The DC Council should insist on a true multi-modal design for Connecticut Avenue, or defund the project

On April 11, 2024, during a District Department of Transportation budget hearing, Director Sharon Kershbaum announced that the Connecticut Avenue “safety” project had been revised to exclude a long-planned bike lane. Then, on June 3, 2024, DDOT held both a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) meeting and a virtual public meeting to announce its more specific changes to Concept C, the design that originally included a bike lane.

We care deeply about our community and have a vested interest in a successful road-safety project on Connecticut Avenue. Many of us live within a block or two of it, and we shop, worship, and send our children to school here. Though the fight over Connecticut Avenue ostensibly hinges on the removal of a long-promised bike lane, we don’t just bike in and around our neighborhoods, and view DDOT’s walking-back of Concept C as harmful regardless of what mode we might be using.

We are so gravely disappointed with the events that have played out over the past couple of months, because many of us participated, in good faith, in the process that resulted in the original Concept C. Where the project is today is an insult to the time and energy that so many Ward 3 residents devoted to designing a compromise that would assuage the legitimate concerns of our neighbors. And, what DDOT is now claiming as the best path forward is a misuse of $26 million.

When the DC Council takes its second reading of and final vote on the FY25 Local Budget Act on Wednesday, June 12, 2024, and as it drafts the 2024 Budget Support Act, its members must demand more from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration, and DDOT’s planners and engineers, to justify the $26 million price tag of the Connecticut Avenue “safety” project.

What we see in the revised Concept C

The June 3 meeting, a recording of which can be found here, lasted just over an hour. Here’s a summary of what DDOT is now proposing for Connecticut Avenue, which it will continue to refine for a potential build-out in 2026 or 2027:

• Adding dedicated left-hand turn lanes and left-hand turn light phases at sixteen different locations (timestamp here), six southbound and ten northbound. Two intersections, Military Road and Tilden Street, would receive left-hand turn lanes in both directions.
• Two primary configuration designs, which will vary based on whether there is, or is not, a left-hand turn pocket:
  • Where left-hand turn pockets do not exist, DDOT’s updated configuration proposes two nine-foot parking lanes, one on each side, with two 11-foot and two ten-foot travel lanes, a pair on each side (see timestamp here).

    

  • Where left-hand turn pockets do exist, DDOT’s updated configuration proposes removing parking lanes, and adding a 10-foot left-turn lane, curb extensions, and the pair of ten-foot and 11-foot travel lanes (see timestamp here). Potentially, there could be pedestrian islands on the opposite side of intersections where there are not a pair of left-hand turn lanes.

    

• Removing some marked crosswalks from upper Connecticut Avenue at Ingomar and Kanawha streets, and possibly adding HAWK signals, or some other type of pedestrian crossing signal at Legation, Jocelyn, Harrison, and Chesapeake streets (timestamp here).
• Generally, at most intersections, curb extensions that would extend completely out to the first travel lane (see timestamp here).
• “Far side” bus stops (bus stops that are after an intersection, rather than before it) where they are not currently. Buses would no longer leave the travel lane to drop off or pick up passengers, but, rather, would stop in the second travel lane at a curb extension.
• No bike lanes (see timestamp here).

DDOT also mentioned the following, though with less specificity than the above:

• That the agency would continue to look to address slip lanes at Chevy Chase Parkway, Nebraska Avenue, and 24th Street.
• That, as of fall 2023, the agency has installed three automated traffic enforcement (ATE) speed cameras and four red light cameras (see timestamp here; note the slide says there are three ATE cameras, but staff say there are four during the meeting), and that, though DDOT is not planning to install additional ATE cameras, it is monitoring the tickets that existing cameras are generating.
• That there will be a new bike plan. DDOT vaguely referenced the goals of such a plan, including the pursuit of an “alternative” north-south route, rather than Connecticut Avenue, in Ward 3. (Another route that is direct, a low enough grade for Bikeshare riders and general accessibility, and close to destinations does not exist.)

A worse way for all

The above falls far short of what we expect for a major corridor, and is an abrupt change from the complex, but well-socialized, plan that DDOT has promoted to the public for the past five years. The revised Concept C doesn’t include rush-hour lanes, which is a good thing, but it proposes to turn existing rush-hour lanes into parking. This, combined with the removal of the bike lane, will make travel by all modes worse.

Drivers will be forced into four travel lanes and will have to navigate around those who are stopping to park, buses that are stopped in a lane, and the inevitable person on a bike or scooter. Four travel lanes for drivers and 24/7 parking means less throughput than four lanes and two bike lanes, or four lanes and bus-priority lanes. The sole benefit in the revised Concept C is the addition of left-hand turn lanes, which removes left-hand-turning drivers from the travel lanes. Drivers who aren’t turning left won’t have to change lanes as frequently. There are significant design decisions—the size and type of curb-outs, whether slip lanes are fully removed, where loading zones will go (an issue of heated debate in 2022 and early 2023)—to which DDOT has not yet provided answers. The proposed parked-car “barrier” is likely to retain more parking on Connecticut Avenue than drivers actually need, and aggressive motorists may take advantage of open spots to pass illegally.

