American mass transportation is on the ropes. As big city systems face annual deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars, their leaders are urgently seeking new public funding that can maintain current operations. In the meantime, they’re welcoming any measures to make bus and train trips faster, safer, and more reliable—the kind of service, in other words, that passengers will happily pay to use, strengthening transit finances in the process.
In Washington, D.C., the K Street Transitway is the sort of project that transit leaders tend to love. The city has allocated $123 million to revamp the famous downtown corridor, including a car-free bus lane to speed up transit trips, along with new traffic islands and trees to provide shelter for pedestrians as well as a two-way cycle track on L Street, one block north.
But last week, two members of the D.C. Council threw a wrench in the city’s plans. Instead of revamping K Street, Council Chair Phil Mendelson and Councilmember Charles Allen proposed scrapping the transitway project and reallocating its funding to provide fare-free bus service for local residents. If the councilmembers get their way, the district will join a growing list of cities that have ceased collecting bus fares.
Fare-free backers, including progressive elected officials like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, have framed it as an equity issue, noting (accurately) that most bus riders have significantly lower incomes than the general population. They have also pointed out that all mass transit systems in the U.S. already receive subsidies; eliminating fares merely increases them. But skeptics, including many transit professionals, have urged officials to focus first on improving transit service, rather than making it free—especially since agencies face a fiscal cliff that could lead to sharply reduced operations. The fares are not enough to cover service, but they help.
Nevertheless, advocates for fare-free transit have insisted that cities can drop fares while still improving riders’ experiences. “There doesn’t have to be a trade-off between affordability and service,” said Allen, of the D.C. Council, in a press release last December. But five months later, that is exactly the choice the district now faces: Should improving transit service or eliminating bus fares be a higher priority?
The closer you look at the question, the more obvious the answer becomes. Plans for the K Street Transitway should be strengthened and then implemented as quickly as possible—not cast aside in favor of a policy of dubious value.
First, the specifics: Anyone who has visited K Street can see that its current configuration makes little sense. “K Street is very inefficient and unsafe,” said Everett Lott, the director of the D.C. Department of Transportation. “It’s outdated.”
Beyond the stop-and-go congestion, drivers and pedestrians are easily confused by service lanes adjacent to the main traffic lanes. Bus riders endure slow and unpredictable journey times, and those brave enough to ride a bike risk being struck by a moving car or doored by a parked one. K Street is awful for pedestrians, too; tree cover is sparse, and the wide roadway offers minimal protection. The street is so dangerous that it earned a spot on the district’s list of problem roadways, known as its High Injury Network.
The K Street Transitway presents an opportunity to address many of these shortcomings. The plan’s centerpieces are new bus-only lanes down the middle of K Street—the first of their kind in the district—that will speed up bus trip times by around 30 percent, according to the city’s transportation department. Wider flower boxes, new traffic islands, and over 100 new trees would provide protection for pedestrians and improve the thoroughfare’s appearance. The original K Street plan also included new protected bike lanes running in both directions.
The transitway project could allow the district to achieve myriad goals at once. Faster bus trips benefit predominantly low-income riders while attracting new passengers who could otherwise drive, thereby reducing congestion and pollution. The streetscape upgrades could strengthen Vision Zero, the city’s commitment to eliminate crash deaths, which has been floundering. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration recently frustrated cycling advocates by bowing to business concerns and agreeing to move the transitway’s planned bike lanes one block north to L Street, but that is still better than the status quo. A safer, more attractive, and more accessible K Street would provide a tailwind to downtown’s post-COVID recovery.
But Mendelson and Allen have proposed axing the transitway project and keeping K Street the car-clogged, dangerous mess that it is. They suggest reallocating $123 million from the transitway to finance fare-free bus trips for district residents. The costs of shelving the K Street Transitway are obvious, but the benefits of eliminating bus fares are far less certain.
Allen, in particular, has been a champion of fare-free transit for years, touting its potential to provide a “deep, immediate, meaningful impact for working families all across our city.” He played a pivotal role corralling the D.C. Council to approve funding for fare-free buses last December. But Allen and other councilmembers were caught off guard in March when the city’s independent chief financial officer announced that the city lacked the revenue to implement the bill. Searching for a new source of funds, he and Mendelson turned to the K Street Transitway.
Allen told the local news site DCist that his proposed reallocation offers a “faster way to ensure this investment equitably benefits residents in neighborhoods that depend on transit.” It’s not at all clear that is the case. TransitCenter, a national nonprofit, found that most transit users care more about the speed and reliability of their trips than about their cost. That finding mirrors local preferences: A survey released last month by the Riders’ Advisory Council of WMATA, the D.C. region’s transit system, found that “Long-term Health of the Metro System and Consistency of Operations” was passengers’ top concern—not fares.
Making the bus free would also do nothing to protect those walking or biking, as the K Street Transitway project could. Nor would it help the district achieve its sustainability goals by reducing driving, because drivers consider trip times more than transit fares when deciding whether to take the bus instead. No city that has experimented with fare-free transit—including Kansas City and Salt Lake City as well as Talinn, Estonia—has demonstrably reduced car trips.
Dumping the K Street Transitway in favor of fare-free transit would place WMATA in an even more precarious situation than it is in. Already facing a nine-figure annual deficit, the agency, which also runs the Metro subway system, needs more paying riders in order to maintain current service, let alone expand it. Projects like the K Street Transitway can attract new passengers by making bus trips more competitive with cars, but eliminating fares does nothing to close WMATA’s yawning budget gap.
“We’ve developed the K Street Transitway as part of the Better Bus Network Redesign with WMATA,“ said DDOT’s Lott. “All up and down K Street will be connecting points with Metrorail and other bus lines. Without the transitway, those buses are competing with lots of cars. If you want to offer free Metrobus for all, but individuals cannot conveniently and safely use the bus because they’re stuck in traffic, they’re going to choose to drive instead.”
Allen said that the K Street Transitway “was designed for a downtown that no longer exists” after the pandemic, as property owners and retailers struggle to regain tenants and attract customers. Fair enough—downtown D.C. remains noticeably emptier than it was before March 2020. But if Allen is concerned about the central business district’s future, he and his colleagues should work with the Bowser administration to restore the protected bike lanes on K Street and expand the transitway’s beautification elements, which would attract more people walking and cycling (who shop much more than most business owners realize). Gerren Price, the leader of the DowntownDC business improvement district, said at a press conference that “What [the new Council proposal] will do, by eliminating K Street and by eliminating all the really important investments in transit efficiency … will absolutely have a net negative impact on downtown’s recovery.”
District of Columbia officials now face a decision: Will they improve transit service, strengthen Vision Zero, reduce emissions, and breathe new life into an iconic but outdated thoroughfare? Or will they leave a terrible street design intact in order to drop bus fares, dismissing riders’ preference for faster travel?
Meanwhile, fare-free transit has been floated by elected officials in places from Los Angeles to New York City. As more cities consider eliminating fares, urban residents should heed a lesson from D.C.’s experience: Tradeoffs between improving transit quality and going fare-free are real. You truly can’t have it both ways.
