The Georgetown Metropolitan

Yesterday DDOT’s spokesman John Lisle confirmed that the Wisconsin branch of the Circulator has been slated for elimination. Lisle offered a list of reasons why they decided to do this. GM will list and analyze each of these reasons:

1. The Circulator Whitehaven extension carried 2 percent of the entire Georgetown-Union Station route’s ridership but was responsible for 15 percent of its cost.

Response: We’ll have to take their word for these stats. Do you want to know why we’ll have to take their word? Because they didn’t hold any public meetings to present the proposed service cut. It’s been announced fait accompli. It hasn’t even really been officially “announced”.

Without being presented with the underlying numbers it’s impossible to argue with this statement. What does it even mean? How does one stretch of road cost more than another? How does that compare with other segments on the route?

Moreover, how does that ratio compare with the Navy Yard Circulator route? By most accounts that’s been an abysmal failure. (Perhaps that’s simply fitting since the route is designed to service Nationals games). But GM doubts the ride from M St. to Social Safeway is nearly the money pit that the ride from Union Station to Nationals Park is. But we won’t know because they didn’t make that information public.

2. The elimination of the extension to Whitehaven will allow the Circulator to reduce the number of in-service buses, which will lower the overall cost of providing the service.

OK, maybe. But cutting service is almost always going to save some money. So what? The question is whether the cut is fair and justified. The Wisconsin Ave. corridor has be decimated with bus service cuts. Surely they save money, but at what point do we recognize that the bus system is designed to move people around, not simply serve as budget cut fodder. Continue reading →

On Friday, Jennifer Altemus, President of CAG, sent out an alert on the possibility that DDOT/WMATA are considering the possibility of cutting Circulator service up Wisconsin Ave. This was the first GM heard of the proposal, but the proposal has a strong bit of deja vu surrounding it.

Right now the Circulator travels along M St. from downtown, turns up Wisconsin Ave., and ends its route at Whitehaven St., just behind the British School. This was not always the route it took through Georgetown. Originally it entered Georgetown on K St., took a right up Wisconsin, and turned back to downtown at M St.

In May 2007, the Circulator was extended up Wisconsin to its current route to take over the Blue Bus’s Foggy Bottom route. In less than a year after this extension, DDOT was already floating plans to cut it (despite the fact that the Blue Bus route it replaced was cut once the extension took place). After strong pushback from the community, DDOT decided to keep the extension. Continue reading →