Great Streets Urban Design

Washington, DC

Great Streets is a comprehensive strategy to utilize public investments in infrastructure, streetscape improvements, land use planning, and development assistance to catalyze private investment that improves neighborhood quality of life and creates a physical environment opportune for expanded retail, housing, employment, services, and other community needs.

Six corridors were identified:
• Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
• H St NE & Benning Road NE/SE
• Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE and South Capitol Street
• Nannie Helen Burroughs Ave, NE
• Minnesota Avenue, NE/SE
• Georgia Ave NW & 7th St. NW

The Great Street corridors encompass over 22 miles of roadway bridging over 50 distinct neighborhoods with diverse needs and visions.

DC’s Great Streets is a unique program. The corridors selected are not in the central business district. The corridors are not grand boulevards. The corridors are not the well-known signature streets of the city such as K Street, Connecticut Avenue, or Pennsylvania Avenue. The corridors are the working main streets of our local neighborhoods. They are also major gateways into the center city and as such many carry heavy volumes of commuter traffic.

Great Streets is also unique in that it looks at whole corridors, rather than districts or nodes. DDOT’s intent is to upgrade the corridor along it’s whole length and change public and market perceptions of the emerging communities that border it.

The streets themselves are also unique and varied. Right of way widths vary widely along the corridors. Land uses change rapidly from residential to suburban-style retail, to historic urban main streets and back again. The same corridor may at one point resemble more highway than main street and at other times appear a quiet residential street.