WMATA redesigned its entire bus network last year. Why fewer people are riding and buses are now going slower is a bit of a mystery. (Jazmyn Gray, Open Data DC, Maddie Poore)
A year after the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority reconfigured its entire bus network with the goal of improving service, ridership is down and buses are actually moving slower than they were before – frustrating both riders and Metro officials alike.
After years of growth, about seven percent fewer riders took the bus in the year since the initiative rolled out. And buses, on average, are moving half a mile per hour slower. The declines in speed and ridership began in early 2025, before the redesign, but they have continued since. And no one is entirely sure why.
While WMATA has made enormous strides in reputation and reliability over the past decade, the majority of the gains have been on Metrorail. “We need to aggressively try to move our bus network better. It's probably the number one thing that I and the agency gets criticized for,” Metro General Manager Randy Clarke told The 51st, saying it needs to run more service and work on reliability. “But probably the thing that I actually spend the most amount of time driving the staff crazy at is bus service.”
The original Metrobus network had been cobbled together over decades without a master plan in a region that has grown dramatically. So, after three years of planning and with a mandate not to increase its budget, the transit agency rolled out an initiative that reconsidered (and renamed) every single route last July.
WMATA aimed to have bus service reach as many people as possible as efficiently as possible, with particular attention to people who rely on it for work and social services. While hundreds of stops and less-used or circuitous lines were axed, major corridors got more service and suburbs that had turned into job hubs got new centrifugal connections. The promise was in the name of the project: “Better Bus.”
In some ways that promise has been met. The most heavily used routes got more frequent service, 27 percent more people have access to routes with 12 minute headways or better, and 20,000 more jobs are reachable by bus in under an hour, the agency says. The network redesign was not just revenue neutral; it actually saved Metro operating costs while increasing service.
Neela Ghoshal called the new D2X a “godsend” for commuting from her home in Capitol View at the city’s eastern corner; she has a shorter walk and a speedier ride because the bus goes all the way down East Capitol Street via Benning Road. “I can now get home from H Street, where I work, nearly as fast as driving,” she said.
Instead of a 15-minute walk, Marvin Brown in Congress Heights said he now has multiple bus options to the nearest Metro station. “As a result, I ride the bus significantly more than I used to and also use it to get home rather than walking,” he said.
But other riders lost out. And those that did are frustrated that they haven’t gotten the benefits they expected from the cuts.
"What was the point of shortening routes if the buses aren’t coming any more frequently?" asked Charlotte Schwartz, a Ward 6 resident who misses her old crosstown connection on the D6 bus that went from Stadium Armory to Sibley Hospital. The replacement D24 “now only goes to Metro Center and it doesn’t come any more often,” she said.
Sebastian Fluker, a Ward 4 resident, told The 51st that his partner is now more likely to drive after WMATA eliminated the most convenient route to their house. And a former G8 rider wrote that the changes in his new route, the D34, have made it harder for him to get around because it doesn’t go to the same places and the bus gets stuck in more traffic on New York Avenue; he’s now more likely to bike or take a cab.
Fewer people taking public transportation means more traffic. And “transit, unlike other kinds of quasi-government services, gets better with more people using it,” Clarke says, contrasting it with 911 or firefighting. “Metro actually gets more efficient and safer the more people that use it.”
Clarke has repeatedly emphasized that the D.C. transit system is likely to grow through new bus routes rather than hugely expensive train lines – telling The 51st that he’d like to see Metrobus move half a million people on weekdays. Right now the number is shy of 400,000.
But buses are also far more at the mercy of human behavior: whether the driver shows up to work on time, whether riders board slowly or quickly, whether someone in a car is blocking the bus lane. And most critically, the agency has little say over the roads.
In the year since the redesign, monthly bus speeds dropped over half a mile, from 9.8 to 9.3 miles per hour, according to federal data. And it’s even worse during rush hour. Metro says weekday morning rush hour speeds have been dropping steadily since the year before Better Bus launched: 8.4 mph in May 2024, 7.6 mph in May 2025, and 7.4 mph in May 2026. While the slowdown coincides with federal return-to-office mandates in early 2025, buses are slower than they were before the pandemic led to regular telework.
About half the decrease in speed in the federal data after Better Bus came from making schedules longer so buses are more likely to arrive on time. Metro says that the reliability metric is now at its highest in three years (although it is still only 76.5 percent). Why speeds got worse beyond that — even as overall travel in the area has declined slightly and about 5 percent of bus stops were eliminated — is a bit of a mystery.
Both speeds and ridership have declined even in places where the routes were unchanged, like Georgia Avenue, where Metro says usage is down 10 percent and speed down 9 percent.
