Opinion | Bowser proposes cuts to D.C. Circulator buses

“It’s quicker,” Chaj said, noting that the Circulator makes few stops compared with the seemingly always-stopping Metrobus. Another consideration is price: The Circulator charges $1 per trip, half the Metrobus fare.

“Over the course of a week,” says Chaj, “you’re saving some $15.”

Inconvenience and extra expense for Chaj could mean savings for the city. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has proposed cutting Chaj’s downtown-to-Woodley Park Circulator route, along with two others — Rosslyn to Dupont Circle and Eastern Market to L’Enfant Plaza — to realize savings of $6.9 million. It’s a small component of Ms. Bowser’s plan to chip away at a projected shortfall of $1.7 billion in financial projections over the next five years.

The cost-savings plan, however, is more than just a potential lifestyle bummer for people like Mr. Chaj. It raises questions about how D.C. has managed making the switch to an all-electric Circulator fleet, an undertaking replete with facility costs as well as high price tags for the vehicles themselves. Those costs are at least partly responsible for driving the Circulator cutbacks in Ms. Bowser’s budget proposal — a classic case of the perfect serving as the enemy of the good.

The Circulator launched in 2005 to provide “a more comfortable and convenient transportation option,” in the words of The Post’s Lyndsey Layton. The buses are equipped with low floors and a spacious feel, thanks to the ample standing room in their center. Ridership tanked during the pandemic but was robust beforehand, with the Georgetown-Union Station route tallying around 1.6 million passengers in 2019 and the Woodley Park-downtown route around 1.3 million in that same year.

The program launched with a fleet of diesel buses. The District Department of Transportation is in the midst of an ambitious drive to convert to 100 percent electric versions by 2030 — 15 years ahead of the city’s legal deadline. Compelling benefits come with the switch-over, including lower emissions, noise reduction and healthier neighborhoods.

Moving to an all-electric fleet, however, isn’t all sweet air and civic bonhomie. Upfront costs are heavy, as electric buses cost more than diesel buses and require a significant investment in garage infrastructure, electrical supply upgrades and also, perhaps, on-street charging facilities. Reliability, too, is uneven, as engineer and transit planner Christof Spieler recently wrote. Manufacturers of electric buses, Mr. Spieler noted, are “on a fast learning curve, and it shows” — though he said that electric buses, when “fully developed and commonplace,” can be cheaper to operate than diesel options.

The District’s Circulator program began its move to electric in spring 2018 with 14 battery-electric vehicles — “the largest electric bus fleet in the DC region, and one of the largest electric bus fleets nationwide,” Bowser’s office boasted at the time. The department is now adding to that number and will eventually have 46 electric buses that will be serviced at an upgraded facility on South Capitol Street.

To keep all six Circulator routes running at full tilt, however, DDOT relies on 73 buses. Purchasing, charging and maintaining a full fleet of electric buses to serve all those routes, city officials say, would stretch the city’s means at this point. City Administrator Kevin Donahue in March cited the high cost of bus electrification — plus low ridership compared to Metrobus routes — in explaining the planned route cuts. The District, said Mr. Donahue, “would have had to put over $100 million into the capital budget to make sure we built out the electrification, infrastructure, and the maintenance infrastructure to be able to sustain the program.”

Everett Lott, director of DDOT, told the Editorial Board, “It was basic simple economics: The cost to continue to run all six routes as we’re trying to electrify the full fleet is just more than what … we have in the budget to be able to fully support that.” He elaborated, “Capital costs for the facility as well as, again, the cost that it would require for us to purchase the additional buses and to operate them — it was just kind of like a perfect storm hitting all of us at the right exact time.”

Storm preparedness, though, is a core function of government. If the electric-bus plan plays a…