The D.C. Circulator will likely be taking over one — or possibly two — Metrobus route at the end of March to expand the city’s local bus system from three looping routes to five.
The Fairfax Connector, meanwhile, is proposing to start operating three Metrobus lines this summer.
Officials from the two government-run bus services say they can offer the same service as Metro for less money. And a regional group assigned to find ways to trim Metro’s budget said the transit agency could stop providing such local bus service, Jim Graham, Metro’s chairman and a D.C. councilman, recently told The Examiner. Instead, Metro could offer regional routes that cross between communities and leave the local jurisdictions to pick up other, more local service.
Metro officials haven’t decided what, if any, service changes to make to plug an expected $154 million hole in next year’s $1.38 billion budget, but the moves already under way to implement more locally run buses mark the latest step in the splintering of the area’s bus service into a collection of smaller local bus services such as Montgomery County’s Ride On, Arlington Transit and Alexandria’s DASH.
Zachary Schrag, an assistant professor at George Mason University who wrote a history of Metro, said the shift reflected a broader trend: The transit agency is moving away from the regional decision-making role it once had while proposals for lines such as Dulles Rail and the planned Purple Line end up in other agencies’ hands.
“Certainly that was not the vision of the 1960s,” Schrag said. But he added, “All these things are cyclical.”
Before Metro began its centralized bus service in the 1970s, a collection of private companies shuttled people around the region.
Today, city and county governments say it can be cheaper for them to operate the buses than it would be for Metro to do so because they don’t face the same union labor costs of the larger transit system.
The Fairfax Connector, for example, uses a contractor to operate its buses and thus offers different wages and benefits from Metro, said Fairfax County Senior Transportation Planner Christin Wegener.
And it gives the localities control over the routes and schedules, meaning they have the ability to make changes without going through hoops at Metro.
“It will be a good change for us,” Wegener said.
For Metro, though, the change will not only eliminate the line’s operating expenses, but the transit agency will also lose both the passenger fare revenue and the subsidy from the jurisdiction that paid for the Metrobus service. That can end up being a wash in terms of operating expenses, Metro board member Christopher Zimmerman said.
Still, the switch leaves the question of the cost of the buses themselves, which are counted as capital expenses. Metro spokeswoman Candace Smith said Metro would move the buses and drivers from its old service onto other routes. But Fairfax had to buy 26 buses for the new service, Wegener said. D.C. is seeking to buy four new Circulator buses.
