Local leaders agree that the future of public transit expansion in the D.C. region is not on rails but on roads.
“The bus is awesome,” Metro General Manager Randy Clarke said at a virtual event earlier this month. But he also acknowledged a major limitation to Metro achieving its goals: There aren’t enough bus drivers.
“Bus operator availability” is the main reason behind what Metro calls “missed trips,” when a bus simply doesn’t show up. Under Clarke, the agency has made that shortage public in digital signs at bus stops and in its online alerts about service problems.
“We wanted to be transparent,” he said.
The bus system is short 120 drivers, and on average, 241 trips — about 2.7 percent of all trips — were missed each month in 2025, according to Metro’s statistics. Missed trips this year peaked at 4 percent in June, when drivers were undergoing training on the new bus network.
The alerts have raised public awareness about a chronic transit issue: Bus operations are particularly vulnerable to staff shortages. Transit operators tend to be older than the average worker, and potential new hires are gravitating to delivery or trucking jobs that require less public interaction.
“The younger workforce has been harder to retain because … there’s really no flexibility,” said Scudder Wagg, a D.C.-based transit consultant. “When your wages are stuck and your [schedule] is stuck, you don’t have any levers to pull.”
New drivers get split, night and weekend shifts and can be on them for years. Bus operations also often lose drivers to the rail side, generally viewed as a more desirable post. Metro said about 140 bus drivers become rail operators or station managers every year.
Metro and other transit agencies also tend to have stricter drug and alcohol policies than the private sector.
“It’s really hard to recruit bus operators at Metro’s level in the Washington region due to the competition for truck drivers and Amazon delivery operators and all of the other places where people could choose to work,” said James Hamre, who ran bus operations at the agency for several decades.
He said in the past, it was hard to get more investment in bus operations. “This is a railroad that has the ill fortune of having a bus system attached to it,” he said. “That’s been the perspective for many, many, many years.”
Metro has also struggled with last-minute absences and chronic absenteeism, current and former leaders said.
“There’s a human element” to the problem, Clarke said at the event, “and we are doing everything we can to reinforce the message we need people to show up to work.”
Ray Jackson, head of the union that represents Metro bus operators, said he has worked with management on attendance. But he said a punitive approach wasn’t helpful. He highlighted that bus drivers get only two days a year they can use to take care of a sick family member and have restrictions on when they can use other leave.
“We have a lot of single parents,” Jackson said. “When family issues arise, then you leave the employee no choice but to call out sick … and then you penalize them for it.”
Driving a bus for many years can lead to lifelong physical health issues, he added.
Staff shortages often mean paying overtime, which is about $20 more an hour. Overtime pay accounts for 10 percent of personnel expenses across Metro and in recent years has been as much as a quarter of total bus operator wages. Last year, Metro started producing weekly internal dashboards showing overtime and absenteeism to monitor the issue.
Paul J. Wiedefeld, who ran the Metro system before Clarke, said that when he left in 2022, the agency was still rebuilding from the pandemic, which led to major staffing shortages in a job that required constant interaction with the public.
“One of the biggest things we really worked on was the relationship with the union,” he said. But he said there was always pressure to overpromise on bus service, both in D.C. and when he ran Baltimore’s system earlier in his career.
“We would literally put out schedules that we almost were physically unable to match. Either not enough people, not enough equipment, stuck in traffic — you name it,” he said. “My philosophy has always been to [say], ‘We may deliver less, but let’s deliver what we say we’re going to deliver.’ That’s a complicated statement and a complicated approach.”
Metro says it has no plans to cut back service now. After a hiring freeze last year, it has doubled the size of its training classes and hopes to be fully staffed in the next six months.
Clarke says his goal is to move over half a million people by bus daily, and for “bus rapid transit” lines to fill gaps in Metro rail access for far less money than a new train line. The dedicated, separated bus corridors known as BRT are something suburbs in Maryland and Virginia are already working on. The District’s plans to run a BRT line on K Street never came to fruition. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has said the D.C. Streetcar, which was supposed to connect Benning Road to Georgetown but never did, could be replaced by a crosstown bus.
One option a lot of transit agencies are exploring is moving to a four-day workweek so that all drivers, regardless of their schedule, get three days off a week, said Wagg, the transit consultant.
“Even within the challenging structure” of these jobs, he said, “they’re trying to find creative ways to solve this problem.”
Delays generally are an obstacle to convincing more people to ride the bus. Metro says 76.5 percent of buses were on time in the past year, which includes an allowance of two minutes before and seven minutes after the scheduled arrival. By comparison, 88.3 percent of train trips were on schedule. Traffic is a driver of delays; buses are more likely to be on time in the summer and winter, when fewer people are on the roads, then in the spring and fall. The agency notes that in corridors with new bus-only lanes, Metro buses are traveling 13 percent faster than in 2019, even as overall speeds have declined by 11 percent.
Outside of missed trips, Metro says delays have improved under the new bus network. Metro is now experimenting with a headways-based scheduling system, in which buses are a set time apart rather than arriving at a specific time, to try to space them more evenly and predictably.
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