The District has ticketed more than 147,000 vehicles for blocking bus lanes in the nine months since the city began enforcement. The tickets to drivers, at $100 a pop, add up to nearly $15 million for blocking red-painted bus lanes.
Many D.C. drivers who have gotten these tickets are upset.
Transportation officials acknowledge that, for years, blocking these lanes went unenforced — but they say blocked bus lanes leads to huge delays for public transportation, and that’s why they’ve started cracking down.
The District has 13 miles of priority bus lanes and about 3,000 bus zones. The problem, according to transportation officials, is that vehicles routinely block the lanes, forcing buses to either stop or change lanes to drive around them.
"If you've got people that are parked in the bus lane, it's forcing the buses to drive around it," Sharon Kershbaum, acting director of the D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT), said. "And they often need to wait, and things back up. So the efficiency gets lost."
Improving safety is also a factor, Kershbaum said.
"Because if there is a car that's parked in front of a bus stop and the bus needs to let the passengers disembark in the travel lane, they're often weaving in between cars, parked cars or cars that are driving. And it's very difficult to see that," she said. "So there's a safety component and an efficiency component."
Last November, the District began ramping up enforcement by installing cameras on Metrobuses and issuing the $100 fines. Drivers who receive tickets also receive a video clip showing their car in the bus lane.
But it's left many drivers feeling like this man, who said the enforcement is confusing.
"You know, I don't know who is creating this, but I think it's unfair to drivers, period," driver Stanley Lightfoot said.
Kershbaum understands people are upset about getting these fines, acknowledging that, for years, rules against blocking the bus lanes just weren't enforced.
"I just want to be clear that the prohibition of driving or parking, or even just pulling over and standing in the interim, those are all things that have never been allowed," she said. "The challenge has always been with enforcement. So before we had cameras in the buses, you weren't supposed to do it. We all know that people kind of ignored it because the likelihood of a police officer or a traffic enforcement person to be walking through at that moment was pretty low. So people just ignored it."
While you're not allowed to park, stop or even drive in the bus lanes, there are exceptions: You are allowed in the bus lanes if you're turning right at an intersection or into a driveway, and not all priority lanes are enforced 24/7.
As for the drivers racking up the most tickets:
- almost 52,000 tickets went to Maryland drivers
- nearly 42,000 were issued to D.C. drivers
- more than 38,000 went to Virginia drivers
The District plans to add another 10 miles of priority bus lanes next year, and Metro is adding another 70 cameras to its buses this year.
This new enforcement didn’t happen overnight. News4 has been reporting since 2019 about D.C.'s designation of priority bus lanes, and warnings were issued for four months before drivers started getting fines.
DDOT officials do think the new enforcement is working. When they first started issuing fines, they were averaging about 20,000 tickets a month. That has now dropped to about 13,000 a month.
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However, those numbers likely will increase as Metro adds more cameras and the District designates more priority bus lanes.
While it’s too early for data on repeat offenders, when it comes to the stationary photo enforcement that’s been in place for years, DDOT says 70% of people who get those tickets only get one.
