Bowser admin backs away from modeshift in Sustainable DC report

A busy crosswalk in downtown DC by Joe Flood, Flickr

Last updated on January 23rd, 2025 at 12:11 pm

Sustainable DC 2.0, the District’s environmental plan, includes explicit goals to not only increase trips on foot, by bike and transit, but to reduce the trips taken by car. The latter is the more important of the two. So we find it concerning that a progress report on Sustainable DC released by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration in an August-Friday-afternoon news dump acts as if that critical target—reducing commuter trips by car from 42.7% to 25% by 2032—no longer exists.

To be fair, the progress report shortchanges every topic’s goals and targets. For example, its update on health shows advancement on that topic’s target to reduce racial disparities in life expectancy by 50% by 2032, though that’s only one of four health-related targets in Sustainable DC 2.0.

But, for our part, it’s hard not to see zero update on the District’s stated commitment to reducing trips by car as a signifier of Bowser’s overall loss of interest in doing so. If the administration is making progress on such a target, the progress report would be the place to communicate it.

We’ve emailed the District Department of Energy and Environment to ask why the goal of reducing commute trips was not granted space in the progress report, and will update this post if and when we hear back.

Why Sustainable DC matters

Sustainable DC 2.0 takes its marching orders from goals, targets, and baselines for 13 topics (governance, equity, built environment, climate, economy, education, energy, food, health, nature, transportation, waste, and water) to make DC the “healthiest, greenest, most livable city in the United States by 2032.” Per DOEE, where Sustainable DC 2.0 lives, “each topic is organized into distinct goals, targets, and actions. Goals are big picture, overarching ambitions. Each goal has four or five quantitative targets. Actions explain how the District will reach each of the targets.” It’s a pretty great government document, and we refer to the transportation section all the time in our work at GGWash.

As “2.0” implies, this version is a 2019 update of the original Sustainable DC (1.0) plan, which was released in 2013. Currently, DOEE and the Office of Planning are working on Sustainable DC 3.0, which will ostensibly include updated targets “in order to be more easily measured.”

Modeshift has always been part of Sustainable DC, which came to life under Bowser’s predecessor, former mayor Vincent Gray. The initial 2013 plan contained four transportation goals and targets, plus subsequent actions the District government would take to reach them (starting on page 82 here). Those goals and targets were:

The 2019 update altered the language of third and fourth goals in the transportation section, maintained the first two targets, added extremely useful baselines to the targets, and changed the fourth target to:

Goal 4 is an obvious, necessary inclusion in a city’s sustainability plan. The transportation sector produced 21% of greenhouse gas emissions in DC in 2016, and that has remained steady as of 2021. Sustainable DC 2.0’s framing, which includes improving equitable access to transportation options for all residents, captures an important aspect of modeshift. Getting people to travel in ways that are not driving is important for the thousands of residents exposed to air pollution and dangerous heat from cars and the infrastructure that supports their use. And it’s important for the nearly 36% of Washingtonians who don’t drive because of age, preference, income, or disability to have transportation options to be able to get to their destinations.

But Goal 3, and in particular Target 3, is core to GGWash’s work and worldview—more so than goals 1 and 2. Lots of biking and walking, and frequent and reliable public transportation, will not happen just because the District builds more bike lanes or runs more transit service; it is contingent on reducing trips by car. District residents and visitors, especially ones who are capable of riding a bike or taking transit but do not because they perceive it as inconvenient or unappealing, really do need to drive less. It has been worth celebrating that the District government, through Sustainable DCs 1.0 and 2.0, has acknowledged and affirmed this reality.

Fulfilling, then faltering, now forgetting

We’ve watched—and effusively clapped for—the Bowser administration’s significant progress on policies that supplement the reality of fewer trips by car in the District: the bus-priority program, bike network plans, and Capital Bikeshare expansion. All are proven ways of strengthening non-car modes of travel so that more people will use them.

Because: We are happy to support modeshare—achieved by building more bike and bus lanes—as a means to achieve modeshift. Modeshare is the portion of total trips taken by different modes. Modeshift is contingent on making it harder and less attractive to drive, whether that’s by taking away driving and parking lanes or charging people to drive and park.

Projects in the District that would have instigated modeshift—which we use to mean changing one mode of transportation, like driving, to another, like taking the bus, Metrorail, or walking or biking—have, in the past few years, disintegrated in depressing and notable fashion. The once-impressive K Street NW Transitway, subject to last-second faffing-around, was rightfully axed by the DC Council in 2023 for being rubbish, largely because it was a glorified highway widening in its final form. Once the Executive Office of the Mayor was harassed enough by opponents, the Connecticut Avenue NW bike lanes were unceremoniously deleted from DDOT’s docket, a Bowser backpedal on a long-planned, extensively vetted project.

Ever-present for us is the administration’s memory-holing of road pricing. Sustainable DC, since its outset, has included actions to achieve its stated goals. The five actions to achieve goal 3, our beloved modeshift goal, are mostly inconsequential (carpooling, AV stuff, business incentives), with the exception of “complete a study to understand the best strategies for reducing congestion for all without unfairly burdening residents with low incomes.” That study exists. It’s done. The Bowser administration has laboriously suppressed its publication since its completion in 2021. (Though the council required its release in the FY24 Budget Support Act, on page 71, the mayor and DDOT have continued to keep the report from the public. The council, too, has basically given up on ensuring the mayor follows the law, and included nothing about road pricing in its FY25 budget.)

The mayor’s ostensible unwillingness to get people to drive less here bodes ill for safety as much as it does for the climate and climate-related health conditions. The District has failed to meet its goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2024, with deaths alone doubling since the Vision Zero promise was made. Public health has a basic tenet, primary prevention—actively reducing exposure to the thing that’s harming people. Fewer trips by car is one of the core ways to reduce traffic injuries and death, which affect less affluent residents of color more than anyone else.

It is genuinely notable that DOEE released a progress report at all; there wasn’t one for the original 2013 Sustainable DC. Maybe we’re just paranoid. But, knowing that an update to the generally quite useful plan is underway, we’re understandably wary of what the omission of efforts to reduce trips by car at this point in time might portend for it. There’s no evidence that Bowser isn’t squiggling out of her commitment to modeshift by directing relevant agencies to tout only progress on less-controversial modeshare, and it’s getting harder for us to trust that she’ll stick to her administration’s own plans.