A Metrobus Sunday map: Where the service isn’t
I recently discovered that the transit authority for Houston’s Harris County, Texas has different transit maps showing service on weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. WMATA has never created such maps.
WMATA redid the bus maps last year. The maps clearly mark frequent lines. But service on Sundays is far different.
Bus service in the Greenbelt area. Left, WMATA’s map. Right, my Sunday version.
Where can you get to in the region on Sunday? More importantly, where can’t you get?
I’ve often joked that the reason WMATA won’t create a Sunday transit map is because it would tip over to the left — because all the ink would be on one side. That’s not quite true, of course. There is some bus service in Prince George’s on Sundays.
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I spent several hours modifying WMATA’s transit maps for Montgomery and Prince George’s counties to show only the service that is available on Sunday.
Right: Sunday service. Image modified by the author.
View weekday or Sunday service in larger maps (PDF).
If you can’t see the images and are reading this article on the home page, try going to the full post page.
In Prince George’s, large swaths of the county are left without transit service on Sundays. None of the Prince George’s County Transit (TheBus) routes operate on Saturdays or Sundays, and Metrobus service is severely curtailed on Sunday.
Only one frequent transit route operates in Prince George’s on Sundays: the C4, which runs between Prince George’s Plaza and Langley Park before entering Montgomery County and continuing to Wheaton and Twinbrook. The frequent K line along New Hampshire Avenue does run right on the county line in Langley Park.
In Montgomery, on the other hand, Ride On does operate 7 days a week. And transit service stretches to many parts of the county, though admittedly, some areas are without buses on weekends.
Right: Sunday service. Image modified by the author.
View weekday or Sunday service in larger maps (PDF).
If you can’t see the images and are reading this article on the home page, try going to the full post page.
Still, even low-density parts of the county, like Potomac, have service. And several frequent service lines crisscross the central and southern parts of the county.
If WMATA were to publish Sunday bus maps, it would help riders know where they could go, without going back and forth between map and bus schedules. It could also show where gaps in service exist, and to push the jurisdictions into improving transit service on weekends.
In Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, the state of Maryland is responsible for funding Metrobus service. It’s up to the state to determine whether to fund Sunday bus service through WMATA. However, the counties each control their own transit service. While Prince George’s TheBus does not operate on weekends, Montgomery has made the conscious choice to operate Ride On on weekends.
We cannot expect people to give up their cars if it means being stuck at home one or two days a week. How would people feel if we closed the Beltway on Sundays? What if driving were made illegal on the Lord’s day?
For those of us living in the suburbs without a car, or even car-lite, the lack of Sunday bus service is like that. The state and county tell many residents that they don’t need to go anywhere on Sundays, unless, of course, they have a car.
It’s not practical, of course, to run buses everywhere on Sundays that they run on weekdays. But it is unacceptable to leave so many residents, especially in Prince George’s, so far from transit, even one day a week.
WMATA can’t solve the problem of Sunday bus service overnight. But they could easily publish a Sunday-only bus map to help riders get around where there is service.