Map by MV Jantzen

We all have our own internal mental map of the Metro that takes into account weekend track work, single tracking, transfers between lines, transfers to buses, and I suspect they look an awful lot like MV Jantzen’s Distorted Metro Map. The cleverly-done HTML 5 app moves the iconic map around a polar scale, putting time distance between station at a premium instead of a clear map, moving stations into closer proximity if they’re closer by time than necessarily by distance.

There’s also a bad-ass Pac-man mode where you get to gobble up the stations like power pellets, which, frankly, is all I’ve ever wanted to do to the Red Line.

The Metro board today met to consider some station names and changes to be made ahead of the next redesign of the map and authorized a number of changes to stations you may know and love. Here’s the skinny, straight from Metro:

• Navy Yard becomes Navy Yard-Ballpark.
• King Street becomes King St-Old Town.
• Waterfront-SEU will drop SEU, because the university no longer exists.
• Forest Glen will be shown on the map with the universal “H” symbol to indicate the location of Holy Cross Hospital.
• Foggy Bottom and Medical Center will also be shown with “H” symbols reflecting proximity of hospitals.
• New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet U will be renamed “NoMa-Gallaudet U.” “New York Ave” will be shown as a secondary name for one-year to assist customers during the transition.

Four stations were unaltered, due to public familiarity with their names, despite their length:

• Grosvenor-Strathmore
• Georgia Ave-Petworth
• Franconia-Springfield
• Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport

The new names will take effect next year when the June 2012 Metro Map hits the streets.  The cost to rename the stations is estimated to be approximately $400,000, though no formal figure is available.

Part of Metro’s new Map

Metro’s iconic map is at a turning point. The new Silver Line that’s being constructed out to Dulles Airport presents a challenge for the transit system’s existing map, as it would push outward the boundaries on the system past the edge of the page. As part of the upcoming changes, Metro has released a draft map (that we’ve excerpted from above) and a survey to go with it.

The heart of the changes, for now at least, have to do with changes in the green line (to more correctly display its geography), and the orange and yellow line service extensions that operate during Metro’s rush hours.  The yellow line now shows a dashed line (though a striped line is also proposed in the survey) down to Springfield, and up to Greenbelt, and the orange line has a dashed section out to Largo.  Mysterious and ghostly is how they’ve chosen to draw the Silver Line outward through Tysons to Dulles for now, largely postponing the question of where the map’s new boundaries will be.

Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert has dissected the map with regard to the site’s mapping contest, and has a series of great recommendations and observations. Definitely give it a look.  Also, Metro’s Barbara Richardson spoke with the Post’s chat group this morning at 10am, and that chat will likely be instructive with regards to what Metro was considering with regard to the map.

Personally, I think the new map is a welcome improvement in a number of ways: it highlights the increased service to Fort Totten on the yellow line and differentiates between the extended yellow line service to Greenbelt in a manner that’s elegant, and also does the same for the orange line out to Largo. It also thickens the orange/blue line between Rosslyn and Stadium-Armory to allow for a silver line when the time comes for it to actually run. This is a ground-work laying map that will hopefully serve us until 2013 when the new map, and new line, debut service out to Tysons.

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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.

I’ve always wanted a website that could tell me exactly how totally and unrepetently fucked Metro was at any given moment, and now I have my wish.  Designer Joey Brunelle built the website, and is still handtuning the application to display how fucked, or not fucked, the metro system is at any given point.  It’s a pretty amazing little web-app, it shows you how many trains are in service, where they are on the map, what the wait time is like for individual stations, and allows you to switch seamlessly between lines.

Nice job, Joey!

Of course, there’s a worksafe version for those of you who still feel the need to watch your language around your bosses.

I hate parking meters. I think they’re an awful concept. Not because they make you pay for what you use, but rather how they make you pay for it: with change.  As rates have increased in the downtown core to $2/hr, it means that you need to carry with you rolls and rolls of quarters if you’re going to do any parking in the core that isn’t in a garage.

We started to see pay-by-phone metering last year, with a number of trials in Dupont Circle and in Foggy Bottom with a pair of services that work on a zone-based system.  Call a number, enter a credit card (the first time) and then enter the zone where you’re parked.  Bam, you’re good for as long as you’re within the limit for the zone.  If you only intend to stay for 50 minutes, that’s all you pay for, instead of the potential for overpaying at a traditional coin meter.  It’s a revolution.

