Georgetown University Wants Streetcar to Extend to Campus

Georgetown University wants the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) to consider extending a proposed streetcar line to or beyond the main Georgetown campus, rather than ending the line at the Georgetown waterfront.

DDOT is currently engaged in a study of premium transit lines between Union Station and Georgetown, among those options is a streetcar. In maps the agency has released of a .

But GU and the Georgetown Business Improvement District (BID) think DDOT should extend the study area to include a line that would service the university and maybe even extend farther west. For Georgetown, the streetcar would help deliver on commitments made in the most recent campus plan agreement. For the BID it means reducing congestion and bringing more people through Georgetown.

"One of the first things we noticed was that it stopped really short of a major population and employment center in the city," Joe Sternlieb, CEO of the BID, told Patch about DDOT's current premium transit study.

An extension to the main campus would mean three GU campuses would be located along the same streetcar line: the law campus, the new Georgetown downtown campus and ideally the main campus in upper northwest DC.

"It would be sort of foolhardy of the District to do this kind of major plan in a way that doesn’t also just go extend an additional half-mile and bring in this additional group of employees and students," Lauralyn Lee, the associate vice president for community engagement and strategic initiatives at Georgetown University, told Patch.

But the study, funded through a grant from the Federal Transit Authority, is already underway.

"DDOT has had conversations with the university and the BID about their interest in connecting to the university or continuing west and we have definitely agreed not to preclude any alternative that will be able to make that connection, but at this point in time it is not included in the study area," DDOT Project Manager Lezlie Rupert explained in an interview with Patch.

The study emerged from DC’s Transit Future System Plan, published in April 2010. That plan has a proposed streetcar line extend only to the Georgetown waterfront. There is no explanation in the document for the endpoint and Rupert did not know why there was no connection to the university.

“My goal at this point is to encourage DDOT to include the university in the study scope so that it is at least a possibility that the streetcar could eventually come to the university,” Lee said.

She said DDOT has been receptive thus far.

"Any alternative that is on the table will have the ability to make a connection going further west or northwest," Rupert said.

So it is not in this study and will not be included at this point, but it is possible that DDOT will include an extension to the university in future plans.

That's good news for Georgetown.

"There’s no easy solution getting things in and out of Georgetown," said Lee. 

Sternlieb recently hired a new transportation director at the BID to help explore the transit issues for the areas employees and businesses.

"The neighborhood suffers from the congestion caused by people needing to drive because there are relatively few reliable other options," Sternlieb said.

A streetcar extending to the university would go a long way toward reducing congestion, he believes. 

He is also encouraging DDOT to give the streetcars their own designated right-of-way so that they don't suffer the same fate as the Union Station to Georgetown Circulator.

“It’s not useful public transit when it takes an hour to get 3.8 miles,” he said.

Lee said she can't really fault DDOT or the city for not having a Georgetown University streetcar extension on their "radar screen."

It is just in the last year the campus plan agreement that the university "really turned the page" in its approach to master planning and its position within the city, Lee said.

"One of our real goals here is to be able to move the university sort of off of the hilltop and integrate it more as a real partner with the city," Lee said.

A streetcar could be part of achieving that goal. Just not quite yet.