If you use the South Entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro Station, well, I hope you like walking. You’ll be doing more of it, soon. Starting Wednesday, the South Entrance will be closed for 9 months while WMATA replaces the 185-foot spans that rise 85 feet to street level. The company that makes the particular escalators used in that entrance have been out of business for some time, which has made finding parts of the escalators difficult. Given that the spans are some of WMATA’s least reliable, that’s a combo that means replacement and not repair.

WMATA will be putting standard escalators in place and widening the current entrance space to handle these new, wider escalator bays, and the entrance will be closed until November of this year.  Farragut North’s northern entrance is just 0.5mi to the south, and the North Entrance of Dupont Circle will remain open during the work. In the case of emergency, Metro will leave one exit escalator span in place during the work for emergency egress, along with a new spiral staircase. The North Entrance of the station will have additional on-call escalator techs in case of failure.

Cracked rails on the Red and Blue line this morning in commute-heavy portions of the above-ground part of the rail system have snarled morning commutes. The breaks, near the Pentagon and near Takoma, were caused by the rapid cooling of the DC area to a low of near 10 degrees Fahrenheit last night, according to Metro spokesman Dan Stessel. The breaks cannot be fixed during rush hour, and repairs will take place once morning rush is cleared.

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If your company participates in Metro’s SmartBenefits program, Congress has likely given you an unexpected pay cut. Those who participate in the program get pre-tax dollars put on their SmarTrip card each month, up to a maximum allowable limit that has been up to this point $230/month. Because Congress did not extend the ceiling, the new pre-tax ceiling is a little more than half that, at $125/mo.

So, when the changes come in a week, remember that it’s not WMATA’s fault, for once, and that the Congress that DC has no vote in snipped your transit benefit in half.

Photo Credit: Maryanne Drury

The same love felt in Billy Strayhorn’s ode to the of the rails of New York City in the jazz standard “Take the ‘A’ Train” is still alive and well today a few hundred miles south here in Washington.  While the Duke Ellington orchestra is no longer around to send their musical echoes into the night, recent Tampa transplant and current Alexandria resident Jason Mendelson aims to commemorate DC’s own transportation network with his very own collection of songs for each (and eventually) every Metro station.

If you are interested in picking up Jason’s ode to Metro, visit Action Music in Falls Church, VA or email Jason directly at dcmetrosongs@gmail.com

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I’ve been participating in the Zipcar Low Car Diet challenge this month, and something that I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten more transit-dependent is that a lot of intelligent, resourceful people are completely confounded by any bus that’s not the Circulator. If their destination is not close to a Metrorail stop, they drive to it. I humbly submit that this is completely ridiculous; the bus is just not that hard.

However, it IS true that Metrobus lacks the navigational simplicity that Metrorail has. The Metro map gives you a nice sense of the finite nature of Metrorail: there are only 5 lines, and they’re, well, lines; they go to all the stops in order one way, and they go back along the same stops the other way. That’s it. Have you seen the full Metrobus system map? It’s a freaking mess. It’s not even one map; they had to split it into three.

So with the goal of making it all a little less daunting for the novice Metrobus-rider, here are a few things you need to know:

1. Don’t panic! All the bus routes include at least one Metro stop, and frequently more than one. Know that even if you ignore the rest of my advice and find yourself on the wrong bus going somewhere you had no intention of going, you always have the option of riding it until it gets to a Metro station. There is always a way home.

2. One SmarTrip is good; two are better. Cash is pretty much the worst possible way to pay for the bus. The cash fare is higher than the SmarTrip fare, and you can only take advantage of transfers (unlimited transfers for 2 hours!) with a SmarTrip card, which means you have to pay full fare for each new bus ride if you’re paying cash. That means my typical two-bus commute from home to office costs $1.50 if I have a SmarTrip, and $3.40 if I left it on the kitchen counter. I made that mistake exactly once, and now I keep a spare SmarTrip with a few bucks on it stashed in my purse just in case.

