Bloomingdale’s afraid of the big, bad bus

Last month, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) unveiled its proposed Better Bus Network, which redesigns its current bus routes and service levels (share your feedback here!). Like other national and international bus-network redesigns, the Better Bus Network proposal aims to provide an overall higher level of more equitable bus service with the same budget. (Last year, WMATA put out a “visionary network” proposal to show what a bus-network redesign with a 35% increase in funding could look like; that increase in funding did not come to pass, and WMATA has subsequently dropped the visionary network.)

While many people will experience the benefits of a redesigned system, some individuals will experience it as worse—there are still people riding lines that WMATA might deem inefficient or low-ridership. So, of course, the public sentiment toward the Better Bus Network proposal reflects some nervousness about the loss of existing service.

In Bloomingdale, however, the Better Bus Network’s proposal would replace the existing G2 and 96 buses with a new C55 route on five blocks of First Street NW, from Rhode Island Avenue to Bryant Street NW—thereby increasing bus service. NIMBYs, however, are throwing an epic temper tantrum at the prospect.

Starting at the Bloomingdale Civic Association meeting on June 17, 2024, through the ANC 5E meeting the following day, leading up to a special single-issue follow-up ANC meeting to come on Monday, July 8, and on NextDoor all in between, this modest, beneficial change has provoked a wildly disproportionate torrent of bad faith, strawmen, and red herrings from a handful of vocal individuals. The opposition has culminated in a petition to “Protect First Street” anonymously authored by “concerned residents of Bloomingdale.”

The following is a rebuttal of the most prominent arguments in opposition to a modest amount of new bus service in Bloomingdale.

The community wasn’t informed this was coming

Check off the free square on your NIMBY bingo card! The idea of a bus network redesign first made an appearance as a recommendation of WMATA’s regional bus transformation project, completed in 2019. WMATA has collected feedback on the Better Bus Network project in two previous rounds, in fall 2022 and spring 2023. Now, the reveal of the proposed new network has kicked off another round of engagement, for which WMATA is hosting all kinds of events to collect input. And, there’s still a year before implementation.

No changes have happened yet. Any complaints about not being informed are about not being informed about the process of being informed.

First Street is too narrow

This segment of First Street NW is 35 feet from curb to curb, with the District Department of Transportation (DDOT)’s standard 10-foot drive lanes in both directions. Yes, DDOT prefers 11-foot lanes for buses, but it’s not a requirement. Buses run in 10-foot lanes all over DC, including the G2 itself on 4th Street NW and the P6 on R Street NE, just across North Capitol Street. Allegations that DDOT will be widening travel lanes by “removing parking spaces, eliminating treebox gardens, and cutting back mature shade trees” is wild, unsubstantiated fear-mongering. Yes, parking spaces will be removed—a few, out of thousands in the neighborhood, on the few blocks where bus stops will be. But an entire lane of parking, for five blocks? DDOT doesn’t need to do that, and wouldn’t have the courage to, anyway.

Buses are too heavy

Opponents are claiming that First Street has a weight restriction that buses would violate, and that the weight of buses would threaten a recently constructed water tunnel under the street.

Without a citation to support the first claim, it’s impossible to know what they think they’re talking about, but it’s almost certainly baloney. Perhaps they are referring to DDOT’s weight restriction for commercial trucks? But that doesn’t apply to public buses; there’s a clearly stated exception for public transit. Plenty of other roads in the District with the same restriction are already on bus routes, including R Street NE and 3rd Street NE in nearby Eckington, which carry the P6 route, as well as 7th Street NE, which accommodates the G8.

The second claim, that a $150 million tunnel would be threatened by the weight of buses 100 feet overhead, is likewise ridiculous. The similar Northeast Boundary tunnel runs below the adjoining Rhode Island Avenue NE, with the G8 route on top.

First Street is already too congested

WMATA is proposing that the new C55 route will run every 30 minutes between 5:00 am and midnight. That’s 76 bus trips per day (opponents have wrongly calculated it as 150)—or, on a street that sees over 8,000 vehicles per day, a 1% increase in total vehicle trips. And that number will drop if any travelers trade their car trip for a ride on the C55.

The petitioners have accused WMATA of “fail[ing] to consider the nature of commuter traffic to, from, and through this neighborhood,” but the C55 doesn’t need to replace every car trip on First Street to reduce congestion. It simply needs to replace, at minimum, 77 trips per day—one more than the number of bus trips being added to First Street. The new C55 route will connect Bloomingdale with Shaw, U Street NW, Adams Morgan, Woodley Park, Cathedral Heights, and Tenleytown, among other locations. It is reasonable to expect that each new bus will carry at least one Bloomingdale resident or visitor who would otherwise have taken a car.

