Are You Waiting Too Long for the Bus? Meet with Metro this Evening

How long is your wait for the S2 or S4 on 16th Street NW? Residents in the area have been sharing their concerns about the long waits and how full the Metrobuses are (or are not) as they bypass bus stops during their morning commutes.

The routes on the 16th Street bus line have the highest ridership in the DC.

Kishan Putta, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for District 2B04, has invited residents of the area to a meeting with  Jim Hamre, director of Bus Planning for Metro today, January 28, at 7:30 pm at the DC Jewish Community Center (16th & Q Streets NW) to discuss this problem and any other transit issues residents may have (14th Street buses, too).

These are excerpts from emails sent by residents to Putta, whose district includes a swath of 16th Street NW:

“Just this week (Tues, Wed, and today, Thurs), it has taken me 45-50 minutes to get from 16th & V to 14th & I, and anywhere from 4 to 6 buses have passed the stop each morning because they are too crowded to accept any more passengers.  (Also, on Tuesday morning, 2 buses that had hardly anyone standing passed us by in the cold).  There are usually 15-20 people waiting at V St in the mornings.  Thanks again for the chance to provide input to Metro.”

 “The bus issue is particularly aggravating for me.  The bus stops immediately outside my building and drops me off a block from my office, but it’s completely unusable.  S2/S4 buses are often full and do not stop, but a second issue is that during morning rush hour, it seems like the majority of the buses go to McPherson Square, not Federal Triangle, which does me (and I’d suspect many other commuters) little to no good at all.”

 “It’s not fair that people who happen to live farther north are able to catch any bus that arrives, while we get passed by bus after bus – some days my commute is 15 minutes, sometime it’s 40 minutes.”

 “Apps like NextBus are useless because even if I track buses and time my walk to catch them, they are usually full and won’t stop.  I often get frustrated by all the buses that refuse to stop that I will just give up and take a cab.”

 “Sometimes the buses are so full that they drop people off, but STILL refuse to take new passengers – it’s a really depressing/frustrating/stressful start to my day.”

“I would note that a big part of the problem is that many buses do, in fact, have room but the drivers do not ask people to move back so it looks like they’re full from up front (nothing is more frustrating than watching a half-empty bus speed by or refuse to open its doors).”

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