Save GEORGE Bus, Says Village Preservation Society

By Jeff Peterson

President

Falls Church Village Preservation and Improvement Society

The Village Preservation and Improvement Society (VPIS) Board of Directors strongly supports maintaining and expanding mass transportation options within the City of Fall Church.  Mass transportation is essential to the economic vitality of the City, to reducing traffic and congestion, to making the City more “walkable”, to meeting air quality and other environmental goals, and to reducing release of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

We recognize that the City faces serious budget constraints and we agree that reducing costs of mass transportation in the City is a reasonable goal.  Much of the debate to date, however, has focused on what programs to cut to meet revenue shortfalls.  We believe that the Council has the obligation to take the time to make a balanced assessment of both the costs and the benefits of mass transportation.  The Council’s goal should be to restructure the existing mass transportation services to significantly reduce costs, rather than simply eliminate the service.  In the final analysis, mass transportation is the future for our region and we must embrace it and learn how to manage it so that it provides the services that our businesses and residential community need.

A key option that needs careful assessment is cooperation with Arlington mass transportation services to expand their service area to include the City of Falls Church, with special emphasis on assess to Metro stations in Falls Church.  Providing mass transportation services through ARTS, rather than GEORGE, could significantly reduce costs while providing more useful service to both Arlington and Falls Church citizens.  Bringing ARTS to Falls Church Metro stations would allow those riders to get both the train and the bus system that runs out to Reston and beyond.  Falls Church riders would be able to ride all the way to Rosslyn and other employment areas of Arlington. 

Other options that need careful assessment include reducing the “platform hours”, (i.e. starting the morning bus (both 26E and 26W) at 6:30am instead of 6am and ending at 8:30am instead of 9:30am and during the evening start at 5pm instead of 4:30pm and ending at 6:30pm instead of 7:30pm would reduce the platform hours by approx 6 hours a day, plus the elimination of the daytime route, which is served by regular metro anyway, would further reduce platform hours by another 4 hours totaling a reduction of approximately 10 platform hours), raising the riders fee to $1 instead of 50 cents would help the revenue side while maintain ridership. 

It is important to remember that mass transportation has important benefits that are difficult to express in monetary terms.  For example, the Environmental Services Council Task Group on Climate Change and Energy Efficiency provided you with a memorandum on March 10, 2009 outlining the environmental benefits that a mass transportation system can provide.  In this era of reducing carbon dioxide to address global warming, maintaining mass transportation services can prevent 102,900 lbs. of carbon dioxide from going into the air. 

The human impact of a loss of mass transportation is personal to each citizen and harder to judge.  The bus system has allowed neighbors to get to know one another.  It has allowed those that have difficulty walking to Broad Street or Washington Street to catch the Metro buses the opportunity to ride instead of drive the 1 mile with parking problems and expense.  Riders also enjoy the safety of not having to walk on the streets especially at night.  The business community can and should benefit from GEORGE as well. 

VPIS stands ready to help you in identifying creative ways to provide mass transportation services in the City of Falls Church at significantly reduced costs.  We thank you for all your time and effort in this very critical and difficult budget year.