Washington DC Cutting Bus Routes As It Seek to Go All Electric

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Washington DC not keeping the eye on the ball has consequences.  Also free things are never free.

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Blue City Pledged Its Buses Would Go Electric. Now It’s Making Drastic Route Cuts

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 DCNF

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March 23, 2023

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The Daily Caller News Foundation – Laurel Duggan on March 23, 2023

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting routes for its DC Circulator bus program in half to save money after the city pledged to shift its buses to all electric or zero-emissions.

The city is set to have every new bus be either electric or zero-emission by 2030, which is projected to make the entire fleet electric or zero-emission by 2045, according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). Bowser’s new budget proposal, which was unveiled Monday, would cut the city’s Circulator bus routes in half, she acknowledged in a Wednesday press conference; another city administrator acknowledged that the electrification program had been costly in the same conference.

In addition to going electric, Washington has moved to make all bus rides free, which is expected to take effect in the summer.

“What you will see in my budget proposal is we don’t make huge new program investments, and that is the context that we entered this budget year in, and that I hope continues throughout the discussion,” Bowser said in the press conference. “We also, because we’re having this transit discussion, looked very closely at our costs for the DC Circulator, the ridership of the DC Circulator and how it fits into the larger transit discussion, and made the decision to recommend eliminating three of the six routes.”

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[Maya Lena]

I cannot say this for sure but I am going to venture a guess that this will not affect the accessibility of the bus too much.  The circulator busses were a subset of the metro busses and only went a short distance in some neighborhoods. They operated on a reduced cost ($1 or free?) 

Now that all of the busses are free, I’m guessing that the difference between catching a regular bus and a Circulator is minimal if the routes overlapped (which I many did). 

This article leaves out those details. 

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