Bussed Tables
We quizzed you about your favorite bus routes. You got an 90.
“The underdog of public transit has rarely had so much potential,” writes CityLab’s Laura Bliss. As Uber, Via and Lyft vie for customers, the original rideshare is quietly asserting its case
Metrobus might be less sexy than new entrants like the Circulator and the Streetcar, but for all intents and purposes, they are basically buses, too: fixed-route, road-based vehicles that carry dozens but not hundreds of people at once. And for all the media attention that goes towards Metrorail (the proper name for DC’s light-rail/subway system), Metrobus carries plenty of people, too — 123 million person-trips in 2017, compared to 180 million for Metrorail.
Because they carry so many people, buses are lower-carbon than driving or ridesharing. And they can be electrified: almost a thousand Metrobuses are hybrid-electric, and begun with the DC Circulator has begun transitioning to fully-electric vehicles.
Because they require little built infrastructure other than a sign and roads that are already there, they are flexible and lower-cost to start or stop than additional rail lines.
Finally, they’re a public service where people share space — sometimes with difficulty, certainly, but in a world of narrowing filter bubbles, there’s an argument to be made that it’s a good thing for us to rub shoulders with people from different backgrounds.
So we asked you what your favorite DC bus routes were. The most popular bus route named was actually the 96, which I now use to commute between U St and Union Station. This surprised me because it’s usually pretty easy to find a seat on the 96, and it runs less often than the other 90 buses.
I didn’t vote. But if I had, it would have more likely gone to another of the 90 buses, which follow Florida Ave — arguably the defining corridor of the city today. Or the rickety 80 that I fell asleep in every afternoon for a year, riding from an office at the Watergate to Eckington. Or the X2 that bore me from 13th and H NE into Chinatown for so many memorable rides.
Maybe I’d have tried to vote not for a route, but a paint scheme. I’m a sucker for the old white-and-blue buses, slowly being phased out, that I prefer so much to the dead-fish silver scheme WMATA now uses.
In any case, the routes you named are mapped below. In order of frequency, they are: 96, 42, S9, 43, 90, L2, G2, X2, 64, 59, 73, 79, 80, D6, H1, 92, 70, 54, L1, G8, S2, 37, 52, 38B, X9, H2, G9, 74, S1, P6, S4, H8, E4, D2, H4, X1, B2, A9, 53, D8, D6, and N2/4/6.
We used a simple text-entry box for the survey. This was easier than creating a multiple-choice with all 269 individual bus routes. However, it led to very uneven answers. Some people named more than one bus route; others gave a general answer, like “the X buses,” or “Circulator.”
To deal with this, I wondered whether aggregating the answers by their general affilation — denoted by the first character of the route name — might help.
By this measure, the 90 buses still take the top spot. There may be something to their axis — NW to SE — that drives their popularity: that route is notably underserved by Metro.
What makes the 90’s popularity even more interesting is that most of the rest of the top spots were taken by obvious commuter routes. The next couple slots were taken by buses that basically take people north-south between NW and downtown: the 42 runs from Mount Pleasant to Gallery Place, and the S buses run north-south along 16th. After that, the G buses go from Rhode Island locations like LeDroit and Bloomingdale into downtown, and the X does the same for H St. (The 50, 70, and several other routes also follow this pattern.)
The 90 buses basically skirt downtown. That makes them relatively unique. Is that why they’re so popular? I don’t know. But people do seem to love them.