Bus riders will have slower and less frequent trips than at present. Their buses will continue to be stuck in traffic, and could move slower than they do now: Currently, buses travel in Connecticut Avenue’s less-utilized rush-hour lane, but the revised Concept C moves the bus lanes to what is currently the road’s middle lane. Drivers are likely to use the middle lane given the addition of 24/7 parking.

People biking, or using a scooter, aren’t going to go away. While some may stop riding on Connecticut entirely, others will use the sidewalk instead, and still others will just continue to ride in the travel lanes. Those that do will be at risk of heavy traffic, including getting doored and harassment and threats from irate drivers.

Pedestrians may gain some advantages, like a smaller road surface to cross at curb-outs, and the occasional pedestrian island where there’s a left-hand turn lane. Whether the left-hand turn lanes really benefit pedestrians, however, will depend on their signal timing, which is already too short in most places, especially for older people, disabled people, and anyone that is not feeling particularly sprightly. These admittedly small benefits are largely undermined by the fact that people on bikes or scooters will ride on the sidewalk, potentially endangering (and definitely angering) people on foot.

DDOT also is proposing to remove crosswalk markings at certain intersections, including Kanawha Street, where a pedestrian was killed while crossing in 2022 by a driver. The agency has not commented on many of the dangerous intersections on the southern end, like Cathedral Avenue and Devonshire Place. Although pedestrians have the right-of-way at unmarked crosswalks, removing planned crosswalk markings sends the wrong message to drivers. A glaring omission of the June 3 meeting was any discussion of Cathedral and Connecticut Avenue, which DDOT itself identified as the most dangerous intersection in the District in testimony to the DC Council in early 2024 (see page 13), and which is missing paint on its northern crossing. DDOT also made no mention of previously considered changes around the National Zoo, like raising the large crosswalk to curb level, and didn’t share any designs for the removal of slip lanes or name specific intersections at which that might occur.

Ultimately, people biking on Connecticut will compete for space with drivers in two lanes, rather than the existing three, and won’t be allowed a protected bike lane, increasing the likelihood that a driver might hit them. Pedestrians and cyclists will compete for space on sidewalks. There will be more car traffic, particularly during peak commuting times and popular events like the Zoo’s weekend hours; as a result, drivers will have to deal with more congestion, and residents will have to deal with more cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets. Bus riders will be delayed.

Status quo-nnecticut

Connecticut Avenue as-is is very, very unsafe, no matter how one is traveling. To provide a comparative summary of its conditions, we analyzed data primarily from Crashes in DC, which is published by OpenDataDC; for fatalities, we also consulted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and the Metropolitan Police Department’s press releases. The data that we looked at was restricted to Ward 3, from December 15, 2021, when Bowser announced her approval of the original Concept C, through May 15, 2024, when the Committee on Transportation and the Environment announced its rejection of DDOT’s budget item. Crash times on Connecticut Ave also were unavailable in OpenData until mid-2021, even though the executive has been required to publish that information since 2016.

The Ward 3 portion of Connecticut Avenue, about 3.3 miles, was the site of 19.5 percent of crashes in the Ward that injured someone on a bike, and 38 percent of its crashes that injured someone on foot. There are a couple hundred miles of roads in Ward 3, and this teensy, 3.3-mile stretch makes up a fifth of injuries or fatalities attributable to crashes between cyclists and drivers, and over a third of injuries or fatalities attributable to crashes between pedestrians and drivers.

When looking at other streets in Ward 3 that are similar to Connecticut Avenue, like MacArthur Boulevard, Massachusetts Avenue, and Wisconsin Avenue, we find that Connecticut is a far more dangerous street than other, similar roads.

Each of these streets are between 2.5 and three miles. However, even though Connecticut Avenue and, for example, Wisconsin Avenue are both six-lane arterials with parking at various times of the day, the former is significantly more dangerous, even after the removal of the reversible lanes. Thousands of people live on it; there are schools, universities, and the Zoo; and commercial strips along it are both neighborhood-serving and regional destinations. Maintaining a high-speed, heavily trafficked, obviously dangerous road, which is what DDOT is effectively doing with its revised Concept C, is deplorable.

The revised Concept C depends on the additional space that removing the rush-hour-restricted lanes would provide, and on DDOT’s assumption that a four-lane Connecticut Avenue will be safer than today’s sometimes-four-and-sometimes-six-lane road. So, we also looked at how many of the crashes on Connecticut Avenue occurred when current rush-hour restrictions were active.