Part of it may be that it’s challenging to improve service without adding dedicated bus lanes. The D.C. region has far fewer bus lanes than other major American cities, especially ones with a bus network its size. There are only about 14 miles of “bus-only” red-striped lanes around D.C., and nothing stops people from parking or driving in them. Cameras have logged 75,000 tickets for blocking bus lanes this year.
“We don't have a lot of dedicated roadway in this region, and we're at the whim of that,” Clarke says.
Before Metro released its own assessment last month, Brian Dew, a data analyst and blogger in Dupont Circle, had decided to evaluate the redesign. He pulled the federal speed data and was surprised at the result. “I thought buses were going to get faster,” he said.
But he also wondered if this was a specific problem to Better Bus, so he looked at other cities that reconfigured their bus network over the past decade. Out of 14, he found, only two now have faster buses. Both of those cities added new bus-only lanes or traffic signals that allow buses to jump ahead of traffic at the same time. “Every time these agencies did a bus redesign and didn’t also add bus lanes or signal priority, the bus speeds fell,” Dew said.
Metro has seen this effect as well. Buses on H and I streets, which both have bus lanes, have seen speeds increase by 4 percent between May 2025 and 2026. Buses on 16th Street are now 6 percent faster. But when the lane doesn’t go the full length of the route, Metro says, they speed up in one segment and then get caught in delays elsewhere. The D74 on Columbia Road NW is a good example: Speed has nearly doubled on the stretch that got priority treatment, from 3.4 mph to 6.4 mph. But the overall average of the route remains stuck at around 6 mph.
When Metro started planning Better Bus, the city was set to build a bus-only corridor down K Street, which would’ve increased the speed of several key crosstown bus lines. It was an idea that dates back nearly two decades, but the plan stalled, meaning that Metro wasn’t able to deliver on a key segment of the Better Bus plan as initially envisioned.
The ridership loss, meanwhile, is due at least partially to streamlining places where service overlaps with neighboring jurisdictions — particularly Montgomery County’s RideOn, Metro says. The transit agency also notes that overall travel in the region is down about 2.5 percent since the second Trump administration began. People who rely on the bus may be particularly likely to travel less right now.
“The loss of 100,000 jobs in our region has affected everything, including transportation – commute trips in particular and add to that this horrible crackdown on… our hard-working immigrant community,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the pro-transit Coalition for Smarter Growth. “Many of them may not be taking transit now for safety reasons.”
Meanwhile people who commute some but not all of the time “have gotten out of the transit habit,” he said. There are still more than 100,000 fewer daily riders on Metrorail than there were in 2019.
The good news for those mourning their old bus routes is that the agency is continuing to tweak and add service. The budget Metro passed in April increased frequency on five routes and expanded service on five more. The agency says it’s slowly working towards an expanded “visionary” bus network that would restore some lost routes while adding frequency and hours. For example, the D24 will run more frequently under this year’s budget.
Paying for those changes is an ongoing challenge, however; an effort last year to get regional leaders to devote more money to bus service was met with resistance from jurisdictions under economic stress.
Ward 7 councilmember Wendell Felder says that while Metro has been responsive to his constituents’ concerns about longer walks and more transfers, better planning coordination could have prevented some of the growing pains. “It is not clear that the changes fully considered how people actually use the bus,” he said.
Metro is also pushing to build its own dedicated bus lanes rather than waiting for the city to do it.
“We are willing to jump in and help our partners take some of the political heat and do the technical work,” Clarke said at a Metro board meeting in June. Among the goals: a “Gold Line” bus service from the new Commanders stadium to Georgetown via Union Station — a connection promised but never delivered by the D.C. Streetcar that shut down in March.
A spokesman for the District Department of Transportation said in a statement that the city is working on a new bus lane plan that reflects the redesign and is “both ambitious and achievable.”
It’s still too soon to tell how much of the reduction in ridership after Better Bus is simply due to innate human resistance to anything new. A 2024 study of other bus network redesigns found that it took about three years for ridership to increase. Just in the past couple months, Metro says they have seen growth on some new lines.
“It takes people a while to adjust to changes. It takes them for some reason to go try something new and figure that out,” Metro head of planning Allison Davis said at the June meeting. “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Dew said that was the case for him: “I think I rode the bus a little bit less after the redesign just because of the hassle of figuring out how it changed.” Still, he said, “They needed to take the step at some point. I wouldn’t go back.”
Rachel Weiner is a reporter and a 2026-2027 Knight Wallace Fellow. She worked at the Washington Post for 16 years covering national politics, crime, Virginia politics, federal courts, and finally transportation.
With your help, we pursue stories that hold leaders to account, demystify opaque city and civic processes, and celebrate the idiosyncrasies that make us proud to call D.C. home. Put simply, our mission is to make it easier — and more fun — to live in the District. Our members help keep local news free and independent for all:
