Keep the Circulator on Wisconsin Ave.

In less than two weeks, the cheapest, most reliable, and most convenient transportation option serving West Georgetown will cease to exist. The Georgetown-Union Station circulator will no longer turn north up Wisconsin Avenue after slogging through the congestion of K and M Streets.

A victim of short-sighted budget cuts, the Circulator extension was a boon to Georgetown residents and students alike. Even putting aside the recent “streamlining” of the 30s lines, which occurred in 2008, and actually reduced Metro bus service to Wisconsin Avenue, the proposed cost-saving measure
will reduce service to the corridor by an outrageous extent.

Consider: the District Department of Transportation claims that the 30 Metro bus lines are an adequate substitute, arriving every 5-10 minutes during peak hours and every 10-15 minutes at other times. Officially, one out of every four Metro buses arrives more than seven minutes later than its scheduled time. The far more reliable Circulator, arriving every 10 minutes at all times, more than doubled the chances of catching a bus. Furthermore, the Circulator replaced a Blue Bus route that no longer exists, and is unlikely to be resurrected.

According to DDOT spokesman John Lisle, the Whitehaven extension carried only 2 percent of the route’s ridership, while accounting for 15 percent of its operating costs, which would be saved by shortening the route and therefore reducing the number of buses on the road by three. The ridership statistics arise from a passenger count undertaken between 7 a.m. and noon during one working week, which recorded only 30 passengers traveling on the line in the downtown direction per day. From here, the math gets fuzzy: the agency somehow extrapolated from those numbers to determine that 70 riders use the line daily, which adds up to 17,000 passengers annually. That is, only if you ignore weekends and holidays, when the Circulator is most useful and frequently full, because the Metro bus lines run so much less frequently at off-peak times. Anyone who has taken the Circulator on weekend evenings can attest to the bus’s popularity, even up to the end of the line.

But all is not lost, just yet. Councilman Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) has stepped in to try to convince the Mayor Adrian Fenty to save the branch, which will only see an increase in ridership once the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway reopens in spring 2010. In the meantime, the incident has given common cause to both Georgeotwn residents and students. It’s not everyday that the Citizens Association of Georgetown, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission of Georgetown, and Georgetown staff and students all see eye-to-eye on the same issue. Email the mayor at Adrian.Fenty@DC.gov and help save our Circulator.