Protect Our Parking (and Our Park)

Mr. Mayor, please make it so I can come home with my 6-year-old and our groceries and not have to walk around the block because of all the commuter cars parked on my street.

Here's the deal: When the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) was planning the Red Line in the 1970s, my Takoma neighborhood was the end of the line pending completion of the Silver Spring station. WMATA wanted to provide enough parking to accommodate commuters from the District and Montgomery County.

Unfortunately, our Maryland neighbors in Takoma Park -- who often act as though they've annexed the District's portion of B.F. Gilbert's boundary-straddling 1883 development -- protested. They didn't want all that traffic in their neighborhood. WMATA backed down.

The result illustrates the truth of the dictum that solutions to problems wind up creating other problems. WMATA built fewer parking spaces than originally planned. Now commuters use side streets as extensions of the Metro parking lot.

Some have Maryland or Virginia license plates, but most belong to District residents who've figured out a loophole in the city's residential parking permit program -- another example of solutions creating problems. Because they live in Zone Four, albeit miles from the Metro station, it's legal for them to park all day anywhere in the zone.

I know this doesn't rank with crime or failing schools. But unlike crime or schools, it has an easy fix: Get the Department of Public Works to create sub-zones to discourage people from parking on the street near our Metro station, the way it did near RFK Stadium to keep the streets clear on game days. You'd have to get DPW's parking enforcement officers to write more tickets. And it wouldn't hurt to put in speed bumps to get the folks passing through our neighborhood to slow down.

And -- while we're at it -- once you've forced out those bozos from Shepherd Park and the 'burbs who use the spaces in front of our houses and block our driveways, how about getting rid of the drunkards and drug users in the little vest-pocket park at Fourth and Blair? I know that the women (and some of the men) walking home from the train after work would feel a lot safer. And maybe some of us would start using the park.

-- David Nicholson, former president of Plan Takoma (now the Takoma D.C. Neighborhood Association)