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Speaking as someone who handled Metrobus oversight for DC Government for almost 15 years (1982-1994), I confess to being glad that I lived to see DC come into what my Semi-Sainted Grandmother and her Generation called "your Right Mind."

We recommended to the District delegation to the WMATA board that they start thinking BACK IN 1984-1987 about how to "municipalize" the DC part of the Metrobus system when (not if) Metrobus began to shrink as Metrorail and locally controlled bus services in the suburbs expanded.

It was like selling bibles to atheists (with at most three notable and praiseworthy exceptions, one of whom - Tom Downs - apparently has returned to work on the Gray transition downtown.)

DC was being left holding up the entire edifice of Metrobus as all (repeat: all) the other former Metrobus "customers" localized more and more of their bus routes. Which had the effect of "throwing" an increasing share of the "sunk costs" (mostly infrastructure) for all of Metrobus back on the District.

There still remains the unresolved strategic question of how and when Metrobus gets formally reconstituted to the openly "federated" regional transit bus operation that it has been somewhat involuntarily evolving into since that first Takoma-East Silver Spring bus rattled around downtown Silver Spring, eventually morphing into RideOn, which is now the tenth or eleventh largest transit bus operation in the country. After that we had Fairfax Connector, CUE, DASH, TheBus and, finally, ARTS.

So, in the strategic sense, better the DC Circulator late than never.

Now let's start a serious City-wide Conversation (in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term "conversation") about how to euthanize Metrobus. We probably ought to call the DC-controlled system that we will have to rebuild out of it "Phoenix."

Harold Foster; AAG-ProfGeog, AICP
Acting Exec Officer
The Americas Institute
Petworth
DC

by Harold Foster on Nov 10, 2010 9:48 am • link • report