3. The Internet is your personal transit concierge; carry it in your pocket if you can. Yes, I know. Smartphones are expensive, and their data plans are practically confiscatory. Plenty of DC residents who have depended on the bus for years manage to navigate the system just fine without smartphones. We are not talking about them. We are talking about you, whose willingness to explore DC is limited to what’s in a 5 block radius of a Metro stop. If you can swing it, get a smartphone with that money you are no longer spending on your car. You just need something that has GPS, can browse the web, and ideally open PDFs. Why? Because you can use the following tools from a computer, but it’s a lot easier to re-route on the fly if you can use them while you’re out and about:

3a. Google Maps with Transit. WMATA finally got on board with this late last year after dragging their feet for aaaaaaaages, and it is pretty much the best thing ever. Plug in your starting and ending points, and Google will spit out multiple transit options that will get you there, and just like Metro’s trip planner, you can specify that you want to leave now, at a specific time later, or that you want to arrive by a certain time and Google will adjust accordingly. Unlike Metro’s trip planner, however, using it on a mobile phone won’t make you want to kick a puppy. Google does include regional commuter buses that don’t take SmarTrip, though, so watch for that. And the full, Google Labs version of Google Transit can even estimate the cost of driving, if you want to feel smug in your transit choices.

3b. Nextbus. GPS tracking of buses, and estimates of how long you can expect before the next one comes along. Set the bus stop closest to your home and office as link buttons in your web browser and you’ll always know when you have to leave. The mobile web app can use your phone’s GPS to give you predictions for all the bus stops near your location (though sometimes it can be a little bit of a challenge to figure out which corner you want). Welcome to life in the future! Caveat: Nextbus is about 78% accurate, which means it is a dirty, nasty, stinking liar 22% of the time. You can mitigate the effects of this inaccuracy first by understanding how it is that it gets to be inaccurate, but also by sanity checks on…

3c. Published bus timetables. They’re all available in PDF form on Metro’s website, and usually a quick Google query for “[route number] wmata timetable” gets you straight to it without having to navigate to it through Metro’s website. Handy from your computer, but even handier from your mobile device. If, for example, Nextbus tells you there’s no bus for 35 minutes but the schedule tells you that there’s a bus every 10 minutes this time of day, you can reasonably assume that Nextbus isn’t tracking a bus or two for some reason (broken transponder, driver failed to sign on, etc.) This won’t save you from every Nextbus lie, but knowledge of the schedules and what causes inaccuracies can wrangle the system back into a usable state for you.

The bus is cheaper and goes more places than the Metro does, and broken escalators are never a problem. If you’re not a bus rider, give it a shot sometime soon and report back.

Rendering released by Metro

2013 doesn’t feel all that far off, and for those of us who were born in the 1970s, it certainly sounds an awful lot like we’re living in the future. The new 7000-series cars that Metro released concept drawings for today will debut in 2013. WMATA ordered 364 of the cars to replace their aging 1000-series cars, and to run on the airport extension line.  The Post got a tour of the plywood mockup, and have posted a video of the mockup, including the fancy new displays which indicate the car’s location on the various lines.

Visiting Seattle this past weekend, I found myself jealous of the Emerald City, and not just for their fine food and coffee options, or for the warm weather and gentle rain.  No, what I found most amazing about Seattle was the wealth of transit options I had in the palm of my hand through Google Maps on my iPhone.

If you’ve ever tried to use the transit mode in DC, you know that it holds nothing but certain disappointment, and you find yourself trying to find directions another way.  You muddle through the wmata.com website, you try to remember which bus route runs where, and which ones are named after streetcar routes, and if you’re like me, you can’t keep it all straight.

WMATA has committed to bringing Metrobus and Metrorail routes to Google Transit, but have missed deadline after deadline, first saying January of 2011, and then saying “any day now“.  The project has foundered for reasons that WMATA isn’t discussing publicly.  I do recognize that processing five rail lines, and 300 bus lines is a chunk of work, but after my weekend of wandering Seattle, and spending a chunk of money on fares, it’s awful hard to go back.

The easier you make it for someone to use public transit, the more likely they are to shrug off whatever fears they have about the bus and the metro and just hop on.  Show someone that it takes just 25 minutes to get downtown on the G8 bus, or that they can easily move back and forth between the rail and bus systems, and you might make some converts simply because parking can be a nightmare in some parts of town.

Please, WMATA, make it easy for us to get around by exposing that data to Google. I know you’re worried about the times not being 100% right, or what happens if the fares change, but these are pains we can get through together, if you’re willing to just open up those tools. While Nextbus is tantalizing in its current state, it also doesn’t work about 30% of the time, either through errors of omission or errors of commission.  People give it a hard time on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, but that just shows how hungry we all are for working transit data.

As a tourist this weekend, I found myself farther and farther from the downtown core, into the neighborhoods of Seattle,  despite the lack of the tourist-friendly rail systems of other bigger cities, and I chalk it all up to Google Transit never leaving me truly high and dry.  I missed a bus here and there, but the ability to map out my options with a smart phone, or with a web browser at the hotel, gave me the tools that I needed to be fearless about transit.

As a city that gets a pretty large quantity of tourists, putting tools in their hands to explore the city means that they spend more time beyond the obvious hubs, and spend more money on transportation, which turns into a boost to fares that doesn’t necessarily require increasing capacity at rush hour, sounds like a pretty good investment of resources, even in a budget crunch.

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Today, Metro announced plans to “realign” service on the Blue and Yellow lines (actually on the Orange line too, but we’ll get to that) as a way to relieve some of the pressure of people transferring between the Blue and Orange lines at Rosslyn, prepare for the Dulles Metro extension, and “realign service to match changing ridership market.” The changes are planned to take effect in June 2012, meaning you have plenty of time to think through the implications for your commute.

The full report and presentation are worth a read for you Metro geeks, but for those of you who just want to know how it’s going to affect you, here’s the summary: Metro is trying to get suburban riders out of your way.

During peak times, 1/3 of Blue Line trains will be rerouted across the Yellow Line bridge, continuing on to Greenbelt, which will divert a bunch of rush hour transfers to the Orange Line from Rosslyn, where they were causing crush problems, to L’Enfant Plaza, which is a larger station that can handle the volume better. This also means that 1/3 of peak Blue Line trains will be more or less Yellow Line trains with a different origin point.

To accommodate Orange Line riders who might otherwise have transferred at Rosslyn to those rerouted Blue Line trains, Metro will add 3 trains per peak hour, but those trains will go from West Falls Church to Largo Town Center instead of to New Carrolton. So at the eastern end of the line, the additional Orange Line trains will basically be Blue Lines.

The full report has tons of stats on what this change is intended to accomplish. I think the most telling stats are that at peak times and segments, the Passenger Per Car load on the Orange Line is 106, while other lines peak PPC ranges from 89-94. At 89, the Blue Line’s peak PPC is tied with Green for lowest. Metro’s desired peak PPC is <100, and this move is expected to reduce the Orange Line’s peak PPC to 90, while only increasing the Blue Line’s to 93.

If Metro’s projections are correct (and let’s be honest, that’s a big if, but most of us are not in a position to second-guess), it seems like a pretty effective way to reduce the Orange Crush, make the Blue Line more effective, and make transferring between lines easier.

Of course, it’s also change, and change is hard, particularly since this change strikes at the heart of what I consider to be one of the most important factors in Metro’s navigability: Metro trains only have one route. Oh sure, your Metro train may not go all the way to the end of the line, but it never takes off in a completely different direction than you expect. These changes will mean you may have to pay more attention to where your train terminates during rush hour.

Personally, I think that’s a small price to pay if the expected benefits materialize. Metro’s passenger studies determined that riders frequently use the screens on the front and side of trains to gain needed navigation information already, and that they were already accustomed to paying attention to endpoints, so they believe that an Orange Line train labeled “Largo” will be sufficient on a day-to-day basis (obviously there will be a huge communications blitz leading up to these changes).

But that’s my perspective as someone who recently gave up her car and does most of her weekday travel around the city by bus. Read the report and tell us what you think in the comments.

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Fresh off a 3-day closure of two stations in the heart of the city, WMATA announced this morning that they’ll be closing five stations at the end of the Orange Line, as well as splitting the Blue Line, to perform NTSB-mandated maintenance over the weekend of March 4th through 6th.

