Officials Plan to Tighten Parking Rules, Boost Enforcement to Reassure Neighbors
By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 6, 2008
On any given afternoon, navigating Columbia Heights in a car can be a teeth-gnashing challenge, with residents and visitors coming and going and construction workers and their trucks clogging traffic lanes.
And that was before the Target-anchored shopping center opened yesterday, smack in the middle of it all.
How much will DC USA, as the 500,000-square-foot mall is known, add to the neighborhood's traffic?
It depends on the time of day, D.C. officials say. Traffic volume along 14th Street NW is expected to increase by 8 percent in the morning, according to the D.C. Department of Transportation.
And during the evening rush? Try a 30 percent increase.
And that does not include the motorists who swing by to sample the neighborhood's bevy of new restaurants.
Columbia Heights residents are bracing for their neighborhood to turn into something akin to a gridlocked parking lot.
"Fourteenth Street is off the hook!" Annie McCutchen, a retired cashier, railed at a recent community meeting. "We don't have a place to park, and it's only going to get worse."
Not to worry, say D.C. officials, who were fine-tuning a counteroffensive even as the shopping center was opening. Their plan includes more meters, stricter residential parking regulations and additional enforcement officers.
The traffic generated by the mall is only part of a challenge that transportation officials face because of the development unfolding along the neighborhood's narrow streets.
In addition to DC USA and more than three dozen businesses that have recently opened or signed leases, about 2,000 residential units have been built in Columbia Heights in the past five years, officials say.
All of which means that traveling by car to DC USA may be less than ideal, despite the mall's 1,200-car underground garage.
"It's our most urban neighborhood," said Karina Ricks, associate director of policy and planning in the Department of Transportation. "It's going to be a lot of human beings on the street. There will be lots of cars and traffic. There will be bicyclists. If you approach it as an urban place, I don't see it being a nightmare. If you go in hoping for a free flow, like it's Jefferson Davis Highway, it will be a nightmare."
Ricks characterized as a "worst-case scenario" the estimate that DC USA would create 30 percent more traffic during the evening rush hour. "People who do it once will figure out it's better to go at a different time of day, or on the weekend, or to take mass transit," she said.
D.C. officials said they hope people use the Green and Yellow Metro lines to travel to Columbia Heights, which has a station four stops north of downtown.
But they know that many shoppers will travel by car, particularly if they're buying a large item or shopping in bulk. The challenge, officials said, is to keep traffic moving and to prevent motorists from commandeering the neighborhood's parking spaces.
Toward that end, the department is dispatching whistle-bearing traffic officers to the two intersections that border DC USA, during rush hours on weekdays and all day on weekends.
The agency is installing more parking meters along 14th Street, and it plans to charge $2 an hour to encourage motorists to use the shopping center's garage, which costs $1 an hour for the first four hours.
Officials also plan to restrict parking by nonresidents on some streets.
"This is our starting point. Let's see how it goes," Ricks said. "We didn't want to be too radical and annoy too many people. Let's start with this and regularly evaluate it."
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