Circulator bus system will begin phasing out Oct. 1 and end this year

The Circulator bus system will be phased out beginning Oct. 1 and fully end by Dec. 31, the D.C. Department of Transportation announced Monday.

On Oct. 1, the Rosslyn-Dupont Circle bus route will be terminated, and all other routes will stop running earlier in the evening. The Woodley Park-Adams Morgan, Georgetown-Union Station, Congress Heights-Union Station and Eastern Market-L’Enfant Plaza routes will cease service at 9 p.m. daily instead of midnight, and the National Mall route will run until 7 pm daily.

These routes will also operate in 20-minute intervals instead of running every 10 minutes. They will cease operations at the end of the year.

The cancellation of the Circulator was previously announced as part of a package of citywide budget cuts in April, but without details on exactly how and when it would stop running.

The Circulator would have required an infusion of more than $100 million to sustain itself next fiscal year, DDOT Director Sharon Kershbaum told the D.C. Council’s transportation committee in April.

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The network has long contended with lackluster ridership numbers. On most routes, ridership has dropped by nearly three-quarters since before the coronavirus pandemic. The one route that has fared better is the Georgetown-Union Station route, but it has still experienced a 40 percent dip in ridership from pre-pandemic levels.

The Circulator, overseen by DDOT, has relied on local tax dollars. Revenue from its $1 fares made up only about 5 percent of its $40 million operating budget last fiscal year.

By contrast, ridership on Metrobus, which is run by the regional Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and costs twice as much to ride, has fully rebounded from pre-pandemic levels, according to Metro data.

On Monday, Circulator employees received a layoff notice from RATP Dev, the operator of the bus system, according to a letter shared with The Washington Post. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents D.C. Circulator workers, learned of DDOT’s plans to phase out Circulator service only hours before the department announced them publicly, spokesman Benjamin Lynn said in a statement.

DDOT previously told The Post that it would work with WMATA to replace some of Circulator’s shuttered service with bus lines. The two agencies are working on a strategy to mitigate the effects of the loss of the Circulator for commuters.

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