Connecticut Avenue was designed to serve suburban car commuters, not residents. There’s pretty much always traffic, it’s unsafe and unpleasant to walk around with all of the speeding cars and their pollution (who wants to eat outside with 110dB of car noise?), and if you’re already driving the parking situation is a mess so you might as well keep going to the suburbs with better pricing and easier, cheaper parking. The redesign should help a lot since it’ll make it safer for the majority of customers who live in the area.