Steven Yaffe, Arlington Transit operations manager, reaches out to the public on Feb. 29 in Phase III of the draft recommendations to improve bus service in the County. Six meetings are being held all across the County to explain the recommendation and get citizen input. Photo by Shirley Ruhe/The Connection
Arlington has developed draft recommendations to improve bus service in the county. The 10-year transit development plan for ART and Metrobus routes contains proposals for 36 routes to enhance or restructure their services. One of these proposals would be a headway-based route that would connect Skyline, Pentagon City and Crystal City.
“It would be a high frequency route every six minutes at peak time,” Steven Yaffe, Arlington Transit operations manager, said. “It would not service every stop to give a faster trip but would stop at all transfer stations.” Bus stops would be replaced with transit stations that offer level boarding.
Arlington Transit is the county’s local bus service operating within Arlington County to supplement Metrobus with cross-county routes as well as neighborhood connections to Metrorail. Most of ART's big green and white state-of-the ART buses operate on clean-burning natural gas. Yaffe says ART is a public-private partnership. Arlington owns the buses and hires a contractor to maintain them, dispatch and supervise.
Phase I of the long-term plan began last spring with the collection of information on usage, preferences and desired improvements. At that time 3,396 responded to the survey.
Phase II which began in November included four workshops and five focus groups to identify gaps in service with 406 people participating. “All were bilingual,” according to Yaffe.
Phase III involves six community events held around the county to get geographical representation, online comments and “reaching out every way we can.” The survey will be taken down March 11. After that the recommendation will go to the board for endorsement of the 10-year plan. Go online at ArlingtonVA.us/transit2026 to get more information or provide feedback to the plan.