Crashes in DC data show that of the 365 total crashes from December 15, 2021, through May 15, 2024, only about 28 percent seem to have occurred during the rush-hour restriction windows, with 49 crashes in the AM hours and 54 in the PM hours. Similar shares of these crashes involved cyclists or pedestrians, and resulted in injuries. So, nearly three-fourths of crashes on Connecticut Avenue occur when it is already in a four-lane-with-two-parking-lanes setup. DDOT’s revised Concept C will make this configuration—in which most crashes already occur—permanent.

In 2015, Bowser committed to a Vision Zero goal and program, a principled approach to eliminating traffic fatalities that creates systems and infrastructure that take human fallibility and frailty into account. In 2020, the DC Council voted unanimously to approve a package of road-safety measures in support of the Vision Zero goal. Such agreement between two often-fractious branches of government is commendable.

Crashes in DC data show three fatal crashes on Connecticut Avenue. Pedestrians died in two out of the three, which both occurred during non-rush-hour periods; so, unrestricted parking, as the revised Concept C proposes with 24/7 parking lanes, did not prevent those fatalities. A driver died in the third fatal crash, which also injured other drivers and passengers and did occur during the morning rush-hour period. However, this crash was in front of the National Zoo, where there is no parking (for a variety of reasons, including an exceptionally wide crosswalk and curb cuts for driveways for the Zoo and nearby apartment buildings). Five of six crashes that resulted in major injuries occurred during non-rush-hour periods; the other occurred during rush hour. The Bowser administration’s revised plans would not prevent similar non-rush-hour crashes in the future.

A design do-over, or a defunding

DDOT has claimed that it is resetting its work on Connecticut Avenue to a “safety” project, instead of a “bike-lane project.” But, from our perspective, its revised Concept C is hardly safe at all. It’s an uninspired and unimaginative design that the mayor snuck into a budget hearing and rushed out to impacted residents through a brief CAC meeting. Additionally, it does nothing to shift drivers away from single-occupancy-vehicle trips, and would make traversing the corridor more difficult for all road users. None of us firmly agree with each other on every single design possibility for Connecticut Avenue, but we do agree that DDOT’s latest proposal is not one to move forward.

This project has always been about what to do with the space freed up by making Connecticut Avenue’s existing curb lane, a travel lane with rush-hour parking restrictions, something else. There are basically four options:

1. Do nothing, and leave Connecticut Avenue in its current configuration, which, per DDOT’s High Injury Network, results in more crashes than other similar roads in Ward 3
2. Make the curb lane 24/7 parking, which is what the revised Concept C proposes to do and which has all the faults outlined above.
3. Restore Concept C to its original incarnation, which would remove some parking, make the remaining parking 24/7, and put in protected intersections and bike lanes on each side. This would accommodate a variety of modes and provide pedestrians with shorter crossing distances.
4. Remove all parking and put back dedicated shared bus-and-bike lanes in the curb lane, effectively restoring the 1973 configuration of Connecticut Avenue, which was redesigned during Metro’s expansion. This, like option three, would accommodate a variety of modes, and improve the frequency and reliability of bus service.

We ask that the DC Council withhold the project’s funds from the FY25 budget and require DDOT to redesign Connecticut Avenue once again, for all modes, as described in option three or four above. If that’s implausible, we would prefer to see the $26 million in capital funding budgeted for the Connecticut Avenue “safety” project used instead to fund the “sidewalk and bicycle lane” capital expenses identified in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s fiscal impact statement for the Vision Zero Enhancement Omnibus Amendment Act of 2019. These funds would enable District-wide implementation of Sections 3 and 5(b) of the Vision Zero omnibus, which require the installation of sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, and transit lanes when DDOT undertakes certain types of projects. The Vision Zero omnibus has remained largely unfunded despite the council’s previous attempts to fund it.

The authors of this piece serve on Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in Ward 3 (Jim Nash, 3/4G; Zach Ferguson, 3/4G; Tom Quinn, 3E); Sauleh Siddiqui, 3C; Gawain Kripke, 3C) and on District advisory councils (Karthik Balasubramanian, chair of the Multimodal Accessibility Advisory Council; Paul Harrison, at-large Member of the Pedestrian Advisory Council; Warren Gorlick, co-chair of the Bicycle Advisory Council). ANC commissioners and advisory council members represent their own opinions, not those of their respective commissions or councils. Concerned Ward 3 residents Eileen McCarthy, Julia K. Stevenson, David Cristeal, Bob Ward, and Stephen Schwartz walk, bike, use mobility devices, drive, and take public transit. Some may even do all of the above.

This post has been updated.