Earlier this year, I met my first archnemesis in my new neighborhood. She and I accompanied our daughters to school at around the same time every morning, but while I pushed my then-2-year-old in a stroller, she put her 6- or 7-year-old on the back of an electric scooter and zipped along the brick sidewalks at 15 miles per hour. More than once, she almost ran us over.After a particularly close encounter a few blocks from home, I’d had enough. I released my inner native New Yorker, disturbing the genteel Georgetown corner with a stream of profanity. She sped away unbothered and proceeded to park her scooter directly in the middle of our driveway.For weeks, she kept up this routine: After dropping off her daughter at school, she’d park her scooter in our driveway. If it had been her personal scooter, my husband and I would have tossed it into the Potomac. But alas, all we could do was drag it to the curb as it beeped furiously in protest and then file complaints with Lime, the e-scooter rental company. To their credit, Lime seems to have taken our complaints seriously. I have not seen this psychopath on a scooter in some months.
Even as Washington, D.C., crime rates have fallen, casual everyday lawlessness is ascendant in the city’s most affluent enclaves, thanks especially to this winter’s snowstorms. Trusting that the government wouldn’t fine them, homeowners throughout Georgetown never bothered to shovel the snowcrete from their sidewalks, leaving the rest of us to slip and slide and struggle — until one industrious mom threw up her hands and paid to have all of P Street shoveled. Others, frustrated by the lack of street parking, began parking their cars on the sidewalk and never stopped after the snow melted.
