GUTS bus. Image from Georgetown University.

Monday night, Georgetown ANC approved recommendations concerning the University’s 10 Year Campus Plan. This includes the usual complaints about students living off-campus, but also dedicates four pages to concerns about transportation-related issues including objections to campus shuttles traversing the neighborhood.

Neighbors have long complained that the free Georgetown University Transportation Shuttle buses to Dupont Circle rattle their houses. In response, some neighbors have lobbied the university to keep the GUTS buses off Reservoir Road and Q Street, the most direct route to Dupont, even though Metrobuses run on the same streets. Instead, neighbors have asked the university to route all Dupont shuttles through the Canal Road entrance, which requires construction of a north-south roadway on campus so that the buses can turn around.

The university included this construction initiative in the Campus Plan. But the ANC’s draft proposal asks that the university begin making changes immediately, while also limiting student parking in off-campus neighborhoods. These demands are excessive, and even previous compromises seem to have been made without student and staff transportation needs in mind.

Canal Road entrance

Routing the Dupont GUTS bus out of Canal Road makes it far more difficult to get to Dupont in a reasonable time. When the University Office of Transportation Management devised new routes in 2009, it tested routes down the Whitehurst Freeway. This route is not only longer than the current rush-hour route on Q Street, but it also traverses some high-traffic areas. Of course, the current compromise route, which sends buses up Wisconsin Ave during non-rush hour traffic, is also circuitous and inconvenient. But routing the buses down Whitehurst would be even worse.

Q Street GUTS route (blue), detour up Wisconsin (red), and proposed Whitehurst route (purple).

Much larger Metrobuses also run on Reservoir Road and Q Street, and neighbors tolerate those buses on their streets. But as ANC Chair Ron Lewis told the Voice on Thursday, “The only reason the Metrobuses are on [residential] streets is that they serve stops along those roads, which are very valuable to the community.”

GUTS buses are valuable for other reasons. GUTS buses are an extensive enough fleet with a short enough route that they’re remarkably punctual. They run every 20 minutes during calm times and every five minutes during rush hour.

Also, they’re free. Taking a D6 to and from the Dupont Metro stop every day of the workweek is $60 a month—which is what many people would pay if the Dupont route became too inconvenient. That’s because only 32 percent of GUTS bus riders are students, according to a survey administered by the Georgetown University Student Association in 2008. The rest are MedStar Employees (32 percent), staff (29 percent), faculty (10 percent) or other (2 percent). Of the respondents, 53 percent rode the GUTS bus five times a week.

I ask Mr. Lewis to expand his definition of “community” to include the people who staff his hospital, the people who work at his neighborhood’s largest employer, and the 6,000 students that make up about 40 percent of his constituency. The inconvenience of GUTS buses on residential streets pales in comparison to the inconvenience that the ANC’s demands cause for students, staff, hospital workers, and community members who benefit from the shorter Dupont route.

Another possible compromise would be to combine the Dupont GUTS route and the D bus, if WMATA could work out a way for Georgetown to pay for its students and employees to get a free ride and add more frequency on the D. This would make the current shuttles also serve the community, and thereby become valuable in Mr. Lewis’s eyes.

However, the GUTS buses are more on-time than the D, and run every 5 minutes during rush hour. Merging the Dupont shuttle with the D bus could be better than rerouting the Dupont shuttle down Whitehurst, but still worse than the current buses running down Q Street.

Additional demands

Unfortunately, the university conceded the arguments about Canal Road early in the negotiations. The Campus Plan already does exactly what the ANC is proposing—just not fast enough. The commissioners demand that the north-south roadway necessary to route the buses out of Canal Road be completed within “the first year of the campus plan.”

However, there are some complications. For example, the ANC is unhappy with the actual blueprint of the western portion of the north-south roadway, fearing “environmental concerns and a lengthy and uncertain National Park Service approval process.” The commissioners ask the university to consider another location for the loop road or a north-south road with a turnaround at the northern end.

Also, a year is still too long to wait. In the meantime, the ANC asks the university to find ways to route buses out of the Canal Road entrance using existing space. They suggest, “If necessary, buses with a relatively short turning radius could be obtained; or turntable technology is available to turn buses around in a space not much larger than the length of a bus. See, for example, http://www.carousel-usa.com/large-turntable.php.”

The suggestion speaks for itself. It makes little sense for the university to invest in such extensive infrastructure when it already plans to undergo construction to implement long-term changes.

The GUTS buses also have five different routes, two of which (Rosslyn and Dupont) run every 5 minutes during rush hour. To route everything out of Canal Road, any north-south road or carousel would need to handle heavy shuttle traffic and turn buses around very quickly, or else the University would need to significantly cut service.

Students have expressed frustration that the university seems to concede on almost every argument, often to the detriment of students, and yet the ANC continues to fight the Campus Plan tooth and nail. This is exactly what we’re talking about.

Student parking

The ANC adds insult to injury with its next recommendation: prevent students from parking anywhere in 20007. The commissioners write, “GU should provide students who live on campus or in the surrounding community—both undergraduates and graduate students—with a combination of incentives, better transportation arrangements, and satellite parking to assure that GU students will not have cars in zip code 20007.”

First, making GUTS bus routes more inconvenient gives students far less of an incentive to use University transportation. To suggest that the University both reroute the GUTS buses and encourage students to use them more is disingenuous.

Second, students are highly discouraged from bringing cars to school in the status quo. The University already refuses daily or monthly parking to students who live on-campus. City law creates additional difficulties for off-campus students. In 1996, the DC Council passed a law preventing only students in certain ANCs—those districts encompassing Georgetown, George Washington, and American University—from obtaining reciprocal parking permits available to other students throughout the city. Georgetown students must get a DC driver’s license and register their vehicles in the DC to park within the ANC 2E boundaries. (Frustration about this law, which is still in effect, was one major impetus for Campaign Georgetown, the mass student voter registration drive that got two students elected to the ANC in 1996.)

As a result, I don’t personally know any undergraduates who have a car in DC. Regardless, once students move off-campus and pay rent to a landlord, the University should not interfere to further prevent them from parking their own vehicles.

It’s good policy to encourage everyone to use smart transit in order to reduce the number of cars on the road. But if the ANC were actually concerned about parking congestion, we could have a productive discussion about how to improve public transportation options. (The Campus Plan brags that GUTS buses keep 7,750 cars off residential streets every day.) Instead, the ANC only wants to discourage students from living in the neighborhood, by any means possible.

The big picture

The Campus Plan transportation proposals should give people real incentives to use public transit that is safe, convenient and environmentally friendly. The ANC’s suggestions go to great lengths to prevent the GUTS buses from operating in an efficient way—while simultaneously limiting other options. If Mr. Lewis really had the whole community in mind, he would reconsider some of the ANC’s demands.