The Orange Line will not operate between Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton, closing the stations at Minnesota Ave, Deanwood, Cheverly, Landover and New Carrolton. In addition, no Blue Line trains will traverse the gap between Stadium-Armory and Benning Road.  The closures begin at 10am on Friday March 4th, and will conclude when the system reopens on March 7th.

Metro will be working to repair aerial structures at Cheverly, as well as make upgrades to Stadium-Armory and “install 6,000 feet of cellular communication cables to ultimately improve cell phone coverage, replace 2,000 feet of track, 380 insulators, 1,400 rail ties and 400 track fasteners.”

In addition, Metro will be working on the Red Line tracks between Friendship Heights and Medical Center to replace track fasteners, and between Takoma and Glen Forest to improve train control rooms.  Single-tracking in both those situations will add 20 minutes per trip in delays.

Metro plans to operate Blue and Orange line shuttles during the weekend to help handle the coverage:

• Blue Line Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to Benning Road. This bus shuttle will operate between the Stadium-Armory and Benning Road Metrorail stations. Customers using this shuttle bus should add 15 to 20 minutes to their trips. 

• Orange Line Express Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to New Carrollton. This express shuttle bus will operate between the Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton Metrorail stations with no stops in between. Customers using this express shuttle should add 30 minutes to their trips. 

• Orange Line Local Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to New Carrollton. This local shuttle bus will operate between the Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton Metrorail stations and will stop at the Minnesota Avenue, Deanwood, Cheverly, Landover and New Carrollton Metrorail stations. Customers catching this local shuttle should add 40 minutes to their trips.

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Another Federal Holiday weekend, another set of closed stations on a day that not everyone gets off.  Metro announced this afternoon that they will be closing Federal Triangle and Smithsonian for the weekend to comply with NTSB recommendations and make safety and reliability repairs.

As much as this sucks, and this sucks an awful lot, it’s better than single-tracking for weeks on end while they do work in fits and starts.  The orange and blue lines will run in two pieces, with no service at all between L’Enfant Plaza and Metro Center at all.  Metro will run shuttle buses between the two stations.

For those who just went scrambling to a calendar, the closure is from 10pm Friday, February 18th, through closing on Monday, February 21st.  Metro has said you should plan on adding 40 minutes to your commute if you have to traverse that area, and to please dress warmly so you can wait for the infernal shuttle buses without dying of frostbite or exposure.

In addition, the Red line will be single tracking during that time between Shady Grove and Twinbrook, so if you come in from the outer reaches, expect some quality standing on the platform time to add to your suffering.

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Metro announced meetings this afternoon surrounding the placement and construction of a new Blue/Yellow line station at Potomac Yards. The meetings are scheduled for February 10th from 4:30pm to 6:00pm and 6:30pm to 8:00pm at the Cora Kelly Rec Center in Alexandria. Those wishing to learn more about the environmental impact study that is being performed, or about the stations and the options surrounding the station should plan on attending the meeting.  Cora Kelly Rec Center is on the 10A, 10B and 10E Metrobus lines, and the AT10 Dash bus.

It should be a fairly interesting process, as there are a couple different sites for the station near the Potomac Yards shopping center, and the final placement of the station is as of yet up for grabs.  Look for this one to be an adventure. Take popcorn and a lawn chair.

Richard Sarles, who has been the Interim General Manager of Metro since the departure of John Catoe, was officially named the permanent General Manager today by Metro’s board this afternoon. He was also given the title Chief Executive Officer, signaling the board’s desire for a shift in role for Metro’s chief.

In speaking to the board after his confirmation, Sarles set a number of expectations for his tenure. Samer will have more details tomorrow in his Talkin’ Transit column, but a few highlights:

• A “secret shopper” program to evaluate Metro services. (Anyone who has ever tried getting help from a station manager is pleased about this.)
• A “virtual tunnel” to make transferring easier between Farragut West and Farragut North. I don’t have details on this, but I take this to mean that if you leave one Farragut Square station to transfer lines at the other, you’ll be charged as if it were a continuous trip, rather than being charged the base fare twice.
• A commitment to implement external recommendations regarding escalators and elevators to keep them functional.

