Located below the traffic circle, it is one of the busiest stations in the Metro system, with an average of 16,948 entries each weekday.

This single-bore layout is required by its deep passage beneath the Connecticut Avenue NW underpass and an abandoned streetcar tunnel, now used as an art space.

[8] In 2007, a portion of Walt Whitman's 1865 poem The Wound Dresser was inscribed into the granite wall around the north entrance escalators to honor the city's caregivers during the HIV crisis.

[17] During the afternoon of December 10, 2019, smoke was reported from an arcing insulator at Woodley Park station causing service to be suspended between Dupont Circle and Van Ness–UDC.

Red Line trains were later forced to single track between Friendship Heights and Van Ness due to another arcing insulator failure.