Local officials are trying to tap into an additional round of federal stimulus money with a proposal to build a wide-ranging express bus network that would connect Laurel to Lorton, Tysons Corner to King Street.
The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board is coordinating a plan to apply for a competitive grant under President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan that could give the region up to $300 million.
The president’s program has doled out hundreds of millions to the region’s transportation agencies, but most of that money will be used for maintenance of existing roads, bridges and rails. The proposed bus program would create a new regional transportation option, by forming an interconnected network of express bus routes on dedicated lanes or given priority over regular vehicles.
Some of the proposed routes that would make up the network are already in the works, including parts of Metro’s plan to create 24 priority corridors and the District’s plan to build a dedicated busway along K Street.
“This attempts to capture all of them,” said Ronald Kirby, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments’ transportation planning director. “The network concept is really critical here. We don’t want disconnected pieces.”
The plan — and the federal money — would jump-start those now-disparate plans. Currently the K Street plan isn’t fully funded, Kirby said, while Metro’s bus corridor plan isn’t expected to be complete until 2015. Buses would be running by 2012 under the new proposal.
The latest version calls for 16 corridors, four of which would run on highways including the Intercounty Connector under construction, Interstate 270 and proposed high-occupancy toll lanes on the Shirley Highway. But last week, officials discussed adding Interstate 66 to the proposal. Kirby called it a “work in progress.”
Local officials are still awaiting guidelines from federal officials on the $1.5 billion competitive program. Kirby said the application was due in November and would be funded in February, a year after Obama signed the stimulus bill into law.