According to official Metro Twitter account @metroopensdoors*, Sarles said, “I see what is possible in the future, which is why I am here today; I could not pass up this opportunity to stay.”

*Without warning, the @metroopensdoors account shifted from being a bot that broadcast service disruptions to live-tweeting the Metro board proceedings. After months of complaining that Metro’s only Twitter presences weren’t actually staffed by humans, this is almost news in itself. No telling yet whether there’s more to come from @metroopensdoors.

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Metro has released a statement regarding the incident first reported on Unsuck DC Metro that has horrified many: six armed men reportedly boarded an Orange Line train on December 23rd, and allegedly robbed and beat passengers aboard that train, and according to some accounts, the Metro operator did not respond to emergency calls made from within the car.

The incident is pretty horrifying, and suggests that perhaps MTPD should spend a bit more time on trains rather than ineffectively searching our bags.  The Statement is below and in full, and says that MTPD apprehended suspects within 30 minutes and recovered the stolen property.

On Dec. 23, Metro Transit Police responded immediately to a report of a robbery that had just taken place, and within 30 minutes the suspects were positively identified, arrested and the stolen property recovered.

In an effort to address crime in the Metro system, the MTPD recently reassigned sworn officers out of administrative functions and office buildings into stations, trains and buses to better protect our customers from crime and to increase their ability to respond as quickly as possible. Here is a good example of how that redeployment makes a difference.

Background:
Police responded immediately to a call for robbery on an Orange Line train between Stadium-Armory and Minnesota Ave stations on Dec. 23. Two victims reported that while on board a train, two males stole a cell phone and a shopping bag containing recently purchased clothing and exited the train at Minnesota Avenue. The victims exited at the Cheverly station, where they reported the crime. 

Metro Transit Police stopped the suspects in Northeast Washington, DC, near the Minnesota Avenue station a few minutes later and were able to get positive identification from the victims. 

Police recovered the stolen property and charged the two 17-year-old males with robbery. 

The victims did not report the use of a weapon during the incident. The victims were treated for minor lacerations at the station.

It is far too often that I have to check the WTF?! category when I am also checking the WMATA category in our CMS.

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Get ready for an ugly weekend of transportation.  Starting at 10pm on Friday night, Metro will stop all Blue and Orange trains at Rosslyn and Farragut West and turn them around, meaning the only line across the Potomac this weekend is the Yellow line.  Hanging at Metro Center and going to Court House or vice versa?That’ll be Metro Center to L’Enfant, to Pentagon, to Rosslyn, to Court House. Sure, there’s a shuttle between Farragut West and Rosslyn, too, but will it save you any time? Not so sure about that.

Yeah, that’s going to be awesome.

On top of that, add in red-line single tracking between Friendship Heights and Van Ness, and New York Avenue and Rhode Island Avenue, and your Red Line trip is going to be a lot longer this weekend, too.

Couple all this delightful convenience with the fact that Metro drivers are pooping and peeing in their traincars, and you’ve got some warm fuzzy feelings for Metro, I’m sure.

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If you can avoid Capitol Hill for the next few hours, you probably should.

A woman was found dead inside a burning car on the 800 block of A Street SE in the 5:00 hour this morning. The car was fully engulfed when DC Fire & EMS arrived, and it was only after the fire was put out that the woman’s body was found. It seems like the car may have crashed into the garage at a low speed to start the fire. The investigation is ongoing.

A suspicious package was found outside the Capitol South metro station this morning. Metro trains are passing through the station without stopping.

So if you can adjust your business this morning to not include Capitol Hill, I recommend that you do it. Stay out of the way while police do their jobs and save yourself the frustration of navigating around them while they do it.

Or, One More Thing an iPad is Good For

There I was, waiting at the bus stop after work, staring at my phone while waiting for Nextbus to load. Nextbus said the H1 bus would arrive in 2 minutes, though the H1 tends to run on Inception time, so I figured that “2″ really meant “15.”

