Brothers Offer Free Shuttle to Washington, D.C. Temple

This article was originally written by Erin Ann McBride for Meridian Magazine. The following is an excerpt.

Washington, D.C. is notorious for its awful beltway traffic. Commuters are familiar with the hot spots in the daily traffic reports. “There are backups at the I-95 interchange,” “it slows around the Mixing Bowl,” and “Watch for stopped vehicles between Georgia Avenue and the Mormon temple.”

That’s right. It’s hard to be a commuter in Washington, D.C. and not know how hard it is to fight traffic to get to the temple.

Enter the Saunders Brothers, Paul and Steve, Washington, D.C. natives from the Mount Vernon Stake, two men who saw a problem and set out to fix it.

The story begins in in January 2011, after a stake temple night. Both brothers were DC temple workers at the time. They noticed there was low attendance from their stake at the temple that night. Even though the Mount Vernon Stake is only roughly 23 miles from the temple, it can take anywhere from 1-2 hours to make the drive during rush hour, and that’s assuming vehicle occupancy restrictions work in your favor.

The brothers realized one of the biggest obstacles people faced in getting to the temple on a weeknight was that the Metro system doesn’t extend out to the temple. And navigating the beltway can take too long. They wondered if it was possible to overcome the Metro and traffic problems and joked about just extending the Metro yellow line to the D.C. temple. But then realized, it would be far more practical to create a shuttle from the red line that could bypass the beltway altogether.

Read McBride’s full article at LDSmag.com.