D.C. Mayor repeatedly intervenes against safer streets

D.C. Council should force DDOT to use their well-studied community consensus design with protected bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue NW.

Author

Gordon Chaffin
June 10, 2024

Welcome to Gordon Chaffin’s Back to Basics Newsletter

Thank you for reading the maiden issue of my new email newsletter. From early 2019 through early 2021, I produced an email newsletter on local politics. Now that I have a solid day job and a lower credit card balance, I wanted to return to the work of storytelling about the D.C.-area government. I’ll do some occasional reporting, share an informed take, and collect civic engagement tools. My goal is for more D.C. residents to take action, however small, to improve their neighborhoods. 

I hope you’ll subscribe and share this post with your neighbors and friends. Expect something new in your inbox every Monday morning.

Back to Basics for Traffic Safety on Connecticut Avenue NW

This week, during final FY25 budget votes at D.C. Council, our 13 council members could force the District’s transportation department (DDOT) to restore protected bike lanes to the design of potential safety changes to Connecticut Avenue from North Dupont to Maryland. The DDOT Director is also up for a permanent appointment on June 20th. However, evidence strongly suggests she is a marionette attempting farfetched talking points behind a Mayor with minimal urgency on traffic fatalities and transportation goals with climate change imperatives worth scarcely little beyond their shiny PDFs. Our Mayor has made the same fool of several previous DDOT Directors.

Let's go back to basics: a large, safety-focused DDOT team studied alternatives for Connecticut Avenue NW safety. It determined that protected bike lanes are the best use of freed-up public space in a 6-to-4 road diet scheme. That concept design was supported by every neighborhood commission in the corridor and the Ward Councilmember Matt Frumin (and before him, Mary Cheh). The inclusion of protected bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue NW is under several versions of D.C.'s master transportation plan (moveDC) and D.C.'s "modeshift" goals (SustainableDC) -- convincing the motorists of today to become transit riders, bicyclists, and walkers for essential trips taken tomorrow.

During last week’s meeting, DDOT presented no viable alternative for north-south, safe-for-everyone bike connectivity. The department said any alternative protected bike lane corridor to Connecticut needed many more years of study. The agency presented little-to-no transit enhancements and displayed the removal of pedestrian crosswalks. The D.C. Council should force DDOT with language in the FY25 Budget Support Act to implement their previously well-studied community consensus "Concept C" for CT Avenue NW, including a road diet with protected bike lanes.

Advocacy opportunities on D.C. local issues - Week of June 10, 2024

Sharon Kershbaum has a crappy boss in Mayor Bowser

On June 3, D.C.'s Department of Transportation (DDOT) presented a comically incomplete vision for a safer design of Connecticut Avenue NW, about three miles from Dupont Circle to the Maryland border. Ending the meeting 20 minutes before the allotted time, Kershbaum declared the – surely – hundreds of audience questions out of scope for the meeting. She said “Thanks for the questions; they’re coming in quick, and we really do want to stay focused on specific questions, so I think we got the big ones that are really about what this new design is going to be.”

The new Connecticut Ave safety design wasn’t really a design but a series of slides featuring microwaved concepts that come from “off the shelf” of current traffic calming best practices. They showed preliminary data collected from studies conducted years ago and possible future options, but it was clearly a thrown-together mishmash. Nothing was really fleshed out because nothing really has been flushed out because their already well-advanced design was thrown in the trash by someone they all answer to. They were punching bags that night and that’s by design!

Yes, Interim Director Kershbaum and her senior staff on camera – all of whom I’ve met and know to feel differently than most of their remarks that evening – have a crappy boss in Mayor Muriel Bowser. The District’s executive forced DDOT to drop the “Concept C” protected bike lane vision, and before that internally, likely forced them to compromise its design by narrowing the bike lanes and “daylighting” zones to fit more car parking.

The design reasons Kershbaum mentioned as “ruling out” protected bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue were of their own making. That’s what road design is: you pick among trade-offs under constraints and prioritized uses. The constraints are often financial, and the prioritized uses are nominally set by master plans and other legally adopted goals but in practice, vetoed by politicians. Influential forces behind the scenes have been chiseling away for months (years!) at the “safe-for-all” bike connectivity part of Connecticut’s concept design: sorting car storage and movement higher among priorities.

This is the latest of many Mayoral scale-thumb-pressing and is an established pattern. In the months leading up to 2023’s D.C. budget fight, and money for project construction up for debate, Mayor Bowser removed long-planned protected bike lanes from the K Street Transitway. It was a move so last-minute and top-down that the official DDOT social media accounts continued using design renderings that included the bike lanes to advertise a mysterious “all-new” design. Despite last-minute press conferences to save Downtown D.C. with one extra vehicle travel lane, the D.C. Council voted to remove construction money altogether. Then-DDOT Director Everett Lott had to complete similar verbal gymnastics during Council hearings as Kershbaum has done recently and, in the end, Lott got fired for it. At least, that’s what the educated rumors were.

In my conversations with people who would know, Bowser has shown zero interest in the last 12 months in using the remaining budget money for new Transitway designs. She lost her fight to remove bike stuff and add car stuff, and she hasn’t cared enough about transit efficiency in our downtown core to move the project forward with bike lanes and rapid transit. Her recent downtown revitalization documents have a lot of shiny pictures about pet projects but nothing that systemically re-jiggers the incentives for people who move around there.

