A stop without a pad, bench, or shelter in Short Pump along GRTC’s Route 19. Image by the author.

After the torching of Richmond’s extensive network of streetcars in 1949, one of the most defining characteristics of the city’s public transit system has not been where its buses go but rather where they don’t: beyond city lines. Since Richmond’s launch of redesigned bus routes and the award-winning Pulse bus rapid transit line, the counties surrounding Virginia’s capital have softened their opposition to public transit and are beginning to see expanded bus service as key to their continued prosperity.

Back when Richmond pioneered the country’s first electric streetcar system, one could travel across five municipal boundaries from Ashland in the north to Petersburg in the south entirely via transit. But waves of white flight triggered by fears of school integration caused Central Virginia to balkanize into oppositional localities. Whereas Henrico County — Richmond’s northern neighbor — chose to avoid taking a stake in the Greater Richmond Transit Company altogether, Chesterfield County to the south bought half of the region’s only transit provider in order to have a veto on any potential bus routes into its territory.

Momentum finally shifted back towards a regional transportation approach with the creation of the Central Virginia Transportation Authority in 2020. Although the vast majority of the newly-created funding will go to roadway widening, the 15% share dedicated to GRTC has focused minds on how to expand a bus system which still has 90% of its service just within city limits into a truly regional transit system.

Henrico County

Thanks to the CVTA’s regional tax collection mechanisms, Henrico County has become GRTC’s single largest funder. Just this month county leadership leveraged that fact to convince Richmond and Chesterfield to create three additional seats on GRTC’s board, granting each locality equal say over RVA’s sole public transit provider.

Henrico’s top priority is to set up service to a new Amazon fulfillment center just north of Richmond International Raceway that is expected to bring 1,000 jobs to the county by the end of 2022. Three options could make that goal a reality:

  1. Henrico could reroute the scarcely ridden Route 93 Azalea Connector which skirts the site to provide service to the new facility.
  2. The county could extend the well-ridden Route 3 to offer more folks a single-seat ride to work.
  3. A microtransit pilot could be tried to provide on-demand feeder service from the Azalea Shopping Center at the end of GRTC’s Route 1.

The answer may depend on if Amazon, with its $1.4 trillion net worth, is willing to help fund transportation options for its employees.

Over the coming years Henrico also wants to extend bus service to another mega-site development: the $2.3 billion GreenCity project, which will include a 17,000 seat arena, 2.2 million square feet of office space, and 2,100 residential units. To get there the county may phase in the extension of GRTC’s Route 1 — first to the existing shopping center at Parham Road, then GreenCity, and eventually all the way to Virginia Center Commons (a dying mall slated for residential redevelopment). How best to connect to the nearby Reynolds Community College is another question on county leaders’ minds.

Thanks to additional dollars from the state, Henrico is also exploring increasing frequencies on several other routes that serve county residents including the Route 7 to the airport, Route 19 to Short Pump, and perhaps even the Route 18 — an hourly route to Central Virginia’s busiest train station that doesn’t even run on the weekends.

In addition to the new North-South Pulse that is currently in planning stages, Henrico is also considering extending the existing Pulse line further west to support the booming transit-oriented development radiating down Broad Street out of Scott’s Addition. As long as developers are willing to keep building the dense housing that undergirds high ridership, the county seems interested in expanding its transit service.

“The future as we see it is a lot more density in designated areas and more urban mixed use,” said Todd Eure, assistant director of public works for Henrico and one of the county’s new GRTC board appointees. “Those projects are all doing well whereas the office complexes and big box retail have not been doing well.”

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.