Opinion | K Street is terrible. The D.C. Council should finally fix it.

The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) has been working for years on a plan to eliminate these oases of dysfunction as well as to upgrade the entire corridor between 12th and 21st Streets NW. The sweeping makeover is critical to the revival of a downtown that’s still sputtering through its post-covid hangover, with office occupancy stuck at around half of its pre-pandemic levels. Yet the whole project is now in peril, with the D.C. Council, as part of its deliberations over the city’s fiscal 2024 budget, weighing a plan to strip funding for what’s known as the K Street Transitway in favor of other priorities.

We say: No way. It’s time for the District to exploit the grandeur of its broad byways. K Street has long served as a passing-through point for motorists riding to and from Virginia and for office workers walking to and from their medical appointments. How about a K Street worth slowing down for?

Urban overhauls typically proceed at their own leisure, and the K Street project is no exception. An environmental assessment dates back to 2009. A decade later, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) championed the roughly $120 million project and DDOT spent recent years balancing the interest of the corridor’s stakeholders. Last December, the agency presented what it called the “final” plan. It called for two protected bus lanes to facilitate east-west transit; capacious median platforms with bus stops; bike lanes in each direction; two lanes on each side of the street for vehicle traffic; and a whole bunch of landscape improvements, including a boost in the number of trees.

The idea, DDOT said in the presentation, was to create a “great street.”

This “great street,” however, was designed with moving goal posts. Even though DDOT declared the blueprint “final” late last year, the authorities recently booted the bike lanes from the project and beefed up the bike-lane offerings a block to the north on L Street NW. City Administrator Kevin Donahue told us that the bike-lane subtraction came at the request of two business improvement districts (BIDs) — Golden Triangle and Downtown — to accommodate loading and drop-off and pickup zones. (The BIDs issued a joint statement to the Editorial Board saying they’re working with DDOT toward “a vision for K Street that responds to the needs of the curb usage for this vital corridor while providing a safe travel corridor for residents, businesses and visitors.”)

Ward 6 D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the council committee on transportation and the environment, balked at the changes. “They have engineered every part of a livable, walkable street out of it,” Allen told us, arguing that the current blueprint is a throwback to auto-obsessed planning.

Along with Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, Mr. Allen favors shifting funding for the transit way to a program for eliminating fares on Metrobus trips in D.C. — an idea that appears to rest in dry dock following a skeptical recent letter from Metro’s board of directors. But Mr. Allen sees other destinations for the transit-way funds, including road safety and transit-improvement ideas as well as the restoration of the D.C. Circulator bus routes that Ms. Bowser has proposed cutting. “We can make that investment right now and take the time to get K Street done right,” Mr. Allen said.

That’s not a realistic scenario, says Mr. Donahue: “If it’s not funded, it’s done forever,” said the city administrator, noting that construction costs will mount and it will be a “long time before there is space in the capital budget to be able to afford it.” What’s more, Mr. Donahue said that a visual from Ms. Bowser’s Twitter account of the K Street redesign featuring seven auto lanes (five moving lanes and two for parking) was inaccurate; that visual triggered mockery on social media.

The takeaway here is layered. Mr. Allen is correct to blast DDOT for the car-centric design; the council would be right to push for changes in its upcoming budget votes. Any decision that imperils the transit way, however, is shortsighted. Vibrant cities correct their infrastructural mistakes, and K Street is a doozy in that department. “If we don’t make investments for downtown right now,” says Ward 2 D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto, “then we will suffer as a downtown and as an entire city for years to come.”