Buses will bring pollution

Yes, exhaust, tire particles, and noise pollution are all negative externalities of vehicles—buses and cars—which is why we need to aggressively reduce the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in our city. I’d be thrilled to advocate for replacing First Street with a pedestrian-only park, but I don’t think that’s what the opponents have in mind. Second-best, however, is giving residents an easy way to bundle their car trips together into a single, larger vehicle that moves more people, more efficiently. Bonus: The chef’s-kiss NIMBYism here of maligning the bus as a pollutant and suggesting WMATA just put it somewhere else (see below for more on that).

They’ll cut down trees to put up bus shelters!!

WMATA has identified V Street and Bryant Street NW as the two intersections for planned stops (visible on the interactive comment map). Two of the four corners involved (both southbound locations) clearly have tree-free space a bus stop could occupy. Given that most bus stops in the system don’t have shelters, it’s unlikely each of the northbound stops would get a shelter, but even if they did, it would remove exactly two immature trees that currently provide little shade, for shelters that would provide significant shade. The two trees could quite easily be replaced in nearby treeboxes elsewhere on the street.

Buses put cyclists at risk

Bloomingdale Civic Association members previously protested strongly against the mistaken impression that DDOT was considering adding bike lanes to First Street, so it’s pretty clear that this sentiment from any of them is just concern-trolling. But a separate letter on PoPville last week from a neighborhood cyclist has put this argument front and center, though it’s clearly flawed.

While the letter-writer’s argument is ostensibly about safety, subsequent comments on the Popville post suggest he’s more concerned about buses being slowed down, and subsequently slowing down drivers—basically, that there will be less passing going on all around:

“Buses are much wider and longer than cars and most delivery trucks, and they can’t safely pass cyclists and people on scooters in such narrow street [sic]. If a bus has a bike in front, the bus would need to be circulating at the same speed as the bike going uphill on 1st St, further slowing down the street and creating more congestion.”

First Street NW has only one travel lane in each direction; it is currently illegal, and dangerous, for any vehicle to pass any other road user on it. There is no allowed “safe” passing currently; drivers who do it put everyone at a greater risk. Bus drivers are at least trained on how to safely pass cyclists, and when.

But North Capitol Street

Billed as a reasonable compromise, many have suggested that all of this could go away if WMATA just shifts the route one block east to North Capitol Street. This is not a small concession to make everyone happy. North Capitol would be an objectively worse place for the C55, and would not provide riders with useful bus service.

In the Better Bus Network proposal, North Capitol will carry the D30 route, replacing the current 80 route. This route connects the hospital complex and development at McMillan at North Capitol Street and Irving Street with the more densely populated blocks south of Rhode Island. But the C55’s opponents are suggesting rerouting it between those two areas, from Rhode Island Avenue to Bryant Street, which is a dead spot bordered almost entirely on the east by cemeteries and hard to cross, thanks to an impassable underpass. Suggesting WMATA choose to drop more bus riders onto an empty stretch of one of the deadliest roads in the entire city instead of on a residential street, in the name of pedestrian safety, is absurd and offensive.

What’s more, the C55 is intended to complement, not duplicate, the proposed D30 route on North Capitol, because it will replace the G2 route, which currently runs up 4th Street NW and serves Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park. First Street is already three blocks east of 4th Street; there’s no need to send it a block further away from riders in LeDroit.

Finally, as the commercial core of the neighborhood, routing directly on First Street provides the best access to local businesses for employees and customers. Buses should drop people off directly in front of the places they’re most likely to be going.

Bloomingdale residents are too rich, so no one will take the bus

Hard to tell which implication is worse here:

1. Ignorance that people across the economic spectrum live in Bloomingdale
2. Dismissal of people who commute into Bloomingdale to work at local businesses or to provide services like childcare
3. Unwillingness to believe high-income residents may appreciate a safe, convenient transportation option that is not driving

The final boss of every NIMBY argument

Buses will change the character of the neighborhood! A bus line on First Street, where there currently is not a bus line, certainly is a change in character, and may not be the preference of every individual resident. But a bus will serve a wide range of people—residents, workers, and visitors alike. Public goods are supposed to be public, and a neighborhood that becomes safer, more convenient, and more accessible to more people is a kind of character to be encouraged, not fought.

Correction: This post earlier suggested WMATA has not yet proposed stop locations on the new route. They have actually included V Street and Bryant Street NW for the C55 stops in Bloomingdale. This post has been updated to reflect this information. We regret the error.