Starting this June, the District will be rolling this out for all 17,000 metered parking spaces in the District, making coin-haters everywhere happy. The winner of the contract is Parkmobile, where you can register an account now, or just call in the first time you use the new technology.  In addition, there will be apps for iPhones, Android phones and Blackberries, which can take some of the hard work out of it for you through GPS location.

Our request for comment to DDOT went unanswered yesterday afternoon as to why they selected Parkmobile instead of the PayByPhone service from Verrus that was also in testing on K Street, I Street and near Dupont Circle.  Verrus is in the process of rolling out a realtime parking availability service for San Francisco’s SFpark, which could have been a real boon for the District’s driving populace.

Other Notes: A few other notes from around the transit-sphere. WIRED had a great piece last week on how mobile apps are empowering transit riders, which echoes the point I was making about Seattle’s great transportation system: The strength is in the flexibility of the system and the ways that riders can know their options.  Paper timetables aren’t cutting, Metro, and the rideguide just isn’t a functional option on a mobile phone.

Combining two of my loves, the Metro and Baseball, WMATA and the Nationals are trying to negotiate over who will pay for late night extensions to service in case of extra innings or rain delay or both.  Currently, the city pays for late train service, which they do not do for any other sport. The Nats may find themselves a bill for $90,000 an hour, or about twice what they’re paying Ryan Zimmerman for each game this season.

One thousand one hundred feet. Does that sound like too long of a walk? What if you had bags and were headed to an airport?

That was the decision in front of the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority Dulles Corridor Committee this morning, and it seems the answer was, “yes, it is too far to walk.” The committee, as reported by WTOP’s Adam Tuss, voted to support a below ground station that would bring the Metrorail extension to Dulles about 500 feet from the terminal.

The problem is that this is going to come at an additional cost of about $300 million. That’s roughly half a million dollars per foot that we move closer to the terminal.

‘226/365 – dulles’
courtesy of ‘dracisk 365/365′

I’m a little bit dismayed at this decision. The full board voted to support the committee vote, as expected. Perhaps the board should have considered more that while WMAA is raising the funds for this, everyone had better consider the shape of the Metro as a whole, though, before deciding this.

Yes, the billions being spent on this extension to Tyson’s and Dulles have no direct impact to the Metro budget. But if Virginia is willing to cough up some part of $300 million to move a station 600 feet, I’m sure I’d like to hear why we’re discussing reducing service to close the budget gap, instead of, say, contributing more?

If the state isn’t willing to cough up much of the cash (I’m thinking that’s a good bet), how can you justify charging an extra $0.50 per car on the toll road to pay for 600 feet?

And even if the board manages to find $300 million in savings in other parts of the project, doesn’t that lead to the question of “why are there $300 million to find, and if there aren’t, what other essential systems are we going to short change by ‘value engineering’ this?”

‘Mobile lounge’
courtesy of ‘afagen’

To add insult to injury, these three tweets (1, 2, 3) show the argument that the National Airport station being 1000 feet from the terminal hurt the airport with low usage. When terminals B and C were built, steps from the station, usage spiked. Because, you know, usage didn’t spike from having two new modern large terminals there? It was just that it was a few hundred feet closer? Really?

If MWAA thinks $300 million to move a station 600 feet closer to the terminal is a good idea, perhaps they should show how that will result in $300 million in revenue. Or how building moving walkways to ferry people to the terminal wouldn’t be cheaper.

Or, you know, maybe reuse those people movers in a new role: station to terminal transport!

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I was getting ready to head to work on Monday when I noticed that Twitter was all atwitter about the Orange and Blue lines being a mess. I usually head into town from Court House after 9:30, and usually congestion issues have worked themselves out by then.

But this was much bigger. A power cable outside Federal Triangle needed replacing, and this caused Metro to single track trains for roughly the duration of the morning rush hour. Even after rush hour ended, there were still residual issues with trains clumping and having to slow down.

I was trying to assess if I should work from home that day and looked at the next train arrival times for Court House. To my utter amazement, I saw that the next three trains were 8-car trains. When I decided to go in, I also saw that the two of the next three trains were also 8-cars. I was shocked, and dropped a note to Metro to find out what was going on.

‘good morning.’
courtesy of ‘volcanojw’

Essentially, what I was seeing was the residual effects of the delays in the system. These were mostly 8-car trains that had been scheduled already, but which had been delayed by the single tracking. I’m almost sure that one or more might have been phantom 8-car trains (6-car trains that are erroneously listed as 8 by the public information display system).

