Tired of waiting for those dinky blue Metro Connection buses? You’re in luck: Georgetown students and residents will soon have a new, affordable way to get to the Rosslyn Metro Station. Last week, the D.C. City Council approved preliminary plans for a Circulator route that will run from Dupont Circle to Rosslyn. This new route will replace the blue Metro Connection buses and will not cost the city any additional money, according to John Lisle, a spokesman for the District’s Department of Transportation.
While this new route will not make up for Georgetown’s lack of a Metro stop, it does give students another way to explore the rest of the District. The more mass transit accessible to students, the more encouragement they have to go beyond the front gates and explore beyond the Georgetown bubble.
Since its introduction in 2005, the D.C. Circulator has quickly become one of the cheapest and most reliable ways to get around the city. While the Circulator cannot match the offerings of Metrobus in terms of number of destinations, the sleek, modern buses are certainly more inviting and easier to navigate than their Metrobus siblings. The Soviet-style design of the many older Metrobuses still in service, combined with their complicated schedules, can be daunting to the uninitiated. The Circulator, by contrast, boasts a simple, color-coded map and just 10 minute intervals between buses.
The Circulator expansion provides a marked improvement on the small blue buses that currently run between Dupont and Rosslyn. The current buses have limited capacity to carry customers and a reputation for less than timely service.
This new proposed Circulator route connecting Dupont Circle and the Rosslyn Metro will benefit Georgetown residents, students, and tourists, supplementing the mass transit options already available in Georgetown. The cheap and efficient Circulator buses are among the best of the District’s mass transit offerings, and we can only hope that more routes will be coming to the rest of the city in the future.
