This project won't put any parking on K Street itself--there will just be two lanes for autos to drive, and maybe one or two pull-out areas to drop people off, but no parking. And even if there was, on the four blocks between 8th and 12th, there would be room for less than 100 parallel parking spaces total.

Putting angled parking on both sides of the four blocks of K Street (8th to 12th) would add a grand total of about 200 parking spaces, assuming no disabled parking, no driveways, no hydrants, no loading zones and no drop-off or valet parking areas. Including all the Downtown Plaza lots, 10th and L and existing street parking, there are around 5000-6000 public parking spaces within 1 block of K Street, most of which are closer to the actual shopping parts of K Street than the project area. Those on-street parking spaces would certainly be metered spaces, otherwise they would be 100% occupied by the first couple hundred people to arrive downtown of the 80,000 or so who commute in each weekday, so they wouldn't help visiting shoppers much. In return, you would lose most of the pedestrian space, which can actually get pretty crowded already during the work week, and greatly limit bicycle access, since they would not have bike lanes and would have to share a narrow and already crowded sidewalk with pedestrians.

Now, that's assuming that elevating Light Rail would be cheap and easy, rather than being a downright enormous, prohibitively expensive project that would leave its right-of-way in shadow and increase street noise. But of course it wouldn't, so let's just scratch that idea right off the bat.

So no, it isn't going to happen. K Street is not a suburban mall, never functioned as one, and cannot function as one. Trying to make it resemble one won't work.

This plans calls for zero additional parking spots. So not one spot will added.

I work downtown, and live in midtown. And yes, K Street gets crowded on work days, particularly during the lunch hour.

I do agree with one part of your post--give up the idea of a retail K Street. K Street is, and should be, mixed-use: residences, offices, services, entertainment, and also some retail. It has never worked as a substitute for a suburban mall, because it is not in the suburbs.

Those 200 parking spaces would be over the course of four blocks, not in a single area, and they would not be free.

There isn't much point in elevating light rail--it would be hideously expensive, and wouldn't really help anything. Plenty of cities have street-level light rail and streetcars.

After nearly seven decades of taxpayer-subsidized highway failure and automobile fetishism, it's time to get real. Not enough people living on and near K Street is what killed it in the first place--K Street was already in dire shape when the pedestrian mall was built. A lack of cars didn't kill K Street, and trying to turn it into a suburban strip mall won't save it.

I'm still a bit skeptical about cars on K Street, but I'm willing to give it a try. The current idea relegates cars to participants on a complete street, where they will not have utter dominion over the landscape. If it works on K Street, maybe we can use the same pattern on other downtown streets.

Hey now, I buy my Chuck Taylors there!

The projects slated for the 700 and 800 blocks of K all include housing. Residents watching the street tend to get irritated by the presence of folks just hanging about, and they call the cops. This, along with the plans for lots of businesses with large patios and kiosks on K, will make the area far less comfortable for thuggy hanging out, just as similar changes in other parts of the central city made those neighborhoods safer.

There are already about 5000 parking spots within a block of the K Street mall.