For exhibit three in Bowser’s toxic transportation pattern, I give you 9th Street NW. The 9th Street NW cycletrack that Mayor Bowser cut the ribbon for in 2022 was the same “eastern downtown cycletrack” that her senior advisor Beverly Perry vetoed from 2017 through 2021. That forced former DDOT Director Jeff Marootian into some farcical verbal combat during years of Council oversight hearings. In a similar debate to current events, a failed D.C. Council vote in March 2020  would have forced protected bike lanes on 9th Street. COVID-19’s emergency was declared days later, Bowser’s May 2021 budget announcement surprised us all by including 9th St funding, and the Mayor got her ribbon cutting a year later.

D.C Councilmember Brandon Todd’s leather shoe

For a fourth story on political intervention, I supply a lesser-known story about the potential road diet of Grant Circle NW. In 2016-17, DDOT considered reducing Grant Circle’s wide, three-lane configuration for safety, to include a reduction of travel lanes to one, the retention of curbside parking, and a protected bike lane. The Department did a traffic study that forecasted drivers would be delayed by a few dozen seconds if they tried passing through. As I learned in previous reporting, Beverly Perry the Bowser aide heard of that delay – got some complaints from influential Ward 4 residents - and suddenly DDOT decided a road diet wasn’t possible. They left the two travel lanes and narrowed them creating a paint-only bike lane.

DDOT has added some “tactical” traffic calming stuff in the interim – they call it “paint and sticks” – but crash data show it’s still dangerous. So, this year. DDOT is proposing to remove that second travel lane and protect the bike lanes. However, some influential Ward 4 residents have started stirring up ANC meetings with car-focused complaints and testifying to the Council. I suspect the protected bike lanes will only stay in the design because Janesse Lewis-George won the Ward 4 primary last week. JLG has made safety for all road users a priority on Grant Circle.

This brings me to Brandon Todd, the former Ward 4 councilmember, and Bowser acolyte. Todd was why it took so long for a Capital Bikeshare station to be cited at Grant Circle. The station on the 700 Block of Upshur NW was supposed to go on the 4200 Block of Illinois Ave NW – a closer sightline to the Circle. However, influential residents convinced Todd’s office to intervene after DDOT had completed an 18-month citing study, taking into account the safety of people walking to and from the bikes. In the end, Todd met with former Director Marootian on a weekday afternoon at the location, and they picked a new installation location.

Brandon Todd is famous for using a worn leather shoe in his campaign imagery. He was Mayor Bowser’s constituent services lead when she was a council member, and he argued his steadfast resident service continued when both moved to positions higher on the totem pole: he pounded the pavement so hard that his shoes wore down. It’s a nice sentiment, but the Bikeshare episode left me questioning what serving constituents really means. I think he was duty-bound to consider the interests of his entire Ward and not the concerns of literally one block. It will not surprise you that nearly all of their front yards featured Todd's re-election signs during his 2020 primary against JLG.

Kathy Hochul follows Muriel Bowser on congestion pricing

Let’s end with NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute “delay” of NYC’s congestion pricing implementation – a transit-improvement funding strategy studied for many, many years and for which $1B of MTA improvements hang in the balance. Robinson Meyer has written all that needs to be said on the substance, and I encourage you to enter your email for the free article view, but he summarized what’s relevant to us in a tweet:  “Congestion pricing is different; it showed NYC could still blaze a trail for the rest of the country. That’s why so many Americans are gutted by Hochul’s betrayal.”

Hochul’s decision was partly at the behest of Congressional Democrats, and she proposed an alternative transit funding method in business tax hikes that are dead on arrival at the legislature. Like Mayor Bowser, Hochul shreds many years of work by people who for her or whose work makes her infrastructure goals possible. Like Bowser, Hochul deploys a rationale that falls apart with a slight investigation. Hochul says she wants to save businesses from added costs in a tough time, but proposes a tax increase on them instead, for their workers who already pay tolls? It’s transparent squirming by a politician who feels pressed.

D.C. won’t try congestion pricing unless it has a different Mayor. Muriel Bowser has said several times publicly and with her edicts to DDOT that congestion pricing will not happen under her watch. Council made D.C. study the transit-funding method before COVID, and then DDOT wouldn’t release the study even though I saw its findings in an off-the-record session at Transportation Camp DC in January 2020. I assume the person who asked me to keep it off the record then wouldn’t mind me divulging this now. So, in budget debates during 2021, 2022, and 2023, DDOT kept telling Councilmembers that the study needed to be redone with post-COVID traffic numbers. When we got to this year’s budget fight, DDOT was honest and said they would not be updating that study and not publishing it’s preliminary findings. 

WMATA only bought themselves a few more years of financial room before their next fiscal cliff. And our regional planning organization is studying what comes next with “DMV Moves.” But, we need to find better, more financially sustainable ways to build safer, more equitable transportation networks inside these ten square miles. A congestion pricing scheme is a financially responsible, triple-bottom-line payment method for honest-to-god Bus Rapid Transit, D.C. Streetcar’s needed extensions, and 100 more miles of streetscape re-dos with protected bike lanes.

Successful infrastructure projects require deference to diverse coalitions

Mayor Bowser and her acolytes repeatedly embarrass her top staff, most of whom deserve barely one-tenth of the vitriol we give them. A good politician straps on worn leather boots for all they represent and their best guess at the common interests of their whole district.

America only does big, durable things when there are diverse coalitions from private and public sectors to support them. D.C.’s Connecticut Avenue NW road diet with protected bike lanes has a diverse coalition that Bowser tanked after giving enough time for the minority and the bad-faith opposition to mobilize. This is what happened too on the K Street Transitway. These are big, important projects, and Bowser’s inconsistent vision harms our city’s ability to execute big infrastructure projects.