Georgia Avenue Rapid Bus meeting

Images courtesy of Tom Metcalf, Chair, Transportation Committee, Sierra Club Metro DC.

So I went to this meeting after all last night and it was interesting. The usual grousing by neighbors, the excitement and glee of transit advocates. I think the proposal is interesting. It's designed to improve service for parts of the corridor that don't have access to higher speed subway service. It's an intermediate step to streetcars, but a whole lot easier to start off with. Their proposals seem fine to me. They intend to introduce this service this year.

My only concern is some desires to "satisfice" and terminate the service at Eastern Avenue, the border between DC and Montgomery County, because those damn Marylanders aren't involved in creating or funding this service.

Still, it makes sense to me that since the streetcar service would go to Silver Spring, and because the people currently riding the 70/71 bus from Silver Spring to DC are coming to the city for a reason, that these people, for whatever reason, are DC's customers-citizens-residents-visitors, even if they alight in Maryland, that it makes the most sense to provide them access to this service also, rather than tell them to "f* off" -- that's not the sentiment of DDOT, but was the basic sentiment of a 71-year old lifelong resident who pulled the "I've lived here my whole life" card, although he used the s*** word not the f*** word in expressing his point.

The way I look at this is that transit customers aren't too concerned about jurisdictional boundaries. To the average rider, they merely want to get from where they are to where they are going relatively painlessly. They don't want to have to mess with too many jurisdictional roadblocks. (I know that the various jurisdictions other than DC do offer their own bus services in addition to WMATA provided bus service, in order to provide more bus service at less cost--often without unionized bus drivers, etc.) Should transit riders from that segment from Silver Spring Metro station to the Eastern Avenue line be left behind to the 70/71 buses?

One complaint made by riders is that people fill up the bus at Silver Spring Metro, so that it is less comfortable and fewer seats are available for riders once they get into DC.

I have some concerns about that sentiment, believing that most DC residents aren't good empiricists, and that I would like to see survey data and origin-destination study data before I would be willing to concede that point.

Possibly one way to collect some more dough would be to charge slightly more for alighting at Silver Spring (maybe 50 cents?). The buses to Dulles and BWI Airport have premium fares of $3.



Index Keywords: transit