Most residents of upper Georgetown, Burlieth, and Glover Park are familiar with WMATA’s D2 bus route. This route serves as a circulator between Glover Park and Dupont Circle you may be familiar as the short bus with squeaky breaks. “Short,” because WMATA uses the Orion II (also seen in service in the city on some of the N routes, the M4 and the 98 – seen here in an image from this webpage) for the route, and “squeaky” because the frequent stops in the route through residential neighborhoods quickly converts the brake pads to shrill noisemakers.
What has been for most simply a quirk of the neighborhood has escalated into a full-fledged controversy in recent weeks. As the noise worsened in recent months, one resident, Mory Watkins, (who the W. Times humorously described as “the bus man”), has made it his life’s work to silence the annoying squeaks outside his Benton Street home by any means possible – from pressuring WMATA to fix the buses and curtailing late night service to even terminating the route at Wisconsin Avenue. Watkins’ activism happened to correspond to a newly created and quickly growing Glover Park Yahoo Group where his more radical proposals stirred up resentment. However, at last month’s ANC meeting some email list members found Watkins much more reasonable than portrayed in print and identified that cranky residents and bus riders probably share the same interest: quiet, well-maintained buses on the D2 route.
In response to the controversy WMATA has said they’re testing some newer, quiet brake pads on one bus, and after an undefined length of time will eventually replace the breaks on all the buses on the route. This DCist thinks brakes are just the tip of the iceberg, as we’ve ridden D2s with malfunctioning sound system that produce screeching sounds instead of announcements, buses with heat stuck on full blast while the A/C is on (the driver said he had reported it but a replacement bus wasn’t available), and buses nauseatingly filled with diesel fumes (one driver complained he frequently experienced lightheadedness on the route.) The D2 is certainly not the only route with problems – you may have remembered from Friday that the Post reported a comprehensive survey of WMATA’s bus system found a neglected and “dilapidated” system. How are the routes you ride?
