Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
POLITICO
Right on Red: The Culture War Comes for Traffic Lights
By Michael Schaffer,
8 hours ago
Illustration by Bill Kuchman/POLITICO (source images via iStock and Creative Commons)
This election year has surfaced all kinds of demographic divides in American politics: Men vs. women, childless people vs. parents, cats vs. dogs, MMA fans vs. Swifties.
But a pair of obscure provisions that passed the GOP-run House Appropriations Committee shows that another divide is driving politics in 2024: Republican motorists vs. Democratic pedestrians.
That’s one takeaway from the latest scrum over the D.C. appropriations bill, an annual forum for legislative grandstanding that has long been a place for pols to pursue the culture-war causes of the day.
Over the years, Hill Republicans have used their power over local Washington in order to target abortion rights, same-sex marriage, medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, among other issues that offended conservative sensibilities. The efforts don’t always become law, but they provide a pretty good measure of the era’s sharpest political divisions.
Which is why it’s interesting that, in the current Congress, the traditional red-meat wedge issues have been joined by a couple of measures that focus on, of all things, D.C.’s municipal traffic policy .
One of the proposals would forbid Washington’s local government from banning right turns at red lights. Another would do away with the automated traffic-enforcement cameras that ticket D.C. drivers for speeding, blowing stop signs and other violations.
The provisions are not just a case of earnest traffic-engineering wonkery sneaking into Congressional oversight. They represent a culture-war cause just as real as D.C.’s needle-exchange efforts or mask mandates, two other targets of current GOP riders. At the core of it is the politically revealing question of cars versus other ways of getting around.
In blue cities across the country, local road policy in the past decade has been tweaked in the name of making things safer and more enticing for non-drivers — often by making things slower and more annoying for motorists.
Speed limits have been lowered. Traffic enforcement has been boosted. Car lanes have been turned over to bikes. And liberal bastions like Seattle and Ann Arbor have embraced a policy that once existed only in New York: banning right turns on red, which can lead to deadly collisions with pedestrians and cyclists. In 2022, the D.C. Council voted to join them, with right on red slated to end in 2025.
In a polarized country, it was inevitable that this would become more than just a disagreement over traffic circulation and moving violations. After all, the 21st century push to promote alternative modes of transportation cites a Democratic-coded cause (climate change) to promote ways of getting around (by foot, bike, bus, or subway) that are a lot more convenient in dense blue cities.
On the right, for more than a decade, there’s been a refrain about the “war on cars” right alongside the war on Christmas. “There is a loud constituency that does not want you to drive your car,” said Jay Beeber, executive director for policy at the National Motorists Association, which has championed the measures dictating Washington policy. “A lot of this is virtue signaling.”
Never mind that street-level traffic regulations in America tend to be up to the locals — or that the rules in cities, by definition, end at the city limits. This year, local no-turn-on-red efforts in Phoenix and Indianapolis were targeted by GOP legislators in Arizona and Indiana state houses. A federal Congress with no voting member from Washington is going to be even less restrained about it.
A red traffic light is seen near the U.S. Capitol in Washington. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
As always with Congressional mess-with-D.C. provisions, there’s an actual policy divide at play, as well as a philosophical question about whether Congress should be acting as an unelected city council for 700,000 American citizens.
The policy question: Is banning right turns on red a good idea? Right on red first came into widespread use as a conservation measure during the 1970s, with a goal of limiting how much time people had to spend idling in their cars. But lately, the push against it has been cast as a safety measure — ironically, by people who share the green goal of reducing auto emissions.
“Just about every study that I’ve seen shows that [right turn on red] increases crashes,” Sam Schwartz, the prominent traffic engineer and former New York City traffic commissioner, told me.
“Right now we’re seeing this surge in pedestrian crashes. It is often pedestrians and bicyclists who get caught in the crosswalk.”
Schwartz doesn’t buy the idea that there’s something unfair about impinging on motorists’ domain. “The pedestrian was here first,” he said, noting that Americans used to be free to cross streets wherever they wanted. “The pedestrian got corralled.” (Schwartz told me that the term “jaywalking” was originally a slam against rubes who would come to cities and not know that you could only cross at the corner: “A jay was a hayseed,” he said.)
