Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George says her young son, Pierce, lights up and points whenever he sees a Metrobus approaching. The District’s presumptive next mayor is similarly enthusiastic when it comes to bus travel.
She chose to mark the annual “Week Without Driving” by riding the D44 from Petworth to her office in the Wilson Building with a small clutch of pro-transit organizers, chatting all the while about the bus-centric projects she hopes to bring to fruition as mayor. That includes one particularly near and dear to Lewis George’s heart: the installation of dedicated bus lanes along Georgia Avenue.
The project, which could speed up buses on one of D.C.’s busiest corridors, has been in the works for years, but it has yet to expand beyond a few blocks. As commuters languished in late-morning rush hour traffic a few feet away, Lewis George said that sort of inaction will end after she takes the reins of the city government.
“We don’t need to study the study,” Lewis George said. “We've been talking about this for a decade. Let's get it done. My goal is to have the infrastructure investment there and the will to actually deliver on these projects.”
Her pledge, much to the delight of the transit enthusiasts on board, is that she’ll “empower” her DDOT director to “unstick stuck projects.” Ironically enough, that’s a catchphrase that’s been deployed many times over the years by Lewis George’s predecessor, Mayor Muriel Bowser—though the current executive generally uses that mantra to refer to major development deals, not bus lanes.
Indeed, Bowser has frequently attracted the ire of the urbanist set by hemming and hawing on such projects or folding in the face of neighborhood opposition and budget concerns. Citing the Connecticut Avenue bike lanes, the D.C. streetcar, the D.C. Circulator, and smaller projects, activists argue the outgoing administration has had a tendency to pitch big transit plans but retreat when the going got tough. Lewis George is promising a different approach.
“The loudest person doesn't get to influence basic safety infrastructure that we know works,” Lewis George said. “It's time that we stop believing that everyone has to love an idea in order for an idea to happen. That's not what governance calls for us to do.”
Those comments will be music to the ears of readers of Greater Greater Washington, the prominent pro-transit group that organized the bus ride, after years of an uneasy relationship with Bowser. She aligned with the organization’s interest in building more housing in the city, but transit was another matter entirely — the group memorably had to go to court to compel the mayor to release a study on congestion pricing.
But Lewis George’s approach will come with its own pitfalls. While she may not worry about pissing off the most dogmatic opponents of such transit projects (such as Nick DelleDonne, the anti-bike crusader who has been busy attending her citywide listening sessions), that doesn’t mean she has nothing to fear by pushing past those “loudest” voices.
Bowser’s decisions may have frustrated advocates, but they generally came because she was listening to constituents, including nervous business owners on Connecticut Avenue and influential church congregations in Shaw who felt they were being pushed out of the neighborhood. (Her critics argue she was too deferential to those voices, overall, but she did still oversee a substantial expansion of the city’s bike infrastructure.) A new mayor, still hoping to win over skeptics and launch an ambitious first-term agenda, may prove similarly sensitive, regardless of what she says on the campaign trail.
And unlike Bowser, who largely governed during D.C.’s boom times, Lewis George will take over as the city’s economy faces serious challenges. She might want to do things like build new bus lanes or find a new dedicated funding stream for Metro, but that would likely require serious tradeoffs elsewhere across the budget.
Perhaps Lewis George’s biggest test will come along H Street, where Metro General Manager Randy Clarke dreams of running a dedicated lane for buses to connect Union Station to the new RFK stadium (a concept generally described as “bus rapid transit”).
If this new “Gold Line” sounds a lot like the original plans for the D.C. streetcar, that’s no mistake. Clarke has been forthright about his interest in righting what he sees as the design choice that doomed that project to failure, pitching it as a solution that will give fans more transit options to reach the stadium beyond the cramped Stadium-Armory train station.
“That's what the streetcar should have been and it wasn't,” Clarke said on WAMU’s The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi in July. “I think everyone acknowledges that system design failure.”
But it’s not as if the gridlock on H Street was unpreventable – planners recognized 20 years ago that the service would only be successful if it ran along dedicated lanes in the middle of the road, avoiding frequent conflicts with traffic and parked cars. A major reason that never happened is the same reason any dedicated lane project faces pushback: complaints from businesses and drivers that they would reduce parking and increase congestion. It was simply less controversial to design the streetcar such that it ran alongside parking lanes.
The city advanced plans several years ago to address some of the issues by creating new priority lanes on H Street, but Bowser scrapped them before they could ever be installed, citing budget pressures. The streetcar’s shuttering followed soon afterward.
If Lewis George hopes to avoid history repeating itself, she’ll have to confront the issue head-on when she assumes office. And she may have an uphill battle to fight in doing so. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, the chair of the Council’s transportation committee, has already criticized Bowser’s plans for the RFK area for making no more than a “passing reference” to the Gold Line. Council Chair Phil Mendelson also recently sounded a note of skepticism of the wisdom of “spending tens of millions on dedicated transit down H Street,” a notable statement given his decisions to pull funding away from the streetcar.
“The commitment to the [bus rapid transit] line seems uncertain, far less certain than the construction of giant parking garages there,” Cheryl Cort, policy director at the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said at a Council hearing on the subject last week. (Plans for a behemoth parking garage have already drawn indignation from the neighboring community.)
But Lewis George says she’s invested in such transit projects, and she plans to meet dissenters with “communication and transparency” that “help people understand why we're taking those steps.” The next few years will test her commitment to that approach.
“If we get more people out of cars and onto transit, we can transform our city,” Lewis George said. “I hope more people buy into that.”
Alex (he/him) is a senior reporter for The 51st who has spent his career covering local government, politics, the criminal legal system and more in the D.C. area. He was raised in Northern Virginia, graduated from Virginia Tech, and lives in Shaw.
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