"Yes but" thinking in the H Street neighborhood

H Street shuttle bus parked at the Old Convention Center parking lot.

Something that bugs me from time to time is what I call "yes, but" thinking to refer to people who argue why for whatever reason, their particular program or point deserves exceptional treatment, that the general rules-procedures-practices-ideas don't apply to it.

The H Street shuttle is one such example. Yes, Colbert King the op-ed columnist of the Post excoriated it in the Saturday paper, "Earmark and entitlement on H Street."

And yes, judging by blog and neighborhood e-list responses, H Street residents disagree.

Some say in defense of the shuttle is that the neighborhood has bad transit access.

What they really mean is that there isn't a subway station on H Street. And it is true that the distance from the Woodley Park Metro or the Columbia Heights Metro to 18th Street in Adams-Morgan is about 1/2 the distance as it is from Union Station or Eastern Market Metro to the 1400 block of H Street NE.

But the reality is that the H Street neighborhood is proximate to the subway.

And the X bus line up and down H Street has service 22 hours/day. (And the intrepid could ride the 90s buses up and down 8th St. NE/SE from Eastern Market Metro, or take the B2 between Mount Rainier and Anacostia, with service at the Potomac Avenue Station.)

Yes, riding the bus can be a gnarly experience. Frequently I am the rare whitey riding the bus, on various routes in DC or Baltimore (part of my trip to work in Metro Baltimore involves daily trips via MTA).

AND THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT THE QUALITY OF THE BUS RIDE IN MANY RESPECTS NEEDS TO BE IMPROVED.

But I would say rather than create separate "premium" bus options to separate the wheat from the chaff, improve the bus service generally.

Note that researchers at UCLA (also home to Don Shoup, the parking guru) have produced some important work on transit environments, waiting, and quality of service. (I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but...) See:

-- Protecting Against Transit Crime: The Importance of the Built Environment
-- Study shows US lags behind in transit safety programs for female riders
-- Thinking Outside The Bus: Understanding User Perceptions of Waiting and Transferring in Order to Increase Transit Use

The buses providing Rex bus Metrobus service on Richmond Highway (US1) in Alexandria and Fairfax have sexier livery than the typical Metrobus, even compared to the new livery schemes for the buses. Would something like this be a better use of $250,000. (Image: Muse Advertising.)

By painting H Street buses in this fashion, it could be seen as a way to market the corridor in a far more arresting fashion than the little shuttle buses ever do. And it would be marketing the corridor for 22 hours/day, every time the bus rolls.

Buses in the Brighton & Hove transit system are specially painted for each route, showing the major destinations along the route (as is done somewhat on the DC Circulator route) and the frequency of the bus service.

WMATA has not done a good job in calling attention to what other transit services call out as high frequency routes. Routes such as those plying up and down 14th and 16th Streets in NW, H Street and Benning Road in NE, the 90s buses, the 30s buses, the 70 buses on Georgia Avenue, etc., should be marketed as high frequency routes.

-- See this page on the routes designated as high frequency in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
-- and this blog entry on "The Octopus Map" from the Oddmart blog.

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul bus system, on bus stop signage, hi frequency bus services are demarcated in the color red.