Governing: For This City, Fare-Free Transit Is a Big Success
June 3, 2022
Ever since Canek Aguirre got elected to the Alexandria City Council, he wanted to make the city’s bus transit service, known as DASH, free.
Growing up in Los Angeles, he fondly remembered a local bus service which only cost a quarter to ride. Going to college in Chapel Hill, the bus was totally free. Why not do the same in this prosperous city of almost 160,000 in northern Virginia?
In 2019, when Aguirre first began serving on the council, he didn't think the political will was there to go fare free. Instead, he proposed reduced fare or exemptions for some groups of people.
“I was trying to inch towards it, but in the back of my mind I really wanted to get to fare free,” says Aguirre. “Given the size of our community here in Alexandria, it just seemed very doable to have a fare-free system.”
Then COVID-19 hit, and the world changed. Heavy rail ridership on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) Metro, whose Yellow Line runs through Alexandria, fell off a cliff and still hasn’t even recovered 50 percent of its ridership. But the city’s buses were still seeing heavy use, as so-called essential workers in grocery retail, food service and health care continued going to work. Today the 11 DASH bus lines are at 95 percent of pre-pandemic ridership.
