The Circulator is dead. Long live the Circulator!

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget request for the District of Columbia reflects many hard choices. This budget crunch comes as the result of retreating COVID-related federal funds, diminished land values for commercial properties, and other long-COVID symptoms suffered by the city’s finances. Among the items left on the budget’s cutting room floor was the DC Circulator. Before we let it go, let’s take a moment to understand why it was started and what parts of it will (and should) live on!

As two who could lay a strong claim to being the founders of the system — Director of the District Department of Transportation and the Deputy Director of the Downtown Business Improvement District at the time — one might imagine that we would object strenuously to its elimination. If that is your expectation, then we are here to surprise you: a DC subsidy of between $10 and $35 per ride makes it mostly unsustainable and unsupportable.

We would love to see the brand and service preserved in some form, perhaps with WMATA operating the Circulator’s popular Union Station to Georgetown route. But in our view, the Circulator has done most of what we wanted it to do. The Mayor, DC Council, and WMATA can make sure the legacy of the Circulator persists, even if most of the red buses do not.

At a time when buses were often an afterthought in DC’s transit landscape, the Circulator brought a new spirit of innovation.

Coincidence

The Circulator was born of a variety of coincidences and hard work. The term “circulator” dates back to 1997, when the National Capital Planning Commission first identified the need for such a service downtown in its Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century. That same year the Downtown BID launched, and the next year Mayor Anthony Williams was elected. Mayor Williams created the District Department of Transportation, wresting control of roads and buses — and trees — from the Department of Public Works.

At the time, the Downtown BID was looking to implement ideas from the NCPC plan to connect the downtown to National Mall destinations and the Southwest Waterfront — slated for the development that would become the Wharf. As part of the establishment of DDOT, untapped funds were identified that had a single purpose: to improve bus service. These were the last of the settlement proceeds from a long-fought case over the final fare increase by the defunct Capital Traction streetcar company. The settlement fund had a balance of $10 million for buses and bus related items — capital, not operating. At the time, Metro was not interested in exploring ideas for changing their service or equipment. We decided to move ahead, taking risks they would not.

DDOT and the Downtown BID began to explore the idea of a circulator service, with a particular emphasis on a Mall route. At the time even Metro buses could not drop off or pick up passengers on the Mall. The National Park Service took the view that doing so would compete with their concessionaire, the Tourmobile. More recent residents of DC will likely not recall the somewhat ubiquitous, circa 1968, blue Tourmobile vehicles that used to trundle about the museums, the Mall, Union Station, and Arlington National Cemetery.

Led by a remarkable Black entrepreneur by the name of Tom Mack, the Tourmobile had cemented its support by ensuring guests to the District, visiting their Congresspeople and Senators, had a simple means of seeing the sites. However, even 20+ years ago, it wasn’t cheap, running almost $100 for a family of four. A bus line that could serve the purpose at less than $10 for that same family was viewed as a threat. Tourmobile, and its friends on the Hill, pushed back.

Better buses

While the issue of Tourmobile resistance was being wrestled with, DDOT and the Downtown BID started exploring what would set a new service apart from the Metrobus service of the day. Metrobus was very much WMATA’s stepchild. Bus service had been foisted on WMATA in the early 1970s as a result of a wave of bus company bankruptcies, and it seemed as if the organization never warmed to the assignment. Metro buses were utilitarian. While well enough maintained, they were uninviting, with drab, dim interiors, and an uninspired white livery. They were the rental-car-fleet equivalent for mass transit, offering citizens a transportation option of last resort.

We began exploring means to gain access to much more attractive European buses. Given that we would not be using federal funds we could avoid the very elaborate Federal Transit Administration bus procurement rules that essentially act as a barrier of entry to buses with more passenger-friendly features.

We explored double-decker buses from Alexander in the UK (these are now seen around town as part of the private tour companies that share the market once exclusively held by Tourmobile), but these were too tall to get under the bridges on two of the routes we wanted. Having a mixed fleet would cause operational headaches. So we chose a bus built by the Dutch company Van Hool.

The Van Hool buses met all of our desired criteria: they had three doors for boarding and alighting more quickly to reduce dwell times; continuous low flat floors with no steps; comfortable seats; clean and open interiors; and — importantly — a back window that provided visibility in and out of the bus. Metro buses had large air conditioning and other mechanical systems in the back of their buses back then, making the bus dark on the inside and uninviting from the street.

We happened to find an unused batch of these great Dutch buses parked in Oakland, CA. AC Transit had been buying Van Hools for a while and had 29 buses that they couldn’t operate, and wanted to sell, because of budget cuts. Using the settlement funds, we bought them, upgraded their air conditioning — yes, AC Transit had no AC! — swapped out the AC Transit seats, and got them painted and branded in our focus-group-tested Circulator colors.

Better routes

Metrobus routes suffer from a design philosophy that seeks to cover as much ground with individual routes as possible. It makes some sense that people don’t want to transfer from line to line, and each line requires its own equipment and staff complement. The Metro funding formula also distributes the cost of a route across jurisdictions, depending on how far the route goes and whether it crosses a jurisdictional boundary. Therefore, a long, multi-jurisdiction route would spread the cost, reduce the number of buses, and provide uninterrupted service for the long-haul rider.

