When Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen first unveiled plans last week to fund free Metrobus service by raiding $115 million from the K Street Transitway project, D.C.’s transit nerds were divided. But it took just one tweet from Mayor Muriel Bowser to bring them back together.
Make no mistake, most transportation advocates in the city would rather see the District government fund Allen’s new “Metro for D.C.” program and the $123 million effort to remake the major downtown drag. Allen’s legislation, which passed the Council unanimously last year, would make all Metrobus rides free inside the District and fund substantial service increases. But the K Street NW project had plenty of fans too, considering it would add bus priority lanes down the middle of the road alongside bike lanes and pedestrian-centric improvements. Choosing between them wasn’t exactly a palatable prospect for many, especially those who value frequent service above free service.
This dynamic seemed to set Bowser up for success. She’s no great fan of Allen’s proposal, and stood by as Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee axed the funding for it. Now she would get to rail against Allen’s plans as an assault on her efforts to revive downtown D.C. Bowser doesn’t always have the support of the urbanist set on these issues, but this split could’ve helped her pull away support from Allen’s coalition if she could successfully argue that nixing the K Street project would hurt bus service all over the city.
But a Saturday tweet announcing a rally to save the transitway quickly upended this delicate balancing act.
That’s because the tweet also happened to include a rendering of the K Street project with none of the promised bike lanes, and with an additional lane of car traffic beyond what the (theoretically) final designs showed last year. A follow-up post suggesting that the project would result in “better motorist experiences” only heightened suspicion that Bowser’s real interest here is speeding up traffic and meeting the demands of the car-centric, property-owning class. (Bowser’s deputies admitted as much when they raised the possibility of moving the bike lane from K Street to L Street in a Council hearing last month.) Suddenly, it started to look a lot more untenable for many activists in the transit world to defend Bowser’s plans.
“The project really has no champions now,” Alex Baca, the D.C. policy director for Greater Greater Washington (and a former City Paper staffer), tells Loose Lips. “How long can you have the GGWashs and the WABAs of the world saying ‘Yay, this project is great’ when you have stuff getting yanked out of it at the last minute? How can we even trust that the center lanes [for buses] would stay in the project at this point?”
Witness the journey Dan Malouff, a transportation planner and longtime Greater Greater Washington adviser, took on Twitter over the past week for an example of this shift. At first, he was a staunch critic of Allen’s proposal. Last Wednesday, he argued that it would “lock us into a bad status quo in order to pay for a short time of operating” more buses. But the more Bowser’s priorities came into view, he started to soften that stance. “It’s hard to imagine a less effective strategy from [Bowser] than appealing to ‘motorists’ here,” he wrote Monday. “Just an epic misread of politics outside her bubble.”
“We’re very supportive of the transitway project, but it really needs to be re-thought,” says Cheryl Cort, policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a nonprofit focused on boosting public transit and transit-oriented development. Cort notes that Allen’s budget proposal would still leave $1 million in planning money to allow for a return to its bus-and-pedestrian-focused roots. She isn’t especially thrilled to see the project funding raided, but to the extent it can force a reconsideration of its design, she thinks it makes sense.
“This has become more of a highway project, which will not bring back downtown,” Cort says. “It’s more of a 1950s-style solution here.”