EDA meeting about GEORGE
Yesterday, over lunch, we had a special EDA meeting to discuss the GEORGE bus situation. Normally the EDA meets just once per month but we didn’t get to talk about GEORGE in our March meeting and with our April meeting pushed back by a week to accommodate Spring Break we wouldn’t have had time to get any feedback to the City Council before they have to make final budget decisions.
In addition to most of the EDA members, there were a couple of folks from the Falls Church Times in attendance as well as the City’s EDO staff, City Manager Wyatt Shields, and Wendy Block Sanford from the City’s planning staff who has the most knowledge about GEORGE. Wendy gave us the presentation that she gave the City Council during their work session last Thursday.
I think the EDA will come out with “official” recommendations to the City Council in the next couple of days, so I won’t jump the gun on those.
One interesting aspect of this issue is that the GEORGE service is fairly unsupervised by the City. Prior to digging into the service as a result of the budget planning, which is what Wendy has been working on, the City basically leaves things up to WMATA. It sounds like WMATA sends the City a bill for managing the service but some aspects aren’t understood well by the City. For example, the City seems to realize about 50% of the full fare based on ridership numbers. For example, with 70,000 trips when the fare is set at $0.50 the City sees only about $18k of the potential $35k. We know that several factors impact that number. Some developers have been given bus passes in exchange for investments supporting GEORGE. There are days in the summer when the bus is free due to extreme weather conditions. There’s also the issue of transfers to and from Metrobus and Metrorail (and reasearch shows that 99% of GEORGE riders do transfer in one direction or the other). The problem is that we don’t really understand how that works and it sounds like WMATA doesn’t provide any kind of a statement explaining it.
For example, we talked about one of the recommendations - which was increasing the fare from $0.50 to $1.00 or more. However, it wasn’t clear if we would see only $0.50 from a $1.00 fare or if we would see something closer to $0.75. Ultimately though, with the ridership numbers we see on GEORGE, another option would be to just make the bus free.
There were a few other aspects of the bus service that the City staff is still trying to sort out. I’m sure it’s a daunting job to ramp up on all the details quickly to help the City Council make critical budget decisions. Wendy seems to be doing a great job at it - but I get the sense that WMATA isn’t the easiest organization to deal with. I also get the sense that GEORGE is a very small fish in the WMATA pond so that probably makes things even more difficult.
Overall, I thought the meeting was productive and interesting. I know I’ve learned a lot about public transportation. I encourage folks to come out and see one of these meetings in person. I find it encouraging to see volunteers (EDA members, concerned citizens, etc.) working with paid City staff to try and find solutions to real problems that we’re facing.
Without speaking too soon on the conclusions we came to (obviously we’re still sorting out the finer details of our recommendations), I think most of us felt like the current bus service is very inefficient and almost impossible to justify but the idea of a local bus service seems like a good one - we just have to figure out how to have it make sense.
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