Montgomery County’s Ride On Reimagined study will affect every current and future bus rider in the county. The county is studying where, when, and how often the bus runs, and how Montgomery County bus service can better serve its riders.
Weigh in to tell Ride On that frequency must be a priority for high-quality bus service that gets people where they want to go, and share your thoughts on other proposed changes! The deadline is Wednesday, November 15.
| How do I view proposed changes? Click here to view the draft network in English. It is also available in other languages on the Ride On Reimagined project page. |
| How do I share my comments? Use this form to share comments. Choose “Not Route Specific” for comments about the network as a whole, or choose a route from the dropdown menu if commenting on a specific route. |
CSG’s Ride On Reimagined Priorities
Help amplify these points in your comments to tell the county that better bus connections and higher frequencies are essential for a more sustainable, equitable bus network!
- Better East-West and downcounty-upcounty connections. We support recommendations in the draft network to add additional east-west bus routes (39, 95, and 37 in the draft network), and 7-day express service connecting Silver Spring-White Oak-Germantown (102 in the draft network). These will better connect residents countywide to economic opportunities and activity centers.
- Focus resources on frequency over on-demand service. The Ride On Reimagined draft network proposes 17 “Flex zones” for on-demand service—where you call or use an app to request individual pickup, versus just two Flex zones today. However, on-demand service can be far more costly than fixed-route service, and with limited resources, would mean cuts to fixed-routes or reducing frequency on those routes.
Therefore, we recommend Flex zones only for locations like Germantown and Olney where many residents have limited access to fixed-route service and could gain improved access to jobs and services. But in more populous areas and where a larger share of people need transit, resources should go towards increased frequency, not on-demand service. - Increase frequencies throughout the day and week. County residents use bus service for more than just Monday to Friday, 9-to-5 jobs—we travel for night and weekend shifts, as well as health care, school, recreation, shopping, to visit friends and family, and more.
The current proposed minimum frequency (“headways”) of 30 minutes on local routes for weekday off-peak and weekend service is not enough to make the bus a truly convenient option for many. While 30-minute headways may be appropriate on particularly low-ridership routes at low-ridership times of day, 15-minute headways should be the standard for weekdays and weekends.
MCDOT should create a ridership-based metric to determine when local routes will have minimum 15-minute versus 30-minute headways, rather than making 30-minute headways the standard off-peak frequency system wide.