New year, new bus priority plan for DC

In December, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) published its long-awaited Bus Priority Plan. The plan lays out an interactive map and high-level plan for delivering 51 bus priority projects for the District, in a nod to DC’s ongoing bid to become the 51st state. DDOT says the outlined projects could improve bus services for 110,000 people per day.

Riders have been asking for this (Disclosure: GGWash has also advocated for more investment in bus priority). In 2019, the Bus Transformation Project, commissioned by WMATA, found that the top three requests from bus riders to improve service were:

• Build dedicated bus lanes
• Make transfers between bus and rail free (explainer here - spoiler alert, WMATA did the right thing)
• Run more buses on busy routes

DDOT can grant but one of these three wishes: bus lanes, several of which it’s installed in recent years. The other items on the bus “wishlist” are largely under the purview of WMATA, which runs Metrobus and Metrorail, with the exception of increasing the frequency for Circulator, which does fall under DDOT (we have an explainer for that). And the bus priority toolkit has additional tools beyond dedicated lanes like signal priority, which can give buses the wheel-up they deserve.

When the bus planners come for your street

I got an up-close view of how DDOT is rolling out the bus priority planning process at a December meeting of the ANC 6A Transportation & Space Committee, of which I’m a member.

8th St NE/SE is one of the lanes that DDOT’s looking to upgrade this year. DDOT presented a two-phase plan for the corridor, starting with Florida Ave NE to East Capitol Street in 2022/2023, to be extended to M Street SE at a future date. We learned that bus lanes weren’t the only treatment under consideration, but they’re on the table.

At and after the meeting, ANCs pressed DDOT to speed up the extension south, noting the vital connection to Eastern Market Metro Station, the only rail station directly served by the corridor, but were told that capacity constraints would keep the project limited to the NE segment for the time being. As a frequent rider of the 90 and 92 buses that traverse 8th (often at a slow pace), I was only too pleased to fill out the survey DDOT circulated. It can be filled out here.

All grit, no glamour?

“Bus priority” may come across as a conceptual contradiction. In pre-covid 2019, riders took on average trips 350,000 trips on Metrobus per day across the region. Despite its capacity to carry many more people, more sustainably and less expensively than cars, the bus is often seen by the public and opinion-leaders as less glamorous or functional than single-occupancy vehicles. “You can’t take the bus to a date” a business leader incredulously informed me after a recent presentation I gave on urban transit and commerce (someone tell the kids).

DDOT’s Acting Director Everett Lott said the bus priority plan will make it easier for DC residents and workers to access jobs and services without a car. “With about half of the District Metrobus riders making under $30,000 a year and two-thirds living in zero car households, we’re…very excited about how this plan increases accessibility to job opportunities for residents in all eight wards.”

Bus lanes and beyond

Dedicated lanes may be the splashiest, but they aren’t the only way to improve bus service. DDOT has also experimented with signal priority, which optimizes signals to facilitate bus traffic rather than bluntly treating all traffic the same.

Re-thinking where specific bus stops are located isn’t always popular with riders, who have built them into their daily routines, but it can help serve more people with fewer stops per journey. All-door boarding, another recent move by WMATA, can also reduce the time buses spend loading passengers at each stop.

Thinking more broadly than bus priority, when more trips shift from cars to transit, biking or walking, it frees up road space for buses to move with greater ease. One way to shift demand for different modes is through road (or congestion) pricing - which happens to be another recommendation from the Bus Transformation Project.

Bus journeys also get quicker when delivery vehicles aren’t blocking their way, which requires more dynamic and well-enforced access to the curbside lane. That precious public space has only become more complex and contested in the Covid context, with many more pickups and dropoffs than before the pandemic, so we’re also watching for any updates to the Freight Priority Network, which in many places overlaps with the bus network. (Where’s the secret Parking Priority Network? Everywhere? Can we just get rid of that one?)

DDOT included some surveying around freight in its moveDC 2020 update, but most respondents were more focused on biking and transit. It will take resources and ongoing public engagement to figure out whether these two crazy kids, bus and freight, can make it work.

More reliable and efficient bus trips can be great for equity, as more than half of Metrobus riders live in low-income households, and 81% identify as people of color. Whereas historically rail systems, including ours, have favored the needs of wealthier, whiter commuters, focusing on buses sends a different message. A recent survey found that nearly three-quarters of DC voters want to see dedicated bus lanes. Sounds like WIN-frastructure(™) to me.

Plans are great, but delivery is greater

In 2019, GGWash predicted that one of the “biggest wins” from the BTP could be getting policymakers to value bus service, and be willing to make tradeoffs to support it. DC’s Mayor Muriel Bowser and Acting DDOT Director Everett Lott have both made public remarks in recent months committing to tradeoffs to facilitate mode shift. (Disclosure: The GGWash advocacy team testified in support of Lott during his confirmation hearing.) The release of the Bus Priority Plan provides tools for residents and observers to gauge how much they mean it.

Another improvement for bus could be to dedicate bus corridors across jurisdictions, which could speed up bus service for the tens of thousands of riders and would-be riders who move across state lines each day, rather than plodding along in Prince George’s County, for example, only to hit their stride within District borders.

We’re approaching nearly two years of our essential services being carried by essential workers, a large number of whom take the bus (at its lowest point in the pandemic, Metrobus ridership dropped by only half - a lot less than rail). I’m not ready to say that bus is having its day, but it should. Maybe 2022 will show that it finally is.