I told the driver (an 8-year resident of DC, mind you) to take the GW Parkway until we hit the beltway. Her response was, “Wait, which one is the beltway? 495 or 295?”
And she wasn’t kidding.
To me, anecdotes like that one fly in the face of some assumptions that, by choosing to live in Washington, DC, I’ve automatically signed up for a life of gridlock. Not so. I sold my car a month after arriving from Ohio four years ago and haven’t regretted it for a day. In fact, it was far more complicating to have a car in my life than not. That is something the long-upheld model cities of walkability in Europe (Vienna, Copenhagen, Gothenburg) have figured out: creating extraordinary, pedestrian-friendly places requires conscious planning efforts to accommodate fewer cars.
In other words, making life difficult for cars makes life easier for people. At least I think so.
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