That is, to put it mildly, not the point of view among conservatives.
“It used to be that transport policy was in the hands of traffic engineers,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Heritage Foundation, the author of the Project 2025 policy-blueprint section about the Department of Transportation . “Allowing turns on red means that traffic moves more smoothly.” Better, she said, to ban left turns on green — which snarl traffic behind whoever’s waiting to turn — than right on red.
According to Furchtgott-Roth, “vision zero,” the oft-stated Biden-era goal of ending pedestrian casualties, is often just “an excuse for turning roads into pedestrian precincts….For some reason many Democrats are against choice of cars, whereas more Republicans are in favor of choice of cars.”
Beeber, of the National Motorists Association, said the heavy use of traffic cameras is a sign of a city “hellbent on getting all the revenue it can,” rather than a culture of concern about safety. According to the D.C. government, the cameras brought in $117 million in tickets last year and will bring in a whopping $270 million this year thanks to a fast expansion in the number of cameras.
“The folks who don’t want you to drive your car are trying to make it as difficult, miserable, and expensive as possible,” Beeber said. “Slowing cars down so that other methods like transit look better is a big part of what they do.”
For many locals in Washington, alas, it feels beside the point to debate the merits of some policy that annoys Congress. For them, there’s a more basic matter of principle: U.S. citizens in the District of Columbia should be as free to pick their own local-yokel policies as residents of Ann Arbor or Seattle — or, for that matter, residents of tiny Kaplan, Louisiana, which recently banned biking and walking as a nighttime anti-crime measure.
That divide over who calls the shots on in-the-weeds municipal questions could become a big news story depending on this fall’s election. The 2024 Republican platform vows that the party “will reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, D.C.,” a recipe for more of what the locals see as meddling — and what many in Congress see as a Constitutional prerogative to run the capital in a way that’s different from a regular state.
"The anti-home rule Republican effort to interfere in D.C. traffic laws, a quintessentially local issue, by inserting riders in the annual D.C. appropriations bill is a petty, offensive attempt to meddle in local D.C. affairs,” said D.C.’s non-voting Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. "The nearly 700,000 D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and Brown, are worthy and capable of self-government. These riders are an antidemocratic attempt to govern D.C. without its consent, and I will do everything in my power to defeat them."
It’s a scrum almost as old as the Republic, and one that hasn’t always had the blue-versus-red political tone: Before the Civil War, John Quincy Adams, who became a Congressman after his White House stint, tried to use his Capitol perch to get rid of slavery in Washington. That bit of meddling would likely have not passed muster with a majority of the slave-holding Southern city’s residents if those residents had been able to vote.
Unhappily for members eager to push pet policies on the capital, the D.C. policy riders that are a staple of the appropriations cycle often vanish by the time the measure is through conference committee. But all the same, the choice of poison pills says something about the political moment for the country more broadly.
Notably, Norton said, she was able to get rid of the longtime rider banning the city from commercializing recreational marijuana, an indication of weed’s decline as a political wedge issue. The politics of cars and bikes, though, still stir fury.
Of course, on the Hill, there’s also a more practical reason: Unlike the city program that used to fund abortions for low-income patients, city traffic rules genuinely impact members of Congress. No turn on red signs slow them down on the way to the airport; traffic cameras hit them with fines when they drive over the speed limit. This makes it the rare recent case of meddling over something that actually affects federal legislators alongside local citizens.
As such, it would be a fitting bookend to local Washington’s initial embrace of legal right turns on red a half-century ago. During the Carter administration, when right on red was seen as a conservation measure, Congress convened hearings and withheld money from Washington’s transportation budget in a successful effort to force the locals to expand the number of intersections where you could turn on red.
A 1978 Washington Post story about the change, though, suggests the real motivation was a bit less lofty. Describing Arkansas Democratic Sen. Dale Bumpers’ leading role in the effort, the article doesn’t quote a high-minded senatorial stem-winder about the importance of energy conservation and the fear of an oil shock. Quite the contrary. “At a hearing last May, Bumpers voiced irritation at having to stop and wait to turn while commuting between his Bethesda home and Capitol Hill,” it says.
Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.
Comments / 0