Steve Burns
WMAL.com

ARLINGTON — (WMAL) The Columbia Pike Streetcar project was canceled a little over a year ago, and county officials say the need for enhanced transportation options through the corridor has never gone away. They are now proposing “premium bus” service that would run along the same corridor along Columbia Pike, through Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard.

“We’re looking at how can we make the service faster, more reliable, can we provide more one-seat rides so people don’t have to transfer?” said Arlington Transportation Director Dennis Leach. “This corridor is very successful from a transit perspective. We’re carrying close to 18,000 people a weekday, and we estimate we’re going to have to carry many moire people than that as Columbia Pike continues to develop.”

The bus service may include transit signal priority, giving buses priority through traffic lights, along with raised boarding platforms, off-board fare collection and skip-stop service. “It’s really about providing more capacity and more reliability,” Leach said.

“The key question is whether there is room to provide any dedicated (bus) lanes in the corridor,” said Coalition for Smarter Growth Executive Director Stewart Schwartz. “I think in this case, it was concerns over the cost of the streetcar that caused it to derail, so to speak. In this case, there could potentially be lower costs, but they’re not small, necessarily.”

Leach indicated dedicated lanes already exist through Crystal City and Potomac Yard, with lanes planned for Pentagon City, and they’re looking into the possibility along Columbia Pike.

Schwartz said this may be a good stopgap for the time being, but more will be needed.

“It’s a good step to cover the needs over the next decade. It’s hard to say whether this will be enough given the amount of growth in the corridor, where you will need higher capacity in the future.”

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