Welcome to the Street Justice Newsletter

This is a daily newsletter produced by Gordon Chaffin, a journalist in Washington DC. I cover transportation & urban planning in DC, MD, & VA to explain what’s happening in the street and why. Subscribe for free or sign up for an ad-free experience.

I added a bunch more organizations to my calendar, so the reporting plan at the bottom of each edition will now have ANC committees and other 6-people-in-a-room kind of monthly meetings. I’ve got all the ANCs, all their transportation committees, and many of the DC-area citizen advisory groups. The more you look into things, the more local government and community meetings you’ll find. It’s amazing how every aspect of the street, and all other aspects of the built environment, get created or not after passing through so many unheard of and democratically unaccountable bodies. As you’ll see below, the first week of every month, I get hammered with events to cover. (Green being events on my beat.)

I’ve gotten several rejections in the last few days from journalism gigs I applied to last fall. It’s been a real bummer. But, then I remember I show those fuckers everyday that I’m a damn fine journalist. The work I do with this newsletter is a big fuck you to those hundreds of rejections I’ve gotten in the last few years from journalism outfits. The Washington Post thought I wasn’t good enough to be their Transportation Writer when Martine Powers left that beat. No offense to Luz, Faiz, Ashley and them, but I would’ve kicked ass as their transport writer. Street Justice is proof.

DDOT, VADOT, and MDOT Probably Determine WMATA’s Bus Future

It’s Bus to Work Day today in DC, also known as Transit Equity Day. Like Metrorail, Washington buses have many fewer riders than before. Like the drop in rail ridership, we can’t pinpoint a reason more than we can pick a half-dozen of them. That causal mush is something WMATA’s studying right now as part of a re-do of the Metrobus system.

The January 2019 report from WMATA’s bus re-do effort is the latest proof for need of a significant change to halt continued suckitude in DC’s bus system. Survey data from last Fall say people ride the bus less now because of “infrequent service and slow bus speeds. [Survey] Respondents prioritized improving the frequency of service and reliability of trips.” (p 3) When that report says Metrobus is “not built around the customer’s needs and expectations,” they mean the buses don’t come enough, don’t come when they’re supposed to, get stuck in traffic, and fail to compete with newer transportation options for anyone with means to make other choices.

Some facts from that WMATA bus transformation report:

Metrobuses went 10 mph on average in 2018, compared to 11 mph in 2008. That’s a big drop when considering comparable cities. Among cited reasons: increased congestion, more on-street parking, poor enforcement of increasing numbers of vehicles standing curbside for deliveries or drop-offs, & more frequent bus stops.

Metrobus ridership is down 13 percent in the last five years. Reasons include more options like Uber/Lyft and more diverse commuting and travel patterns.

51 percent of Metrobus trips happen *outside* rush hour and 85 percent of those trips *do not* involve a transfer to Metrorail.

Half of Metrobus riders are low income, more than half live without a car. Or is it that they can’t afford one? 51 percent of Metrobus riders live in DC, a third live in Maryland, and 16 percent live in Virginia. Those ridership demographics are more disadvantaged than the DC area as a whole and Metrorail’s ridership demos. NoVA has more local bus services than MoCo and PGco, so that maybe explains the Commonwealth’s low ridership portion.

Operating losses for Metrobus go up 3.6 percent every year averaged over the last four, with cost growth at 2.9 percent and revenue growth at 0.9 percent, both averaged over the last four years.

Increased personnel costs account for *80 percent* of the cost increases in the last four years. Other reasons for increased costs include more time driving their fleet around without passengers and slower bus speeds. They say 1 mph faster service means four percent less operating costs.

WMATA’s bus report goes through case studies from other cities to discuss options to rescue a flailing bus system. Portland gave buses priority at traffic signals, which only a few DC area intersections have. Seattle added some bus lanes, but really King County invested a bunch more money into the bus system with a ballot measure. Would DC areas do that? The SF Bay Area created a regional governance structure overseeing 26 Bay Area transit entities in nine counties and gave it more power and funding than similar structures in other metro areas. I don’t know how likely DC area governments would be to do this. Metro’s current governing structure is a punching bag for all the stakeholders right now.