The only catch was: the buses would never be on time; often bunch up; and would struggle to respond to changes along the route. Furthermore, the routes were inscrutable to anyone other than a seasoned rider. Often the buses would bear the hodge-podge numbering from long-gone streetcar routes or private bus lines. The Circulator, we liked to say, started somewhere you had heard of and went somewhere you knew, e.g. Union Station to Georgetown and back. And that’s what its destination sign said.

Lacking permission to run a Circulator route around the Mall proper, we initially established a route that ran around the outside of the Mall. That route didn’t perform particularly well. It was discontinued until we got permission years later to run the current Mall route, which enjoyed higher ridership numbers from people wanting an easy route around the major destinations adjacent to the Mall.

Better operations

We initially designed the system to run on five-minute headways — a bus every five minutes (with an average wait time of 2 ½ minutes) — rather than on a fixed time schedule. We used to joke that a bus schedule is a list of times the bus won’t come! We were determined to change that with frequent, fast, reliable, and understandable service. Even some ideas we explored but were unable to implement set the stage for WMATA to adopt later on. For example, fare payment at all points of entry — that proved difficult because the monopoly provider of the SmarTrip technology in the early 2000s had no way to do it affordably.

Drivers were trained to greet customers and answer questions from tourists. The $1 fare was designed to make it faster for people to get on: waiting for fare collection costs the bus its biggest non-traffic time penalty. We installed the city’s first bus lane on 9th street to ensure it didn’t get stuck in traffic on its way back to the Mall. We also installed a real-time tracking system you could access on your computer (this was before people had smartphones) to see where Circulator buses were on a map so you wouldn’t have to wait at a bus stop.

Finally, even the name and color scheme were focus-group tested to improve recognition, acceptance, and loyalty. (Funny story: Circulator was the working name of the system, but focus groups liked it better than some of the catchy brand names that had been developed. We were both partial to “The Buck,” as in “The Buck Stops Here,” or the “George,” the “Hop On,” and the “Go Go,” but no one else was!) The Circulator was a cool, sustainable way to get across town. It was a brand of the dynamic, and growing city that said. “DC can do great things for its citizens.”

Loved to death

The Circulator was a hit. It became a symbol of DC’s emerging leadership in transportation diversification and innovation. The precursor to Capital Bikeshare (CaBi), called Smart Bike, was launched roughly at the same time. The reason CaBi and the streetcars are red is to connect them to the Circulator brand. Bike lanes were being striped; speedbumps — long fought by DPW — were being installed; pedestrian countdown signals were going in; car share (ZipCar and FlexCar) was launching; and many other ideas were being raised and tested. People wanted more. Councilmembers wanted it in their wards, too.

The tweaking of the Circulator concept that led to problems started slowly, with the Union Station to Georgetown loop being stretched up Wisconsin Avenue so it could better serve businesses along the commercial strip. But we couldn’t afford more buses, so the city just changed the headway promise from five minutes to 10.

The Convention Center to Waterfront loop got stretched too. Then a third route was added from downtown to Woodley Park through Adams Morgan. The Circulator then replaced the Georgetown BID’s Blue Bus between Dupont Circle and Rosslyn after the BID’s federal start up grant expired. The Mall loop, the original proposal, took another decade to launch, and only after Tourmobile’s founder died. New routes were added on Capitol Hill and across the Anacostia River with the laudable goal of making a visible connection between neighborhoods, but drifting from the initial mission of offering a service that wasn’t focused only on commuting.

As it got stretched and made more compromises, the Circulator became more and more like the service it was trying to improve on. Underinvested equipment, inscrutable routes, unreliable service… eventually the biggest difference between Metrobus and the Circulator was the red paint. Sadly, due to the pandemic and the rise of faster and more reliable alternatives like cheap rideshare and rental e-bikes, those red buses became increasingly empty.

What’s next

It took eight years from the first Circulator planning meeting until we woke our kids up early one July morning to ride the first bus leaving Union Station. We spent those years thinking deeply about DC’s unmet transit needs, who we were going to serve, and the essential elements of a user-centered bus experience. The service we started in 2005 stayed true to our criteria — always placing the rider first. Business people in suits loved the initial Circulator service and happily rode it next to restaurant workers and tourists. And once they became Circulator riders, they often became Metrobus riders as well.

Metrobus is a better service than it was 20 years ago. Metro’s new buses are more like Circulator buses — comfortable, with mid-door boarding and back windows. WMATA and DDOT now work together to create bus lanes and address persistent bunching. Nonetheless, there is still a lot that can be done to improve Metrobus service.

The mayor and DDOT are promising to work with WMATA to ensure riders who depend on the Circulator continue to be served by transit. We urge them to remember the best lessons of the Circulator and continue to push for better, faster, more frequent, reliable, and understandable transit service, in a highly branded livery that announces DC’s commitment to its economy, citizens, and visitors.

To this end, they should consider having WMATA run the single east-west Circulator line between Union Station and Georgetown (or Rosslyn) to ensure continuation and visibility of the brand on a route that is not covered by other Metrobus service. This is the most-used Circulator route by far — carrying over half of all Circulator riders — costs less to operate per passenger than any other route, and has been the fastest to recover ridership after the pandemic.

The Circulator has provided almost 50 million rides over the last 18 years. It is a testament to DC’s ability to creatively address the city’s transit, marketing, and economic development needs and was a symbol of our rebirth after the financial crisis of the 1990’s. Ending something is much easier than starting something. But constraint is an opportunity for innovation: as the Circulator service ends, city leaders should seek to preserve its best aspects and find ways to contribute new ideas of their own to improving mass mobility.