After about 5 minutes of shivering, we saw the H1 turn the corner from Constitution… and then blow right past the stop. There was a great disturbance in the Force, as though 10 angry government employees cried out… and the bus screeched to a halt on the other side of the intersection.

The harried driver waved us all aboard, not even wanting us to delay long enough to pay the fare. As I reached my customary seat right behind the rear exit, I heard the driver say, “Anyone going to Brookland?”

“I am!” I called out.

“Good, maybe you can help me, then. I don’t have the directions for this route. I mean, I’ve done it once before, but, you know, it’s been a minute.”

Oh. Great.

It turned out that this particular driver was subbing in on the H1, and when he left the garage, he had only been given the route’s inbound directions. If you read Shannon’s article on how bus routes are named, then you already know the H1 is a rush-hour only route, which means it only goes inbound in the mornings.

And look, when I say that the driver had the wrong set of directions, let me be clear about what he actually did have: A folded sheet of photocopied paper, where the print was distorted as though the original had been part of a notebook that didn’t lay flat on the copier bed, where the directions were printed out in order, turn-by-turn, but with no distances, no map, no nothing.  So not only were the directions for the wrong half of the route, they were practically unreadable.

The driver, to his credit, was a total pro in his demeanor. Yes, you could tell he was a little exasperated, but that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable reaction to being shoved onto a bus with the wrong directions and told to go pick up the cranky evening rush crowd on an unfamiliar route and having to rely on those same tired people to shout directions at you so you can get them home.

The passengers were all looking around nervously by this point, so I pulled out my iPad, downloaded the H1’s timetable, and showed its little half-assed map to the driver, because it was more helpful than what we was holding. And also backlit! And away we went.

Now, understand something really important: I have a terrible, awful, useless sense of direction. I get lost in large houses. And one of my favorite things about commuting by bus is that I can space out and pay no particular attention to the route. So let me be clear that in this situation, I’m just the one-eyed woman in the land of the blind. When I’m the one helping the bus driver get us all home, we’re all screwed.

But I sat in the front seat of the bus, helping the driver navigate the route from that mostly unlabeled map, occasionally turning to the other passengers when there was a question about the specific turn the driver needed to make, and jumping up to review the map with him while stopped at red lights. When a passenger boarded the bus and asked if it would go by the Columbia Heights metro and the driver hesitated, I said, “Yes!”

He said, “We do?”

“Yes! It’s right here on the map, see?”

As we pulled into Brookland Station, the driver visibly relaxed, his workplace ordeal over for the moment. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So… that’s an iPad, huh?”

Guess I know what somebody wants for Christmas.

In response to recent threats to the system, WMATA has decided that the negative press that the TSA is getting is the sort of thing that they would like to have also, and today announced enhanced searching of individuals, including bag searches at random stations.  One small problem with Metro’s plan is that they will not be searching at every station, and I can’t quite figure out what would stop someone from seeing police presence at, say, Farragut West, and instead walking just two blocks to Farragut North.  Terrorists aren’t going to be deterred by searches, and a bomb going off at any station would do the sort of damage that would be irreparable to ridership and public confidence in the embattled transit agency.

So, if you were looking for yet another reason to decide that Metro is an agency adrift, without leadership or positive policy, then you just got it.  Searches start in the next few days.  The searches are supposed to take “minutes,” but when you consider it took them 90 minutes to figure out that a christmas ornament with LEDs was harmless, I’ve got to think that the average search of my bag will last approximately six days.

UPDATE: Metro has released a YouTube video to sell this to you, showing that the process should take no more than 60 seconds. You know, as long as no one else is in the process of being scanned, and never mind that 60 seconds is more than enough time to miss your train.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I understand being cautious in a world where new plots to assault Metro riders are announced daily (and that’s just by WMATA! *badum ching*) that you have to be cautious in a situation where you figure out that you might well have something a bit hazardous on your hands.  This morning’s incident at Pentagon Metro, that closed the hub station for 90 minutes during the midst of rush hour, is one case where the caution lead to massive amounts of commuting frustration over a battery-operated Christmas ornament.

