Business View Magazine | July 2019

278 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 THE ALEXANDR I A TRANS I T COMPANY One of the side effects of that deferred maintenance has been a deterioration of the outdoor rail platform structures in Alexandria. “We have five Metro rail stations that are serviced by the Yellow and Blue lines of the transit system,” Baker notes. “As a result of their open exposure to the elements over the past 40-plus years, the station platforms are failing. And so, the Metro system has taken a radical approach to try to resolve the issue by completely closing all Metro rail service south of the Reagan National Airport, which is prior to the service coming to Alexandria. That’s about 8,000-plus passengers a day who are served on the Metro rail system in Alexandria. “So, starting Memorial Day through Labor Day, there will be no service and, consequently, we at DASH are one of many entities partnering with the Metro system to provide bus bridging, which means people who ride the Metro rail system, instead of getting on a subway in Alexandria, will get on a DASH bus and be transported to the Reagan Airport Metro rail station in order to continue their trip. This is a huge undertaking that’s never been done before on this system, and as far as we know, there’s never been a shutdown of this magnitude. The goal is to be able to replace and repair the platforms very quickly by having no rail service to navigate and they’re expecting to get that done within four months. “So, we’ve had to expand our bus fleet from 85 buses to over 120 vehicles and we’ve had to hire somewhere in excess of 50 additional employees, just bus operators, to run service, this summer. It’s being paid for by the Metro rail system, and using the funds that we’ve secured from Metro, we’ve been able to identify buses elsewhere in the country that were nearing, or at, retirement age, but still have enough life in them to be able to operate for four months. And we were very successful partnering with the Westchester County, NY Liberty Line’s transit system. We identified buses that they were finished with and were in very good shape. We have rehabilitated those and prepared them for service. We’ve also gotten a few from some other systems and that’s how we’re getting that fleet. Then, those buses will come off the road after our service is done.” Increasing DASH’s challenge is the need to quickly identify, hire, and train new drivers. “We’ve been actively recruiting and onboarding operators,” says Baker. “We’re using a lot of school bus drivers; we’ve also been successful in getting some transit systems that serve universities. Oftentimes, when a transit system serves a major university, they scale back their service during the summer. So, we’ve hired some of those folks; many of those systems use students to operate their buses and so they’re licensed and certified and capable of operating