Missing the Bus
A couple of days ago, I had to catch a flight at Dulles Airport. This is a considerable inconvenience: although Dulles supposedly serves Washington, DC, where I live, getting from Washington to Dulles can take longer than getting from Dulles to your destination. It can be expensive, too. The cab fare is upwards of 80 bucks. So to reach the airport, I took the 5A bus.
I boarded at L’Enfant Plaza, a dead zone of 1960s architecture in Southwest Washington. Only four other passengers joined me, aboard a bus without a luggage rack. Having made this trip before, I knew where my suitcase should go: in front of the rear exit door. The two Brits who boarded with me didn’t believe this was necessary.
They were convinced when we pulled up to the next stop, at Rosslyn, just across the river in Northern Virginia, to find a small army awaiting. Perhaps 50 people climbed on board. The first few put their luggage by the exit door, next to mine, making the emergency exit absolutely inaccessible in the event of an emergency. The next three dozen sat with their suitcases on their laps. Another 15 stood in the aisle, with one hand on their roller boards, the other grasping the silver handrail above their heads. Fifteen or 20 more were left at curbside, informed that the bus was full, and that they’d have to wait for the next one.
All in all, the hour-long ride on the 5A is a pretty lousy way for Metro, the Washington area’s main transit agency, to treat its customers, and it’s certainly not a nice way for the nation’s capital to greet its visitors. It’s worth asking why this problem can’t be fixed.
The answer, of course, is that it is being fixed. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the agency that runs Dulles Airport, is building a rail line to the airport. The first phase opened last year. The second, supposedly, will open in 2020. Together, they will cost at least $5.8 billion, a good hunk of it supplied by the federal government. When the Silver Line is finished, passengers may have a more comfortable trip from Washington to Dulles Airport, but that trip will take even longer on a Metro train than it does on the 5A bus.
We’ve heard a great deal of lamentation about America’s infrastructure crisis, about the purported lack of investment in vital transportation facilities. There are, indeed, places where the infrastructure is crumbling. But it is equally true that we have a marked preference for expensive solutions to our transportation problems. Yes, I know that many people besides airline passengers will ride the Silver Line. But I also know that for a great deal less than $5.8 billion, and in a matter of weeks rather than five years, Metro and the airports authority could provide more frequent service between Washington and Dulles. They could introduce luggage racks, so passengers who’ve paid $7 for the ride don’t have to spend an hour with their suitcases on their laps. With a better, more comfortable bus service, they might even manage to reverse the declining passenger numbers at Dulles by proving that the airport is not so hard to get to.
Innovation is a tough slog in the public transportation business. Too often, the folks who run transportation agencies associate innovation with expensive new equipment, custom-built infrastructure, and whizzy branding. But as I showed a couple of years ago when I described how the grocery chain A&P became the biggest retailer in the world, the best innovations often involve nothing more than better ways of doing business. It’s a lesson the folks at Metro and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority could stand to learn: a frequent, less uncomfortable bus service that gets passengers to the airport on time would be a valuable innovation.