The Present: Transit in Washington

The 1966 Interstate Compact that formed the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) defined most of our metropolitan area as the "transit zone" - the geographic area that includes the District of Columbia, Montgomery & Prince George's counties in Maryland, the Virginia cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, and Falls Church, and the Virginia counties of Arlington and Fairfax; Loudoun County was added twenty years later.  Each of these jurisdictions receives Metrobus and Metrorail service and pays its share of WMATA's budget proportional to the amount of service provided.  They also pay a share of the agency's capital expenses, proportional to the amount of impact each jurisdiction receives from capital purchases.

Ironically, each of these jurisdictions has its own local bus system that generally only serves the municipality that funds it (the exception being Falls Church, which has three Metrobus routes run under the GEORGE monicker).  Of the seven such systems in the area, all but two (Arlington County and Fairfax City) have fleets of 50 or more buses.  There are also two commuter railroads, Maryland Area Rail Commuter, and the Virginia Railway Express, and commuter buses run by the Maryland Transit Administration, the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission, and Loudoun County Transit, serving points outside of the transit zone.

This wide selection of local transit systems creates a coordinated regional network which, in some ways, resembles that of yesterday; and unlike in most metropolitan areas, there was only a short period in this area's past when only one agency controlled all local transit — WMATA was conceived in 1967, but its period of autonomy ended in 1975, when Montgomery County became the first in the region to start operating its own local bus service, Ride On Montgomery County Transit (not RideOn, Ride-On, Ride on, or Ride ON!).  Other jurisdictions soon followed suit, finding more local control and lower operations costs among the benefits of doing so.

For the purposes of this site, "Today" entails the last 30 years between WMATA's inception and today's date.

Today's transit systems include:

WMATA Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
Ride On Ride On - Montgomery County, MD
Fairfax CUE CUE - City of Fairfax, VA
DASH DASH - City of Alexandria, VA
Fairfax County Fairfax Connector - Fairfax County, VA
TheBus TheBus - Prince George's County, MD
PRTC Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission - Local and commuter buses serving Prince William County and the Cities of Manasass and Manassas Park, VA
Arlington Transit Arlington Transit - Arlington County, VA
Loudoun County Commuter Loudoun County Transit - Commuter buses only serving Loudoun County, VA
Virginia Regional Transit Association Virginia Regional Transit - Counties of Loudoun, Fauquier, Culpeper, Orange, Clarke, Frederick, Warren, Page, Rockingham, Augusta, Highland, Buckingham, Cumberland, Prince Edward, Amelia, VA
Circulator Circulator - Washington, D.C.
MTA Commuter Buses(Commuter Buses) MTA Commuter Buses - Commuter bus service funded by the State of Maryland, provided by Eyre, Keller, and Dillon's Bus Service
MARC MARC - Commuter rail service serving West Virginia and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD
Virginia Railway Express VRE - Commuter rail service serving the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Shuttle-UM Shuttle-UM - Student-operated transit system at the University of Maryland, College Park