June Northwest Georgetown ANC Update

Hello, and welcome to your June northwest Georgetown ANC update! Although the recent weather sure has made it feel more like March, I assure you that it is actually June.

Bus Changes and Stop Eliminations

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to again warn you that the entire WMATA bus system is about to change dramatically. Starting on June 29th, every single route in the city will bear a new name, and a majority of them will travel new routes.

For a reminder, this is what I wrote last month:

I’ve described the changes in detail here, but here is a handy thumbnail description of how the existing Georgetown lines will appear starting June 29th:

D2: This will now be called the D96 and it will now travel from Bethesda all the way to Foggy Bottom. The Georgetown to Dupont section will largely remain the same.

G2: This will now be called the C91. It will still travel from Georgetown University to Howard University. But instead of traveling along O, P, and Dumbarton through Georgetown, it will travel on Q St.

D6: This will now be called the D94. It will still travel to Sibley, but no longer will it go eastward to RFK. It will now terminate in Chinatown.

38B: This will now be called the A58. It will still travel from Farragut out to Balston, by way of Georgetown, but now it will continue onward all the way to Seven Corners.

30 Series: The 30 series will be replaced with the D80 and the D82. Through Georgetown it will mostly be the same (although with an unfortunate number of eliminated bus stops). The D80 will travel to Union Station (like the current 33) and the D82 will go to Foggy Bottom (like the current 31).

Finally there will be a novel new route called the C85. It will travel from Foggy Bottom, along M St. through Georgetown. It will then head out to MacArthur Blvd. in the Palisades in order to reach the new MacArthur High School. Then it will wind its way back through Glover Park and up through Ward 3.

What I want to discuss this month is the euphemistically named “bus stop consolidation” that WMATA is also deploying at the end of the month. In English what this means is that WMATA is eliminating a bunch of bus stops.

I’ll get to the detail of the eliminations below, but first let me explain WMATA’s justification for eliminating bus stops. The first is most obvious: with bus route changes, certain bus stops are no longer along a bus route anymore. For instance, the G2 stops in east Georgetown are all being eliminated because the G2 replacement, the C91, will no longer wind its way through the middle of east Georgetown. It will now travel up on 35th St., hang a right on Q St., and then head to Dupont from there. So all the G2 stops that aren’t on that route will be eliminated.

The second justification is a bit less obvious and is a bit more controversial. Essentially the idea is that if buses have fewer stops along a route, they will move faster since they’ll stop less frequently. In theory this makes sense, but it may make less sense from your individual perspective if your bus stop is one of the ones that gets eliminated. (It reminds me of the old Onion headline “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others”). Whatever time savings might be gained by the people whose stops weren’t cut comes at a cost of the extra time people whose stops were cut have to spend to walk to/from a more distant stop. In other words, it’s certainly good to speed buses, but if you’re degrading service in the process, the benefits might not be worth it.

So what are the Georgetown bus stops WMATA is proposing to eliminate?

It’s best to look at each bus route to describe them.

First the good news: no stops that currently service the D2 or the D6 are being eliminated. That also means that many of these stops will also service the G2-replacement.

Now for the bad news: some stops on the Wisconsin Ave./M St. lines are being cut. The less bad news is that the cuts to these stops are not quite as bad as it initially seemed when WMATA announced them. That’s because the document announcing the stop eliminations described the stops by location, not direction. So, for instance, it announced that the Wisconsin and P stop and the Wisconsin and N stop were being eliminated. That would make it seem that there will be no stop between M st. and Q St. on Wisconsin Ave.

But that’s not correct. WMATA is proposing to eliminate those two stops in only one direction each (southbound for the first and northbound for the second).

These are the actual stops on the Wisconsin and M St. routes and whether they will continue or not:

Southbound Eliminated?

Wisc. and 34th No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and P Yes

Wisc. and Dumb No

M and Wisc. No*

M and TJ Yes*

Penn and 28th No

Northbound

Penn and 28th No

M and 30th Yes*

M and 31st No*

Wisc. and N Yes

Wisc. and P No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and 34th No

So for the 30 series replacements, when you’re going downtown the eliminated stops are the one in front of Lutece and the one in front of the Barnes and Noble. When you’re heading back to Georgetown from downtown, the eliminated stops are the one in front of Sprinkles and the one in front of J. Crew Ralph Lauren.

Additionally, the asterixes next to a couple of the stops relate to the the 38B replacement (the A58). It will in fact continue to stop at M and 30th (in front of Sprinkles) and M and Thomas Jefferson (in front of the Barnes and Noble). It will also continue to use the stops west of Wisconsin that it currently uses. But it won’t continue to stop at M and 31st (in front of the Urban Outfitters) or M and Wisconsin (in front of the Capital One Cafe). Essentially they took the four stops on M between 30th and Wisconsin and split them up, one half will keep being used by the 30 series replacement and the other half by the 38B replacement. This has the added annoyance of making it more difficult for a rider heading downtown to simply wait at one stop and take whichever bus comes first.

The only stop on M or Wisconsin to be fully removed is the one in front of J. Crew Ralph Lauren.

While these eliminations are not as bad as they may have seemed at first, they are still not good. To eliminate four of sixteen former 30 Series bus stops in Georgetown will impact people who travel to or from Georgetown by bus. And I think the J. Crew Ralph Lauren stop elimination is probably the worst. Now the buses will travel all the way from the Urban Outfitters to P St. before stopping again. That’s a big stretch without a stop for a dense commercial area.

WMATA does not seem interested in undoing these changes, especially since they’ve already installed signs for the new routes and stops. But the ANC will discuss adopting a resolution Monday night to request some or all these eliminations be reconsidered. Maybe we can bring them back eventually.

Repaving

Some residents living on or near the 3300 block of Reservoir Rd. have reached out to me recently to complain about the state of the road surface on that block. Walking down the block I could see that, indeed, the road is in terrible shape. I reached out to the city to get this block prioritized for repaving. Unfortunately, staffing shortages due to the budget shortfall made it difficult to get an answer back promptly. But I did learn that DDOT will send inspectors to evaluate the surface to see if it needs repaving.

It should be fairly obvious that it does. The challenge is that the city’s dashboard mistakenly states that the block was paved in the 2020 fiscal year. It definitely wasn’t. You can even use old Google streetviews to see the current pot holes grow over time, like some family album.

For instance, here’s one bad spot from last December:

Here’s that same spot in May 2021:

And in November 2015:

In fact, you can got back to July 2009 and see the beginning of the cracks that continue to grow today:

Clearly this block has not be repaved in at least sixteen years. Probably longer.

Hopefully the DDOT engineers will recognize the obvious, but to nudge them along I will be proposing a resolution Monday night asking them to prioritize this block.

Let me know if your block is being similarly neglected!

Quick Notes:

• Reminder: Volta Park field day and cocktail fundraiser this Saturday. Buy tickets for the party here!

• MPD announced the arrest of an individual suspected of car break-ins on the 3400 blocks of Q and R streets. Thank you to MPD for their diligence!

• Here are all the closures in Georgetown over the past 18 months or so. Keep an eye out for my complete report soon.