UPDATE: I misunderstood what Metro spokesman Ron Holzer told me. What did happen was that six more cars, in pairs, were added to existing trains to create three more 8-car trains than was planned.

My conversation with Metro spokesman Ron Holzer did point out that they try to be proactive in the use of what they term “gap trains.” These are trains that are not on the schedule but which can be deployed quickly to fill in any gaps left by having to remove a train from service. Sometimes, these trains are added in to relieve congestion, as well.

So how does Metro know when to deploy a gap train for congestion relief? In scheduled events, like a game or concert at the Verizon Center, Metro has gap trains at the ready, and send them in when the crowds start to exit. But in the case of train or track issues, the agency has traffic checkers at key stations, and central control can bring up platform cameras to see what’s going on.

In Monday’s incident on the Orange line, a 6-car gap train was added six cars were added to create three more 8-car trains than was planned, but “no other capacity could be added because of the single tracking,” Holzer said.

‘the long wait home’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99′

Holzer also points out that as part of Metro’s ongoing improvements and in an effort to ease congestion due to the Cherry Blossom Festival and the onset of tourist season, the agency is adding 8-car trains. This expanded capacity will continue even after the festival is over.

For Monday’s commute, this was but a band-aid on a huge cut. There’s no getting around single tracking when there are critical issues that have to be fixed immediately. This power cable repair had to be done, and there was no way to postpone that work. Unfortunately, and we’ve talked about this before, until the system is in a state of good repair, issues like this will not be uncommon.

One other thing I think Metro can improve on is communications. Single tracking was done by the end of rush hour, and the problem was known to be a power cable. Yet, even by 10a, my train operator was saying that we were single tracking. There has to be clear communication, otherwise it appears that various parts of Metro are not in sync.

I also think that some of the pictures I saw of crowding on the platforms were very scary. This wasn’t an incident where people had to be offloaded on one platform, it was single tracking during rush hour. In other words, the station managers should have expected platforms to fill up, and should have started to stop people from entering the station until there was space for them.

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Most of us work in jobs where our performance matters. Every year, your boss sits you down and tells you what you did right or wrong, and if you’re good, the rights outnumber the wrongs and you get a raise. For some, the raise doesn’t come, and for others, you get fired. Companies like to pay based on performance because it motivates people.

If you go to a nice restaurant, and you order your meal, and as they’re bringing everyone else’s food out, they explain to you that they screwed up your order. Maybe they dropped it on the floor, maybe they realized they sold the last rabbit too late for your order, or maybe the waiter forgot to enter it. No matter, really. They usually apologize and, more often than not, they will take the hit and not charge you for your meal. Better restaurants go a little further and offer you a discount on your next visit, or a free dessert.

Both situations have one thing in common: the income is related to the performance. You get paid more if you do well. You have to lose money in order to correct a mistake. I think Metro could learn a thing or two in the realm of customer service and performance.


”
courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie’

So how would a “performance-based fare” work? In London, you get a free ride if your trip is delayed by more than 15 minutes. Let’s make that the base and work from there.

If any escalator is broken on your path, Metro should deduct ten cents from your fare. If two or more escalators are down, that’s another ten cents, and the maximum.

If an elevator is broken on your path, but it doesn’t impact your ability to use that station, Metro should deduct five cents.

If an elevator is broken on your path and it impacts your trip (in other words, if you have to use an elevator and it being broken means you have to go out of your way to get to another elevator, or if you have to go to another station), Metro should deduct half your fare.

If your train is offloaded, you trip is free. This will create an incentive for Metro to only off load a single car if the doors won’t close, as opposed to the whole train.

If your train is delayed by more than three minutes, you should get a five cent deduction for every three minutes it is delayed. If your train is delayed by more than 15 minutes, your fare is free.

If your bus is delayed by more than five minutes, you should get a five cent deduction for every five minutes it is delayed. If your bus is delayed by more than 20 minutes, your fare is halved. If the delay is cause not by traffic, but by something that is under Metro’s control, your ride is free.

‘Arrival of the Metro’
courtesy of ‘pablo.raw’

How would Metro do this? Well, first, it would be available only to people with SmarTrip cards. Not that it isn’t possible to do this in real time, just highly unlikely, and it’s another incentive for locals to get a SmarTrip card already.

Second, Metro has all the details, possibly even down to the minute, of when an escalator, elevator, train, or bus failed. Every evening, or possibly every weekend or end of the month, Metro should go back and plot the routes that people take, cross reference that with the various outage reports, and automatically adjust the fares. The next time you enter or exit a station, your SmarTrip card will be updated, and the website will always show the current value.

