Editorial: New Year’s Resolutions for Georgetown
By • January 10, 2024 One Comment 917
As 2024 begins, Georgetown has so much to be thankful for. Sparkling vibrancy has returned to our indoor and outdoor commercial retail, shopping and dining spaces, as our “Business Ins & Outs for 2023” indicates. Georgetown’s civic agencies, volunteer groups, and political representatives all brim with positive ideas for improvement.
But, the new year ushers in a time of reflection. In that spirit, we offer these resolutions for Georgetown in 2024:
We published an editorial last May entitled “Georgetown’s Spring Cleaning Should Be for Everyone,” praising our local shopkeepers and restaurants who work hard to present clean and attractive spaces for the community, but calling out some of the wealthy corporations in our business corridors who don’t seem to be putting in the effort. Let’s all resolve that – for our businesses, our residences, and ourselves – we’ll put on our best faces for the public.
In November 2021, we ran an editorial “To Help Local Business, Journalism and Democracy, Support the Journalism Sustainability Act” to highlight the threat to small local papers such as ours – now beginning our 70th year – in Georgetown. An AP report from Nov. 2023 highlights how much more dire the situation has become indicating, “The nation has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005.” For 2024, Georgetown businesses and enterprises might resolve to help keep our local journalism alive by purchasing advertising from us and appreciating all we do to report on local developments.
In our various stories on the controversies surrounding widened sidewalks and outdoor streateries, we’ve noticed a lot of “us vs. them” commentary, as if visitors, tourists, students, and “undesirables” are somehow not welcome in Georgetown. Let us resolve to be more generous in how we think about those who come to appreciate all Georgetown has to offer, and to help keep our local businesses and restaurants afloat. Remember, our commercial spaces are public not private and should reflect a welcoming spirit.
Now, here’s a wish-list for 2024 we received from a longtime resident:
Now that Barnes & Noble is coming back, Georgetown could really serve its residents with:
- A cheese monger
- A fish market
- More reasonably priced, locally-owned restaurants
- Residential parking restrictions (like other D.C. neighborhoods)
- One-way streets
- More residential street lighting
- More civic events like the dance classes on the waterfront
If you have resolutions or ideas for improving Georgetown, send them to us at Editorial@Georgetowner.com.
In your just-published editorial on New Year’s Resolutions for
Georgetown, you quoted the “wish list” of a longtime resident. As another long timer (30+) years, let me underline one of his/her suggestions: more one-way streets for Georgetown. There is a major DDOT study of traffic patterns/possible reforms in Georgetown now underway, and its conclusions will impact our neighborhood for many years. I URGE the “Georgetowner” to lend its weight to this process with an editorial(s) advocating more one-way streets, esp. in the north-south direction (34th St. already is a good and successful example).
Georgetown streets were not designed to accommodate two-way traffic in an era when more than 50 percent of vehicle sales are of wide CRVs/SUVs, and it is becoming a major inconvenience and risk for our residents (and esp. the older ones) to pass oncoming traffic, esp. now that there are CRVs/SUVs also parked on either side of streets originally designed for horse and buggy traffic ( when those horses/buggies were parked not on the streets, but in stables). We already see now how cars are crawling past each other, or even halting at intersections until oncoming cars in the middle of the block can reach those wider intersections.
I have heard only one plausible objection to one-way streets: that they might encourage speeding. The opposite is just or more true: with two-way streets, now when one passes through an intersection and sees that the block ahead is clear, many of us speed up in order to reach the next intersection before having to pass a car in the middle of the block. If that argument is not convincing, then there is another way to guarantee limited speeds on one-way streets: install speed bumps, such as we already have on a couple blocks in Georgetown (e.g. 31st St. between P and O Sts.).
You are welcome to publish this message or not, as you wish. It primarily is intended for the “Georgetowner’s” editorial staff, in hopes you will consider the matter and undertake an editorial campaign for more one-way streets while we are at a critical stage of the DDOT review when public input makes a difference.