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The Great Transportation Debate

For those of you who remember the glory days of buses, here's what's happened since (as explained to me by the bureaucracy).

Back in the day Georgetown bused students all the way to MD to watch some hoops. Then when we started playing at the Verizon Center and students would take the buses downtown, only to go out drinking and not go to games. A minor problem, since it still managed to get people in the seats. Then there was a trend of waaaay more students wanting the buses home than took them there (and everyone leaves at once), so instead students were leaving when there was still 5 min left in the game. Add to these issues general rowdy and debaucherous students pissing off bus drivers and it was enough to question their effectiveness. That's when students got really aggressive and wanted to be let out on M Street, or other places, and when the bus drivers told them that they didn't stop there they started opening the back doors of the school buses and it became a liability issue that the bus company no longer wanted to deal with. So the AD switched to giving out metro cards. But the same problem of students using the cards to go somewhere else than the game pervaded and they decided to scrap it all together.

In addition, traffic in DC at rush hour for the weeknight games is awful. There are also, apparently, laws in DC that require buses to have permits to travel certain paths through the city at certain times (for those of you who wonder why sometimes the DuPont GUTS bus goes up by the Naval Observatory and sometimes goes down Q, this is why).

With all of this debate the issue has been brought up again by the AD, but short of having a staff member physically handing out the metro cards at every game on each bus to Rosslyn (and then what do you do about students who choose to get there by alternative method?) the idea of metro cards doesn't really hold appeal. Handing out a bunch with the ticket package doesn't make sense because then students will grab one whenever they need the metro, and then when they don't have a metro card for the USF game they'll say, "Oh well!"

I'm not saying its a lost cause, but it's going to take a LOT of convincing to get the AD to move back to the bus system. I think someone would have to come up with a comprehensive pitch solving the permit and logistics problems of navigating downtown and making sure students don't leave early. Metro cards may be more doable with some creativity for making sure those students actually come.

Stay Casual, my friends.

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