The most effective intervention was from London, where they instituted a toll/road price/congestion fee in a 13-square mile area within the inner city. My favorite aspect of this is you can’t (yes, can not) enter the city with an internal-combustion car. This is now true of many of Europe’s big cities. This from the wonderfully forward-thinking continent where entire countries are banning ICE cars. In London, you have to pay $15.21 per day to enter the city 7 AM to 6 PM with free nights and weekends. Bus ridership in London increased 38 percent. That’s 5 times the increase in America’s best-performing bus transit cities.

I dream that Muriel Bowser would one day stand at the 14th Street Bridge and demand $15 from Virginians driving into DC, but that’s unlikely. WMATA’s bus re-do folks set three objectives for their effort: (1) Derive maximum value from our existing roadway infrastructure, (2) Better match service and demand; and (3) Speed up point-to-point travel for workers, tourists, and families. The report says changes are needed to three areas for those objectives to be served: changes to (1) governance, (2) funding structure, and (3) political priority.

My informed speculation is that this bus transformation will involve consolidation of existing bus routes (pursuant to the first number two above) that serve arterial roads like Georgia Ave NW and Minnesota Ave SE. They’ll make stops less frequent and sell it as making the system less confusing to understand as a rider. They’ll probably do a few signal upgrades to favor buses and some small dollar street infrastructure improvements. The press releases for these will sell incremental evolution as revolution.

I look forward to seeing what this transformation group concludes later this year, but the actual paradigm shifting changes seem unlikely. DC needs a London-style gambit, where political priorities change and delivering buses through streets becomes more important than doing so for cars. Another way to read the first number two above — better match service and demand — is to give people a constant, reliable, fast transportation service. That’s what the want and why people with options are leaving. That quality of service requires radically changing the streets. That means permanent, enforced bus lanes. That means reducing cars on the road by 20 percent with tolls and congestion pricing. That means DDOT, VaDOT, and MDOT — the people who actually run the streets — need to re-take hundreds (thousands?) of street miles for bus travel.

Here are three recent episodes that dissuade me from predicting DC area governments will invest more in their bus systems.

When WMATA’s Board discusses their next budget and late-night service, they suggest vouchers for or partnerships with Uber/Lyft. They don’t suggest new late-night bus services that connect to the early-closing rail stations. And is weekend service more important than late night? Why not run more buses on Saturday, instead of Metrorail?

When Maryland said last week they’ll be rebuilding and widening the American Legion Bridge, not a single word was said about buses getting through that choke point. They’re making sure to connect seamlessly to VA’s toll lanes across the river, and the bridge rebuild would connect toll lanes to Gov’ Hogan’s Beltway and 270 widening project. But, none of this widening or disruption includes space allocation for or even mention of public transit. I swear to God, they’re forcing the project to stack more car lanes into the air or underground and they’re not even sketching out a bus rapid transit lane, even though MD already has a theoretical bus rapid transit plan.

When Virginia said last month they’ll be expanding toll lanes on I-95 down to the Occoquan and West from Tysons to the Maryland line, nothing was announced that will improve rapid bus services in those roads or give more reserved space for buses.

If you read their press releases, it’s easy to conclude DC area governments forget the bus even exists. In the daily events and meetings I cover, it’s obvious that on-street parking and car travel lanes matter to leaders more than a better bus service. And yes, in most cases, it is a zero-sum situation literally due to space or figuratively due to induced demand.

Aaron Gordon, my colleague in transportation reporting and fellow newsletter-as-your-job entrepreneur, wrote a good piece last week on the bus. “For those who don’t know, our buses are in a state of crisis far surpassing what is going on with the subway.” He’s talking about NYC’s buses there. Arguably the highest quality bus system in America. Aaron continues: “The buses are too damn slow. Very little has been done to make them faster. Anyone who has a choice will opt for something quicker.”

You should read Aaron’s whole diagnosis of bus suck-ery, and subscribe to his newsletter about NYC’s transit system: Signal Problems. But, here’s where the real key is on the bus being crappy: “The wholly predictable result of these changes is that the people who still depend on the bus are generally our city’s most politically powerless. Bus ridership has higher percentages of lower-income, foreign-born, older, and person-of-color riders than the subway.”

And there it is: bus ridership is whittled down now to nearly only the people who absolutely need the bus. The fact that the bus sucks, and isn’t the best as it possibly could be, shows how a city’s leaders deal with other peoples’ problems first — in NYC, in DC, probably everywhere in the country. Prioritizing cars on the street more than transit is caring about the complaints of people with options over the needs of people with none.

This Week’s Reporting Plan