My question: why the hell did it take so long to figure out that it was a Christmas Ornament? I mean, I get not wanting to put your hand down in there to pull it out and have something go off, but why not just put that bomb-proof trashcan on a dolly and wheel it right out of the station so that life can go on while you figure it out?

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Here’s the end to our #MetroCarol story, but before we get to that- a snapshot of what happened.

I was delighted to get a Facebook Invite to an interesting event: a flash mob on the DC Metro. Jason McCool, an actor and music professor, and Melanie Spring, founder of web marketing firm Sisarina, wanted to organize a spontaneous outburst of Holiday Carols on the platforms of various Metro Stations on the Red Line.

It was a great idea; a good natured event that would be a lot of fun to watch and would bring a surprise dose of holiday cheer into the city. Plus, I’ve never been involved with a flash mob before. I’m sure it was part of the reason over 100 people RSVP’d for the event.

The viral nature of flash mob videos on YouTube also attracted the attention of the news media. It wasn’t a surprise the press caught wind of the event. In today’s age of social media it’s hard to hide a secret event when conversation was openly held on Facebook and Twitter by both the organizers and participants. The press sniffed out the chance to get on top of a story before it happens, unlike most flash mobs which go viral after a video is released post-event. A similar flash mob in November featured the Philadelphia Opera Company singing inside a Macy’s department store didn’t get notoriety until the video was posted by the group the day after.

The challenge McCool and Spring faced was trying to grow their event via social media while keeping it under wraps. Unfortunately they found out it was an almost impossible task.

McCool was interviewed by the Washington Examiner and WUSA before it was even scheduled to happen. In the Examiner piece, the rough outline of the event was made public, creating not only more buzz for the event, but opening it to public scrutiny before a single note was sung.

With the event almost public knowledge amongst the media, it was a top local story on all the major outlets and morning radio shows. NBC Washington wrote that it would ruin the commute, TBD posted the schedule, and all of a sudden the event was drawing more attention than it should have.

McCool and Spring expressed frustration over their now-public plans- and for good reason. What good is a flash mob when everybody is expecting it and already talking about it? This isn’t a flash mob snowball fight where everybody has fun regardless of the press prior; the whole idea of surprise was lost with the amount of attention they got.

Regardless the organizers rolled with the punches and decided to change plans, a spontaneous outburst of caroling was changed to a gathering to sing outside Metro stations. The flash mob allure may have been lost but I decided to come out and see how it would unfold.

Plus it’s the holidays! Shouldn’t we all take a moment to enjoy some pleasant holiday songs?

When I arrived to Dupont Circle I wasn’t the only person around with a camera. WJLA, WUSA, NPR, and the Washington Post were all on-hand to see how the “flash mob” would unfold.

As the singing began it started as a confused walk around the Dupont Circle fountain but gained momentum as they decided to brave the walk across the street outside the metro station entrance.

The most memorable moment came as the crowd went into, “Let It Snow” and snowflakes began to fall. I’ll admit it was a really nice touch from mother nature.

The small crowd of 20-30 decided to sing, “The 12 Days of Metro” down the escalator earning a few smiles from the passengers on the other side. After a few songs they quietly boarded a train and made their way to Union Station.

Today the media posted their post-mortems. NBC Washington remains snarky about the event while, the Washington Post and WUSA highlighted the one key take-away: people enjoyed it.

Now there’s been a lot of talk about “leaks” and objections to the whole event and McCool is already turned off over the idea of a repeat flash mob because of all the pre-event criticism. I don’t think you can say there’s a leak when you organize an event and openly talk about rehearsing, planning, and recruiting big crowds in the wide-open space of social media. I guess the lesson learned is if you want to keep it a secret keep it off Twitter.

However I have respect for McCool and Spring for going forward last night with a noble goal: making people happy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The FBI has had a string of wins recently nabbing numerous would-be terrorists before they’ve struck. CNN is reporting that they’ve just accused a man arrested on December 7th of “threatening to place pipe bombs along the Metro transportation system in Washington.” The individual, identified as Awais Younis (nee Sundullah Ghilzai) bragged to someone on Facebook how to construct the device and where he could deploy them without being noticed.

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