Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Rather than giving you the checklist of what WABA is working on, I want to give a quick and dirty rundown of why we do what we doand perhaps save the description of what we do for a bit later. Its a long checklist and Im proud of all of itbut its boring to read and even more boring to have read at you. So lets talk about why WABA does what we do & why I do what I do with WABA. Im not a bike guy who happens to be in DC. Im a person who loves this area and wants to see it at its best, and who happens to see biking as a solution to a major problem facing the region. So whats that problem: Its that the region is growing in the number of people without adding any more space, so moving around it is a challenge. And that challenge isnt just an annoyance. Cities exist for a variety of reasons, but if people cant move and are sitting alone in cars that arent going anywhere due to congestion, we can say with some certainty that whatever economic and social needs led the creation of the city have been undermined. I want to ask you to focus for a minute about discretionary trips. Lets not bother with commutes because people will go to work despite all obstacles. Theyll sit on I66 for 3 hours or theyll pack into already packed red line cars. People will go to work because, by and large, people have to go to work. Lets instead think about whether a guy who comes home and walks his dog after work decides to go back out to eat dinner or watch a moviewhether he makes the trip extra trip that invests, say $50 in the local economy--and the role transportation plays in that decision. Is he going to sit 3 hours in traffic or pack onto a jammed metro line to do that? Probably not. But from a regional economic standpoint we need him and people like him to make that trip. So how do we make it happen? The 20th Century solution was to ensure that there was plenty of parking near the local business, turn as many of the traffic lights green as possible, raise the speed limits, and make it as quick as possible to get there. We tried that. This country and this region spent most of the 20th century on that solution, filling transportation design manuals with throughput equations based on how many cars could pass a point in a given timeframe. It hasnt worked. This is vastly oversimplified, of course, but that model failed because it ignored the fundamental problem that if you have a place people want to be, there are going to be a lot of people. And where there are a lot of people, they cant all have free parking and green lights at the same time.

So whats the alternative in that scenario? To go someplace people dont want to be! To sprawl out to a place no one goes. But then everyone follows suit and the sprawled out places become the new places everyone is and no one wants to be, so we sprawl further and further until our region is choked. And people look around. And at some point they say I dont want to do this anymore. I dont want to be here. Anywhere here. And then someone notices that downtown is looking a lot more attractive, and he goes back. And thats where we are now in this region. We are in the process of rebuilding our urbanand interior suburban--density and we realize that we cannot satisfy everyones individual desire for a door-to-door freeway with free parking at each destinationso were working out how to implement a new model that works collectively to enable mobility within our constrained space. And were now starting to see some of the details emerge on how all of this is going to work. Were seeing zoning updates and area plans and sustainability plans and transportation plans that take that big question and grapple with the million details to implement solutions. And now because Ive managed to ramble on for my full time without mentioning bikes, Ill mention them here. Bikes are a major part of the solution to how one can most efficiently enable trips within an urban and urbanizing region. Nationwide over half of our trips are within 3 miles. Locally, where our density is greater and things are closer, that number is much higher. Thats a 30 minute bike ride, even on a slow bike at an I dont want to sweat pace. As for that that space constraint that makes everything so complicated: twelve bikes can fit into the space of one car. So Ill close by mentioning the phenomenon of Capital Bikeshare. Theres been a lot of ink spilled over whether Capital Bikeshare is successful. But there hasnt been a lot of public debate over what successful means. Is it seeing lots of red bikes zooming by? Maybe, but thats a bit squishy. Is it profitability? Again, maybe, but its a public transit system and if you can make one of those outright profitable youve done something almost unprecedented. So perhaps instead we should go back to why we create public transit systems in the first place and ask what makes them effective. We dont build them because we want to see how many trains we can run, and no entrepreneur says lets build this so I can make a profit off the gate! Cities and regions build transit to enable mobility to encourage economic activity, and to attract people for whom mobility is a determining factor in where they choose to bring their talents. And bikeshare should be judged no differently. Does this system enable trips that otherwise would not have taken place? And with 4M trips taken with no accompanying drop in any other measured mode of travel region-wide, the answer seems to be yes.

Now, I really am going to wrap up here. But I dont want to leave anyone thinking that Im here just to shill for the bikesharing program. I do often talk about bikeshare rather than bicycling generally because in policy discussions data matters, and we have excellent data on bikesharing and terrible data on biking generally. But I also focus on bikesharing because people understand that program as the result of government policy in a way they dont understand about bicycling. The reality is, biking as a whole is also greatly dependent on government investment, just like driving. There will always be a small undercurrent of peoplemaybe 1-3% of the populationwho will bike regardless the conditions. But that 1-3% doesnt really move the needle on the problem were trying to solve. That is, how to move people efficiently to enable activity. Yet in surveys, over 60% of people say that they would be interested in biking if they felt that it was safe and appropriate facilities are provided. Now, 60% moves the needle. In fact, getting 60% of people out of cars, which are taking up 1200% of the space of a bike, for all those trips of 3 miles or shorter suddenly starts to seem like a way out of this seemingly intractable problem of moving more people around this region without more space. So how do we do it? We listen to what they people said. They said they would bike (1) if they feel safe and (2) if facilities are provided. And really, you can combine those because truly well-designed facilities make people feel safe by design. So thats what we need. Right now, most of that 60% doesnt feel safe riding a bike on city streets. So even as successful as its been, bikesharing doesnt work for those people. As a transit system, its stations without rails. So they wont ride. The trick is to build the rails. Build safe, protected bikeways that separate people from moving cars so that they feel safe, and well start to find a solution to this conundrum of growth within confined space which, left unresolved, will undermine the regions continued economic growth and national competitiveness. In a nutshell, that is what WABA is working on. We are working to build a region in which bikes play their due role in offering mobility solutions which are, at the macro level, important economic competitiveness solutions for this region, and doing so in an equitable way. Im happy to talk more about the specific campaigns and programs were running to do so, but thank you for letting me go a bit past my time, and I do look forward to your questions.