DC closes streets pretty often. Let’s try doing so in a way that enhances our transportation system.

Mexico City's Paseo De La Reforma during the Mexican capital's weekly open streets event. (Photo by me)

Washington, DC’s H Street Corridor has developed into one of the city’s premier destinations for food and nightlife, and is one of my favorite places to hang out. But one Saturday each year, I stay as far away from the neighborhood as I can. The reason: the annual H Street Festival.

During the festival, the road closes to traffic for the day, allowing over 150,000 people to check out temporary on-street vendors by foot. I’m sure the event can be fun, but dealing with the transportation disruption it creates – for all modes – seems a major hassle. This year, the festival was initially scheduled for a September weekend during which I was in California – a safe distance away from the mess – but due to a hurricane threat (that didn’t materialize) the chaos was rescheduled for two weeks ago, when unfortunately I was stuck here in town.

The H Street Festival in Washington, DC. Notice the bus stuck in traffic on the bridge in the distance. (Photo courtesy of PoPville)

On October 13, DC Streetcar service was cancelled entirely for the day, four of DC’s most heavily used bus routes were detoured, and side streets normally pleasant to bike on became clogged with car traffic diverted off H Street – all on a day when transit ridership in the neighborhood was sure to be far higher than normal.

A row of Mobike bicycles in Bosque de Chapultepec during the weekly open streets event. The dockless bikeshare company left DC last summer, but is still operating in Mexico City. (Photo by me)

The weekend after the H Street Festival, I took a break from the U.S.’s federal district, missing out on every-22-minute Red Line service without congressional representation to pay a visit the Mexican capital, which recently gained state-level autonomy.

In Mexico City, I encountered a type of street closure that had a transportation impact much different than that of the H Street Festival: the weekly Sunday ciclovía. For the open streets event – a common feature of Latin American cities – a network of wide arterial roadways are closed to motorized vehicles and dedicated entirely to active transportation modes, allowing cyclists, joggers, and walkers to take over the pavement.

So when I woke up last Sunday and saw bikes streaming down the boulevard outside my hotel room, I rushed downstairs, got a day-pass for the city’s EcoBici bikeshare system, and started pedaling. I soon found myself headed westbound down Paseo de la Reforma, surrounded by the megacity’s skyscrapers and monuments, but no cars. At some major intersections, traffic directors occasionally asked us to come to a brief stop so Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes – and, yes, some automobile traffic too – could continue moving.

The Reforma ciclovía route took me through an expansive park – Bosque de Chapultepec – before coming to an end near the National Auditorium. I saw plenty of other streets temporarily devoted to moving people as I explored nearby neighborhoods, such as La Condesa, through the morning and early afternoon.

Ciclovía was a real-life display of the basic geometric realities that, as Jarrett Walker explains so well, make multimodal transportation so essential. A couple of days earlier, looking down from my plane during our approach into Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport, I’d seen the city’s roads jammed with inching cars – if typical traffic congestion represents the freedom of the automobile, this was a full-on constitutional convention. 

When people were on bikes or their own two feet instead of in cars, at least as many traversed the streets. But instead of staring at taillights and honking their horns, they glided along comfortably. 

A Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) station in Mexico City. (Photo by me)

Mexico City’s transit system wasn’t completely untouched by ciclovía  – I felt a bit guilty whenever I entered the lane of Paseo de la Reforma normally dedicated to Line 7 of the city’s Metrobús BRT system, which endured a service change to allow for the event. But I also couldn’t help but notice that trains and buses I rode while ciclovía was underway were less crowded than at other times during the weekend, making rides a bit more comfortable. I didn’t conduct a scientific study to determine the cause for this, but it’s certainly possible that the open streets, in giving people more options to get around, took a little pressure off the city’s normally-packed transit routes.

A Mexico City bike lane. (Photo by me)

In addition to the positive effect ciclovía had on mobility for everyone, it made me more comfortable with general cycling in Mexico City. Due to the road congestion and aggressive driving I’d seen, I’d initially gotten the impression CDMX was a place where it’s best to stick to trains and dedicated-lane buses. But after my enjoyable morning ride, I started viewing the city’s transportation infrastructure in a different light, and began noticing quite a few wide bike lanes, even on streets that seemed hostile at first glance.

As a result, by evening, I felt comfortable putting my EcoBici day pass to further use and taking another ride up Reforma, even though it was now reopened to automobile traffic.

DC's Constitution Ave closed to traffic for the March For Our Lives rally earlier this year. (Photo courtesy of The Boston Globe)

U.S. municipalities occasionally permit open streets events, but they are rare, special occasions. I fear that if anyone were to propose a weekly ciclovía-style event in DC or another large American city, auto and oil-funded organizations, local news outlets, and much of the public would focus primarily on potential inconvenience for drivers, perhaps even framing the proposal as the latest campaign of the propaganda-manufactured “War on Cars.”

But we do close streets, quite frequently, for events like the H Street Festival that do little to enhance regional mobility. Here in DC, marches and rallies that take over roadways are a basic part of daily life, especially since early 2017. And tomorrow, we’ll experience our latest edition of street closures and bus detours that make way for a single, very specific type of active transportation trip – a 26.2-mile run. (Congratulations to my cousin for setting a personal best last weekend in one of those bus-disrupting runs, while I was lazily enjoying ciclovía!)

Drivers survive those street closures somehow. They even attend and enjoy the events that necessitate them.

So, why not give a weekly ciclovía a shot here, allowing people to traverse, explore, and experience our city in a whole new way?