Metro officials will consider adding a new bus route to connect Northern Virginia with National Harbor in Maryland.
A pilot proposal, which will be weighed by Metro board members at a Thursday’s committee meeting, calls for daily service from Alexandria’s Huntington and King Street Metro stations to downtown National Harbor, with stops at the Oxon Hill Park-and-Ride and MGM National Harbor casino, which is slated to open by the end of this year.
If approved, the pilot would last from this October through June 2017. Buses would run in each direction every 30 minutes, from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. The annual cost of operating the service would be $2.9 million, according to Metro.
The Alexandria City Council will consider the proposal on June 28.
Developers and local officials have been advocating for the service, saying demand and the approximately 3,600 jobs brought by casino’s opening necessitate a transit link. The new bus route would be called the NH2. Metro’s NH1 route already provides service from National Harbor to the Southern Avenue Metro station, within Prince George’s County, but no such link exists to Alexandria, which sits just across the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge.
Metro says the 9-month pilot will allow it to evaluate demand, survey customers and conduct an equity analysis required by the Federal Transit Administration.
If the route is successful, Metro says, it could be adopted permanently. The Peterson Companies, developer of National Harbor, has proposed an annual contribution of $500,000 to offset Metro’s operating costs, board documents said.
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Prince George’s officials and community leaders have long said the continuing success of National Harbor depends on public transit. The complex, which includes entertainment and retail shops, restaurants and hotel and convention accommodations, has about 7,000 workers — many of whom work in the service industry and rely on public transportation.
In 2015, MGM decided to allow public buses to drop off passengers in front of its $1.3-billion resort, a reversal from its earlier transportation plan that said guests wouldn’t be using public transportation and an “almost non-existent” number of employees would be using transit to get to work.
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