Some of you might be thinking that Metro can’t afford this, and you’d be right. I still think Metro needs something of this sort (perhaps only the 15 minute delay) in order to make passengers feel like someone understands there is a problem, and, while the five cents won’t fix it, it does acknowledge it. And it’s a damn sight more believable than another recorded “we apologize for any inconvenience” message.

Metro could take the accountability further: have the refunds come from the budgets of the appropriate groups. This probably won’t work well in the beginning as the system is being rebuilt, but it should be a consideration going forward.

If the CEO title for the GM is meant to show a commitment to “the buck stops here” corporate thinking, I think corporate practices for performance should spread within the agency.

Two weeks ago, Metro’s board heard, again, about the possibility of eliminating late night service on the weekends. This has reopened the debate about what direction Metro should be going, and whom it should be serving.

Two of the most vociferous opponents of such a change on the WMATA board have recently left, and the new board seemed more amenable to the idea.

There are those who believe that late night service is a big boon to Metro’s bottom line and that it should be continued. Others, especially within Metro, argue that closing the system earlier would give them the equivalent of 45 days more maintenance time per year, and lower costs for overtime.

As always with Metro, it’s a balancing act. On the one hand, the system is overloaded during the rush hours, has long lead times in the evening, and pretty crappy service on the weekends. It is constantly facing budget shortfalls, and its funding is always under attack. It is aging, and it isn’t in a state of good repair. It wasn’t designed to handle the service we’re asking of it, and we won’t fund it well enough to even make it run “normally”.

‘light rail’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99′

On the other hand, we don’t live in the same city for which the Metro was designed. The DC area has grown bigger and faster than just about anyone predicted (see also: housing and roads). We have a population that expects to be able to get home by public transport as it shuns driving. Our younger population needs Metro, because between housing prices, a flat economy, and taxi prices, they can’t afford to go out on a Friday night unless they have a reliable way to get home cheaply. And everyone would love to have a system that can be rightly called “world class.”

So, what are options? What’s realistic? Here’s what we do know: Metro has to do maintenance. It costs them more when they have to work employees over long weekends. Metro has a big budget crunch about to hit it, and it is unlikely they will get additional funding from the regions.

Across the board service cuts (eliminate 8-car trains, increase headways between trains, etc) would lead to a revolt at this point. So would increasing fares. So is it wrong to look at eliminating a service that, while important, isn’t the core of Metro? In a word, yes.

As the nature of the city has changed, so too must the nature of Metro. And that means late night hours should stay, and we should be looking for ways to increase late night service, not reduce it.

‘Tunnel Rats’
courtesy of ‘Samer Farha’

So, options:

Create a maintenance schedule the concentrates resources on one line or station so that you can close that line early for a night. Or two nights. Or however many nights in a row. And I don’t mean just late night service: if the work you need to do requires six hours, but you only have from 12:30a to 5a, then close the station or line earlier, even on a weekday. Communication is key, here, both in station and via blogs and newspapers.

Work on one side of the tracks at a time, and space trains out so that you can easily switch them using the same set of tracks. This is trickier, slightly more risky, but when trains are running every 15-20 minutes anyway, the impact isn’t going to be that great.

Lastly, close down entire stations for a weekend at a time if needed, but plan on providing reasonably normal service to the stations that are open. That hasn’t been the case with holiday weekend closings, but the upcoming work in March on the Orange line needs to be better handled. Busses just don’t take the place of full trains very well.

I’d like to see a future system where not only do we have late night service on Fridays and Saturdays, but twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Yes, I know we’ll need more and better trains, and we’re getting there. We’re also going to need better planning, and limited service in those overnight hours. But why not run, single tracking if need be, a train every 30 or 45 minutes in the overnight hours?

It isn’t just the daily suburban commuters that we need to help out. Everyone, from the tourists that line our pockets to the service workers who can’t work a late shift because they can’t get home to the (gasp!) drunks in Adams Morgan and Dupont, deserves better.

Last week, Metro’s new, permanent General Manager and CEO Richard Sarles held a blogger roundtable to talk about system safety, improvements in customer service, and bag searches. You probably read about it here and there, so I’ll leave the recap to below the fold and tell you about my impressions of Sarles and why I think he’s going to be the most important head of the system for the foreseeable future.

