Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.

Joe Englert wants a parking garage.

So it says in the Washington Business Journal, on page four of a six page testament to the change he’s helping spread along H Street NE, once one of the District’s proudest thoroughfares and now in the midst of a facelift. When he hasn’t been opening businesses there himself, it seems he’s been grooming and instructing others in how best to take on what is clearly an arduous process, the turning of a hundred year old building that’s stood useless, in all likelihood, for decades into a smart and appealing destination. We should take our hat off to him.

But that parking garage. It certainly isn’t hard to see his side of things. He’s poured millions of dollars into the neighborhood and, perhaps just as important, contributed to the creation of a business community that looks after itself. While the city is determined to do its part, spending millions to make H Street part of its Great Streets program and laying streetcar tracks in the process, for now the street is a mess, limited to one lane in either direction and completely without parking. The rails will be completed in just over a year’s time, but the city isn’t making promises about an actual service delivery date, other than saying the line should be in operation within five years. The question, then, seems to be a simple one: how important is automobile traffic to the success of the H Street businesses? But let’s generalize: how important is automobile traffic to District residents, full stop?

It’s not a simple question—certainly not as simple as I’d like it to be. District residential neighborhoods vary widely in density, and public transportation in the city is a two sizes fit all proposition; either you live near a Metro station and enjoy the benefits of a generally very good mass transit system, or you find yourself a bus stop and hope for the best (bike lanes and trails are best left unmentioned). It’s certainly possible to live a carless life in D.C.—I have done it—but it’s not necessarily easy.

But driving is rarely a simple exercise, either. Our roads are fitful and occasionally cruel. They start and stop suddenly, waver between one and two way, and play host to lurking police cameras. They sneak suddenly onto freeways that just as suddenly end, dropping you off in strange and unknown places, frequently manned by stern looking government agents. The stop lights are confounding and when they finally manage to string greens together, your neighbors conspire against you: stopping apropos of nothing to turn on hazards and abandon car, or rolling along at an impossibly slow pace while searching for a parking spot. Of which, of course, there are practically none.

But oddly enough, the town has grown despite its traffic woes. In fact, the city’s most dynamic areas are some of the worst for getting through quickly and are nightmares for parking. Georgetown, for one, is a beast. M Street is practically a parking lot itself, and yet the sidewalks fill to bursting day and night. Driving through Gallery Place is sure to add a half hour to your trip, and you’ll pay $15 to park, but still the place thrives. Most curious are Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant, where crowds of pedestrians threaten to commandeer the streets, even though parking and mass transit are, for all intents and purposes, absent. It almost seems that the best way to improve a neighborhood for retail is to make it hard to get there.