Washington D.C. has its own slice of the Netherlands; and not only in the embassy!

Despite facing challenges to overcome a car-oriented mindset, Washington DC is leveraging its international environment to make smarter cycling infrastructure. Through a longstanding commitment to building a bicycle network and numerous workshops with the DCE they have been able to implement bike-friendly traffic circles and a network of protected bike lanes. Further they have made cycling a solution for people that need it most through an affordable bike share program.

We spoke with Will Handsfield, Bicycle Program Specialist at DDOT, to learn about how they are approaching this transformation into a more bike-friendly city and how Dutch cycling knowledge has helped inform their decisions.

This year, the Dutch Cycling Embassy (DCE) celebrates its 12.5-year anniversary. To document and celebrate the global impact the DCE and our network has had over that period, we are highlighting multiple projects. This article is part of the series #DCELegacy.

What project comes to mind when thinking about the workshops?

I think more than one project. The network of bike facilities in Foggy Bottom I would attribute to the 2016 workshop in a couple of ways. It [Foggy Bottom] is a federal office zone where there is very little residential housing but a huge number of federal office buildings, some of which have secure perimiters. For one reason or another, we had essentially zero bike facilities in Foggy Bottom despite it being part of our downtown, and also having a lot of excess roadway capacity (i.e. wide roads that didn’t carry substantial traffic)in 2016 when we did the workshop.

My predecessor, Darren Buck, was working with the DCE when they jointly chose that area to look at. George Washington University (GW) is there, among other things, and it’s also the Western gateway between Georgetown and the Rock Creek & Potomac Parkway. It was a big dark spot on the map and the DCE that year looked at what a network of facilities in Foggy Bottom would look like. The workshop participants identified a number of streets where some form of protected bike facility could be implemented: Pennsylvania Avenue, Virginia Avenue, F Street, G Street, 20^th Street and 17^th Street. And now 8 years later, we have protected bike facilities on 3 corridors (Virginia, 20^th/21^st, G) and are about to start on a full reconstruction with protected bike lanes on Pennsylvania Ave. It’s a good overall example of getting a plan, and then following it and building a workable bike network.

So, that was the theme of the 2016 workshop, the 2023 workshop we looked at mainly barriers in certain parts of DC to bicycling and traffic circles. We looked at three traffic circles, all three of them were on barrier locations where there’s maybe a good bike lane or trail on one side or the other, but not a separated facility through. We were able to learn a lot about circle design from our Dutch friends.

In the new designs, we’ll have protected bike lanes, and pedestrian crossings where there are fewer conflicts and we’re eliminating multiple -threat crash risks that are currently present to those crossing the circle on-foot or by bike. The first one we are working on, Grant Circle NW, is also one of the only circles that does not have any traffic signals. In past eras of doing similar work, our traffic engineering teams would typically default to signalizing all the movements. But we have learned from the Dutch approach, that you can signalize circles, but any improvements to safety come at the expense of throughput; which is part of the goal to not create additional delays. So we are continuing with the no-signal, more free-flowing model but with a much more pedestrian and bicycle-focused design.

I think that’s a good example of what the most recent one ThinkBike Workshop has produced. It’s our intention to build this circle up, and we’re about 1.5 years into the redesign. When it is constructed in 2025, it will be a good example to look at for various safety outcomes. DC has five other circles that are similar where we could make  bicycle and pedestrian-focused changes.

DC seems to be moving forward with a lot of cycling initiatives. Why do you think that is?

Starting in the year 2000, the Anthony Williams administration (Mayor of Washington) decided to develop a bicycle network, a safe bicycling network, and it started with trails along our waterways and rail lines. It has evolved, including an on-street component and that means that we’re re-prioritizing what is on the street in order to fit the bike lanes in.  Sometimes we remove excess vehicle capacity that was leading to speeding, sometimes there is extra space we can repurpose for bike facilities, but at this stage of our network development, more commonly you have to reconfigure vehicle parking or something else about the roadway in order to develop the space for a contiguous bike facility.

Fast forward 24 years, and among other things, we’re using the Dutch technical expertise to figure out the ‘how’ component, such as the DCE workshops, the CROW manual, and just examples we look at from the Netherlands that we can look at on satellite or street-view imagery. We’ve already decided that we want a bike network, a bike system of transportation that’s safe and feels comfortable, and where the Dutch can help is in offering how they would do it. We don’t entirely take all their advice, but the main themes of safety and comfort bridge across.  DC is one of the leading US cities in bicycle planning, but we still work within a system where the strong expectation from users is that cars can go everywhere. We are seeing this change, though, areas like the Wharf, Half Street SE, or our Open Streets events all create permanent or temporary areas of pedestrian priority where bikes are the guests, and cars aren’t allowed at all, and we have several streets where bikes are the priority for longer distances, and cars are diverted off the corridor after 3-4 blocks in a given direction.

The nature of DC is that it’s got really good bones, versus a sunbelt city that was built after the automobile. The central planning features of DC were built around horses, walking, carriages, canals, and later railroads. Also, in DC a person’s property line doesn’t start at their front fence. Public property goes from your front wall on one side of the street, to the front walls of your neighbor across the street, so, that allows us to do certain things like put in bike share stations, usually on commercial properties, within that bit of public space that other cities can’t do.

We’ve made progress on racial and gender equity issues with bicycling. This is in large part because we’ve democratized our bikeshare system. We have a program called Bikeshare for All and if you’re on any kind of public assistance like SNAP or TANF, you can get bike share for $5 a year. We have a large program where your employer can subsidize your bikeshare membership with lots of participation, and if, like me, you work for the District of Columbia, your bikeshare membership is free (the District is majority owner of the bikeshare system). We also have a large and growing ecosystem of “micromobility” companies providing access to shared electric scooters and E-bikes for a cost lower than a rideshare trip. Someone’s familiarity with our bicycle network starts with using these really cheap shared bikes (and scooters), but pretty soon if you see the benefits of it, you might get your own bike or E-bike.

How does planning play into this? What lessons do you take out of the ThinkBike Workshops?

The planning principles and general good advice we take away from ThinkBike workshops are really strong. The focus on low stress networks, it’s something we already had some experience with but it really reinforced the focus on connected networks and also how to talk about it was something that was pretty important. It’s not thinking of the new link that’s out in the periphery of the District that we could do but how we can better connect the existing network to itself because we know that that actually gives people biking more benefits than new unconnected links.  I’ve also taken to heart the lesson that the best bike plan is a car plan (the idea of deconflicting space by limiting access), and that is something we are being more intentional about in areas of redevelopment within the city.

The political element is really tough because bike projects are not universally popular, and people have different ideas of how they would prioritize using the available space of our rights-of-way. Lots of our roads were rebuilt in between the 50s and the 80s. Their approach then was very clearly: make the cars go faster. So now we are working on trying to make things safer as our primary basis for updating roadway treatments.

In general, we’ve greatly benefited from the Dutch thinking. We’ve had a director go to Holland and an ongoing relationship with the Dutch Embassy. So, we’ve had years’ worth of jointly organizing events with them and doing bike tours – perhaps around one or two bike tours with the Dutch Embassy every year, and that affects how we think about these issues of infrastructure and how bicycling fits in society as well. It’s very mutually reinforcing, and they serve the role of being friendly experts that can help us with something with which they are deeply familiar.

Offering that help freely and consistently, combined with the nature of Washington being both the national capital and an international capital, we uniquely have access to the Dutch Government and NGO community folks that are also interested in this.  All you need to do is look around to see the results of this collaboration, it is now built into the fabric of the District of Columbia.