Sarles is a relatively soft spoken guy, but he’s got a gravitas that lets you know he’s both in charge and very well versed in the details of the system he runs. He’s also very much an engineer, having come to management at NJ Transit later in life. He understands the system, and strikes a pragmatic tone in his talk with us.

He brings that engineering background to the role of GM, and already has a systemic plan to return the system to what’s referred to as a “state of good repair.” That means, essentially, that the critical systems of transporting people have to be well maintained so that they do not pose either a safety or breakdown hazard. And that’s a long way away.

‘Metro Blogger Roundtable’
courtesy of ‘Samer Farha’

I think Sarles has the knowledge and the leadership to get the system back into the state of good repair. I also think he’s very focused on customer service, and that the board has finally chosen a transit leader that understands the minutiae of the system. If he succeeds, and I think, with one exception, he has all the tools in front of him to do so, he will have turned around a system that is seriously broken, and will have laid the groundwork for the system to thrive for years to come. In essence, he will have reset the clock on the decay and failure of the last two decades.

I believe Sarles not only deserves our respect, but deserves good will and space to act that I don’t think any of the last three GMs deserved. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be a cake walk, and it isn’t going to be done soon (maybe not even during his tenure). Neither we (the blogging community) or you (the riding public) should feel afraid to criticize or push WMATA on what’s needed. But we should keep in mind that these changes take time and money, both of which are in short supply.

“This whole catching up — state of good repair — it is something that’s not going to turn around in six months or a year,” said Sarles. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And we’re going to be running a long marathon here.”

He’s very serious about that statement, too. “Look at the Red line, that’s 35 years old. This place has got to be rebuilt. [It] has the heaviest traffic, it’s the oldest part of the system, and we’re in the process of rebuilding it.”

‘Metro Blogger Roundtable’
courtesy of ‘Samer Farha’

The timelines aren’t fast, either: “We’ve got another two years to go on the Red line contract … then we’re moving on to the Blue and Orange lines … and that’s going to go on for another three or four years to rebuild that line.” Some of that work will overlap, but construction and weekend and evening closures look like they are going to be with us for at least the next five years.

And what of money? With a budget slashing Congress in place, and the economy not rebounding as quickly as some had hoped, what happens to Metro if promised funds don’t show up?

“With what’s going on in Congress right now, there’s the potential that all the plans we laid last year could unravel,” says Sarles matter-of-factly.

“We will not catch up [to the state of good repair],” he continues, more somberly. “It’s devastating. Unless someone else wants to give us that kind of pot of money, there’s no place else to go.”

I can’t stress this enough: we, the riders of the system, have to ask our members of Congress to not cut Metro’s funding. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t demand smaller budgets and lower taxes without losing something. For those of us that rely upon Metro to get us to and from work, for this region and its economy, we can’t sit by and not act. Metro has no options. It wouldn’t be viable at $10 a ride, and there are no other sources of funding.

More than the accidents and the delays, more than the crowding and the nightmare commutes, funding remains the number one problem for the agency. And this is something that, no matter the engineering, is not entirely in Metro’s or Sarles’s hands. If you want to see the system and this GM succeed, you need to get involved, too.

‘Metro Blogger Roundtable’
courtesy of ‘Samer Farha’

And now that I’m off my soap box, here’s a quick summary of other topics of interest:

“CEO”: Sarles is the first Metro GM to have the title Chief Executive Officer since Richard White. “By adding the title … reinforces that fact that the CEO is going to act like a CEO here and run the organization. And the board has indicated they are going to focus on policy, and governance and monitoring.”

On bag search, which we discussed at length: Sarles indicated that he was briefed, in depth, by the Metro Transit Police Chief on the use of bag searches, and that he authorized them. His defers to anti-terror experts in this, and says the belief is that terrorists like to have a routine and do not like it when their routine is broken. That’s exactly what I want to hear from the CEO, but I still believe they are wrong on this. Here’s Bruce Schneier on this subject. I’d recommend you refuse a search and force the agency to rethink their plans, but I like tilting at windmills.

“People want to do something here,” said Sarles, all but admitting this was security theater. “We are the nation’s capital, we are the symbol here of a great country, and we call ourselves America’s subway. I can tell you that we are something that people would like to attack.”

I’d expect to see the bag searches used in limited fashion, especially around the “special times” (holidays, significant dates, etc).

On escalators: Sarles is aware of the problems. He’s elevated the escalator group to a more prominent position in the organization. The first big escalator project will be the replacement of the ones at Foggy Bottom, which Sarles says will take about a year and will include adding stairs as well.

