WASHINGTON — A new report card said Metrobus is barely making the mark. D.C. Metro Hero and the Coalition for Smarter Growth just handed the transit system a "D" grade.
Researchers analyzed 34 key bus routes in The District, saying "service was found to be largely unreliable and unpredictable."
"It’s not consistent," rider Lamar Jones, one of the 200,000 D.C. riders who take Metrobus each day, said. "The schedules don’t seem to mean anything."
The report named five key fixes to make buses move faster. More dedicated bus lanes top the list. The District launched red bus lanes downtown last month.
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Researchers stress there is a path away from a failing grade.
"D means there’s still hope," Stewart Schwartz, executive director for Coalition for Smarter Growth, said. "Some of that hope is in the H and I Street bus lanes."
But the new lanes are only a trial run. When you include that, D.C. has only two miles of dedicated bus lanes city-wide.
Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said Metrobus can trend in the right direction, but only if it gets some help.
"We don’t control the roads and we have to get the local governments to support us in that and they are," Wiedefeld said. "The district is in particular and that’s where a lot of the bottleneck starts."