Saturday’s Post reports on plans by Metro to add “rapid-bus service” on the highest ridership bus corridors in the next six years. The corridors include 16th St (S1/S2/S4) in DC, Veirs Mill Rd (Q2) in Montgomery, and Leesburg Pike (28AB/28FG/28T) in Virginia.

Each corridor would get limited-stop express buses like the Metro Extra running on Georgia Ave and will have some signals upgraded so they can wait a few extra seconds before turning red to let a bus through. According to the article, WMATA is testing this technology on Georgia Ave and plans a pilot program in June.

If Metro and its partners adopt the plan, transportation officials will have to make a fundamental shift in the way they think about traffic, [WMATA planning head Nat] Bottigheimer said.

County and state governments own the intersections and the right-of-way on the roads, he said. They are used to thinking about traffic flow by getting the greatest number of vehicles, rather than people, through an intersection.

But if buses start to carry 25 to 30 percent of the total number of people going through an intersection, then “we need to ask the question, at what point do you start treating a bus as a special vehicle,” Bottigheimer said.

At what point? How about right now? County planners should be designing intersections for the most people rather than the most cars today, and that means buses, pedestrians, and bicyclists as well as single-passenger cars.

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Tagged: buses, pedestrians, signal priority, transit, wmata

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.