On the number one issue: According to Sarles, the number one issue that riders report having problems with is … trash. Are you kidding me? Who are these riders? My guess is this is partly due to what people feel Metro can control and so they complain about that when asked, versus not complaining about other things. Like service.

The final word: I expect that Metro is going to be doing more outreach. This meeting was called at the last minute, and the attendance showed. I was told this is because of Sarles’s schedule, and the difficulty of finding one hour to do this. But Sarles has also been out and about, meeting riders on the Metro during rush hour last week. And he rides the system regularly. I think he understands that while the system is being rebuilt, the best way to gain favor with riders is not to lie to them about the pain they are feeling, but, rather, to listen and to be sincere in their answers.

We are putting building blocks in place – making safety investments, improving our tracks and rail system, putting new buses in service, expanding staff training and designing new rail cars – while it may not be immediately evident and there are inconveniences along the way – we are literally building a new Metro for our customers and employees. — Metro’s GM/CEO, Richard Sarles

As we reported yesterday, Metro’s board named Richard Sarles as the permanent General Manager and Chief Executive Officer. It’s a move they should have done in the first place, and one that I said might happen when we first heard of Sarles.

Over ten months, Sarles has brought an engineer’s attitude and has been acting less interim than his title would have implied. He said he wasn’t looking to come here full time, but he always seemed to want to make an impact. “I came to Metro as the interim general manager,” he said at the board meeting yesterday, “simply wanting to help put the agency on the right path.”


‘if it ain’t broke…’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99′

I think he’s certainly done that. Metro is by no means a shining example of a transit agency, but I think Sarles has managed to put it back on track to recovery. That path, though, is not a short or smooth one, and there’s yet a long way to go.

But, let’s take a look at where we’ve come in the last ten months. Under Sarles’s tenure, we’ve had a lot more construction in order to improve service and safety. We’ve had a refocusing on safety within the agency, and there have been far fewer deadly accidents in the system. We’ve gone from members of Congress calling for a take over of the system to a reinvigorated board and organization.

What of my wish list that I hoped Sarles could get to delivering? There’s been progress, but not nearly enough.

The system isn’t yet reliable enough, though some might say that it is reliably broken, especially on the weekends. There’s a long way to go here, and Sarles acknowledges that, saying, “we still have a big job ahead.” He points out that moving the system forward has to include “a continued commitment to safety, reliability and financial stability while adopting the fourth cornerstone of improving customer service.”

‘dupont circle’
courtesy of ‘dracisk 365/365′

I still want to see more 8-car trains, but at least Metro is now much more honest with us about why they aren’t there yet (surprise, no money). There does seem to be a shift in the culture of Metro toward more openness, but there’s definitely a tug of war between the past and the future. And speaking of the culture, I think it, too, is slowly changing. Bus and rail staff seem more friendly, though it’s still far from certain that an employee will be helpful.

This year saw one of the largest increases in fares, and the addition of a strange and complicated peak-of-the-peak pricing. I have no idea what I’ll be paying when I enter the system anymore. Luckily, SmarTrip makes it relatively painless, and I can now track my spending online. Metro has released a lot of data over the last ten months, and there’s still hope it’ll make it into Google Transit. Some day. Soon.

Sarles still has a lot of work to do, though. And the job isn’t made any easier by the need for money, big money. Part of the “CEO” title is surely going to mean he’s going to have to do more talking to and convincing of members of Congress, who are going to have to cough up more money to keep the system from having to reduce service.

‘dupont circle’
courtesy of ‘dracisk 365/365′

“Operating more efficiently will continue to be a focus for us throughout the agency, particularly as it related to the operating budget,” Sarles said. “However, I want to point out that our ability to operate our core services, as well as continue safety and reliability improvements through rebuilding our infrastructure and equipment depend upon adequate funding.”

And so, while Sarles really is the right man for the job in my view, it’s clear that the future of Metro is far from certain. He’s going to improve many things, from escalators and elevators to customer service and safety, but at the end of the day, money is still the system’s biggest need, and that’s a tough sell in a good economy.

Read Sarles’s comments to the board.

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Last night’s horrific commutes ranged anywhere from 3-5 hours on the short end to 12-14 hours, we’re hearing, with most of those higher numbers west of the city.  Take a look at a couple screenies that Greater Greater Washington put up last night that show pretty much every road west of the Potomac River over capacity with no cars moving.

