This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m checking out an absolutely adorable little red bus. The photo comes from the DC Historical Society and it shows an early iteration of the GUTS Bus.
GUTS is the Georgetown jitney bus. I would have guessed that it stood for Georgetown University Transportation System, but no. The ‘S’ stands for “Society”. Which is way fancier.
This photo is from 1979. The bus system dates to 1974. This page offers a great history of the bus to mark its 50 anniversary in 2024. One interesting fact, the august descriptor “society” was specifically chosen to “evoke a feeling of community and connote a cooperative University organization.”
It actually replaced a short-lived shuttle system that was offered by the student-run CORP. That shuttle was a good proof of concept but ran at such a deficit that the CORP couldn’t maintain it long. The GUTS bus was sufficiently funded to stay open. Here’s a flyer from the GU archives touting the new bus:
That Benz looks to be the same from the top picture. It’s unclear how long it ran before needing to be replaced. There’s a photo in the GU archives of one of them in 1984, looking only a bit worse for wear. Any 80s Hoya alums remember when they were finally replaced?
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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