The final death march of the Georgetown Circulator has begun. As I’ve previously written, the city is ending the bus service due to budget constraints. Although popular, the program proved to be too expensive (as measured by cost-per-rider) to justify keeping around in a belt-tightening era.
The axe has already come down on one Georgetown-based Circulator route. The Dupont-to-Rosslyn route, which travels down M St., was terminated as of yesterday. Of the remaining routes (including the Georgetown-Union Station route) late night service has also been terminated. Moreover, buses will now be operating on a 20-minute headway.
And then this hollow shell of a formerly great service will finally be put out of its misery come January 1st. By then all Circulator service will be gone and the red-and-silver buses will be nothing but a memory.
As I’ve also mentioned before, the city is working with WMATA to try to beef up or modify metrobus service to compensate for the lost Circulator service. The details are in this link. In short, there will be no replacement service for the Dupont-to-Rosslyn bus. And the replacement for the popular Georgetown-to-Union Station route will be replaced with new 30 series routes that will go all the way to Union Station.
This replacement service would appear to be somewhat adequate, but it does not account for bus frequency. The new 30 series buses will not come any more frequent. So to the extent you use either the 30 series or Circulator to get vaguely downtown, you will have noticeably fewer buses per hour offering that service.
This is a major blow to transit service for Georgetown. And given the fact that the neighborhood is still the most popular and dense retail and entertainment neighborhood in the city and still lacks a metro stop, this is bad for the city as a whole. We must keep pushing for more service on the 30 series to compensate for this huge loss of transit service.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
Politics, not budget.