You can see the snowfall trends in the storm thanks to the Capital Weather Gang’s Submit-a-Report map, and it seems to have aligned a few trends that made things massively difficult for everyone to get around.  Read on for all the details.

1. The storm started earliest west of the city and moved east starting as early as 1:30pm, meaning that the plows weren’t in position to deal with the worst of the roads in time for…

2. The Federal Government closed at 3pm.  We drove through downtown yesterday right at the 3pm hour in the worst of the mixed icy precipitation and the start of the heavily falling snow.  West of the city, where a large proportion of Federal workers live, there was already 1-2″ of snow around that time, and suddenly the plows weren’t able to handle the influx of cars to effectively keep snow off the roads.

3. The ripple effect only made things worse.  Cars clogging the roads meant that plows couldn’t move through, which meant snow was piling up, which meant that the roads grew less and less passable for cars that were stuck there.  Abandoned vehicles made for obstacles that then needed to be slalomed by the plows, causing further delay.

‘SNOW’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

You see where this was going.

I contend that had the Feds closed at 1, we would’ve seen a sane, if slightly longer than normal commute, but I think that had the Feds stayed open til 5, we would’ve seen a saner commute, as that would’ve given the plows and salt trucks a chance to better treat the roads in the face of the storm.

Am I offbase? Crazy? Say so in the comments.

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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I’m a fan of open and honest communication. It’s the best policy. You lay out your position, you let everyone know what is going on, you keep them informed. They might not be happy with everything that you do, but they will see that you are making an effort and that you are, at least, trying to keep them updated.

Metro seems to have a love-hate relationship with this concept. Last year, Metro tried for a little more openness. They invited bloggers into their HQ for a no holds barred talk with both the former General Manager John Catoe as well as his replacement, Interim GM Richard Sarles. We covered both events, and we were happy to see WMATA headed in a more clear and open direction.

But I’m beginning to think these things are flukes. Last week, WTOP’s intrepid transportation reporter Adam Tuss called out the agency on Twitter for not answering questions about the recent violence at L’Enfant Plaza. Metro eventually caved, but not until after he threatened to “slam them on air.”

‘Easy Listening’
courtesy of ‘Rolenz’

Metro has a bad habit of trying to pretend that bad things don’t happen. Worse, they don’t have a good habit of getting out ahead of the story. It’s almost like they have no strategy to make sure that people are informed and that the folks responsible (in this case, Metro Transit Police brass) face the press and public alike.

What they are good about, it seems, is putting out press release after press release on how Metro is ready to fight the snow that’s [not] coming. Things we should be able to take for granted, Metro feels the need to shout from the proverbial rooftops. With barely a flake in the sky, they felt that it was imperative that we all know that rush hour commuting was going to be fine, but no press release about the L’Enfant incident (yes, they did a release, apparently in private, to some members of the press).

‘footprints to the White House’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99′

Part of the job of being a public agency is communicating with your public. Metro seems less and less interested in that and more interested in not talking about bad things and bad policy. At a bare minimum, their Twitter account should respond and have a more “human” voice.

Even their press releases talking about track work seem to have a need to spin them into the positive: “To improve service reliability, Metro to conduct mid-day track work on the Red Line” one recent release says. It could easily, and more accurately, read, “disruptions on the Red Line due to mid-day track work to improve service reliability.” I don’t have a problem with trying to be more positive, but to obfuscate that there will be an impact on your travel isn’t really right, either.

And just in case you didn’t know, “Metrorail improvements planned for Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend,” really means, “Don’t bother trying to get to or from VA on Metro’s Blue or Orange lines unless you’ve got lots of time on your hands.”

I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs, but perhaps a walk over to Metro’s data group can help them see that openness isn’t all bad.

By now, I am certain that you have seen the video, or heard about the incident that took place at L’Enfant Metro this past weekend, where a man was beaten by a group of teenagers while they took video of the incident. Metro has now issued a statement after the fact condemning the incident. It’s after the break.

The Metro Transit Police Department is seeking assistance from the public and encourages anyone who witnessed or has information about an assault at L’Enfant Plaza on Sunday, Jan. 2, about 7:15 p.m. to please call the Metro Transit Police Detective Branch at 202-962-1792.

This was an unfortunate incident and the MTPD is following up with an investigation. After the assault, the man reported it to the station manager on duty at L’Enfant Plaza who immediately notified the police. A Metro Transit Police officer responded, immediately took a report from the man and began the investigation. The victim received minor injuries and declined medical assistance.

If customers witness a fight or are the victim of an assault, they should immediately report the incident to the Metro Transit Police by calling 202-962-2121 or notify a Metro employee. Customers also can use emergency call buttons on every rail car which connect the caller to the train operator. On platforms emergency call buttons on pylons contact a station manager.

The Metro Transit Police Department will increase its patrols at L’Enfant Plaza station, and be watchful of groups of young passengers approaching other customers.

We join MTPD and WMATA in condemning the brutal beating of the passenger, and further add a strong “Seriously, people, WTF is wrong with you?!” to their statement. More horrifying about this issue is that no one on the platform helped this guy while they were whaling on him. People, we’re in this together, help each other out once in a blue moon, alright?

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As you might have heard by now, Metro’s longest serving board member, Chris Zimmerman, has elected to step down. I spoke with Mr. Zimmerman this morning about his decision to step down, and about Metro in general.

Despite the persistent reports that he resigned due to frustrations with funding, Zimmerman told me that he stepped down because of time constraints. At the beginning of the year, Zimmerman will become chairman of the Arlington County board. “I have a number of things in Arlington that are very important to me that I really need to spend time on,” he said. “The Metro assignment has become quite consuming, and at some point you have to decide what to focus on.”

That doesn’t mean he isn’t concerned with Metro’s funding. “My concern about Metro in the future is that we have not been committing the resources necessary to operate at the level that the region expects, and we’re seeing the consequences of that. That’s not something that can be fixed from within the Metro board.” He adds that he expects to continue to be involved in Metro and other transportation issues, and in finding a stable source of funding for the agency.

Read on for what I thought was a frank and wide-ranging discussion of the issues the board and the region have ahead of them.

‘Into the Darkness III’
courtesy of ‘yonas1′

“It’s a chronic problem. We’ve been facing it for a long time, we’ve been talking about it for a long time,” he says of Metro’s funding. “These are not things that are going to be fixed by a magical general manager. They’re not going to be fixed by any configuration of the board of directors.

“If we really want this thing to work, we have to get serious as a region and commit the investment to it that’s necessary to maintain it at the level people want to maintain it and to operate it at the level they expect.”

Metro, Zimmerman says, is core to the local economies and it is those local jurisdictions that have to step up and help pay for the service. “It’s not just another amenity, it’s actually a core service. It’s something that is key to the vitality of the local economy that generates the revenue that pays for everything else, therefore it has to be given a certain primacy. If it’s necessary to come up with more money, even when you’re cutting other things, then yes, you have to come up with it. Because this is the seed corn.”

He says that Northern Virginia’s local governments came up with extra funding during the budget crunch earlier in the year. “The choices were cut service, raise fares, or come up with additional subsidies, and it was the Northern Virginia local government that said, ‘okay, we’re willing to go half way, even though that means raising taxes in our jurisdictions.’”

“The biggest resistance was from Maryland, and the District wasn’t particularly great, either, frankly.” He continues, “I think that’s just a matter of who’s closest to the system, who’s closest to the riders. The local governments [...] are willing to step up to the plate. The problem when you have it at the control of the state level, it just gets lost in lots of other priorities.”

‘2nd Annual Ellen Bozman Affordable Housing Award’
courtesy of ‘cliff1066â�¢’

His frustration with the situation is quite palpable. “I am concerned that we were forced to raise fares so high this year because of the unwillingness of government at the state level basically to provide any additional funding.”

“The only alternative was to raise the fare or slash the service, and I thought slash the service was the worst thing we could do. But we definitely raised fares a lot more than I thought we should be doing. So far it’s not clear that it’s so expensive that people can’t afford it, but obviously it has an impact.

“We, frankly, should be incentivizing transit use. We’ve done a fair amount of that. We’ve been increasing ridership tremendously. We’re ahead of every other place except for New York in the country on transit ridership, and it has been growing. This could wind up being the first year it doesn’t grow, but the combination of a recession and a significant fare hike presumably will have some impact.

“My concern mostly, though, is what will happen next year? With the continuing recession and the impact it is having on budgets, if the board faces the same choice we had last year — a big gap and what to do about it — if there’s no more willingness again to put up additional funding from the governments, then they are going to face the same kind of choice, and it’s going to be much harder to raise fares.

“I definitely think we’ve raised them as much as they can safely be raised in the short term, and I don’t see how that’s much of an option for this year’s budget. So you’re going to be looking at cutting service. Do governments want to see services cut, or are they going to be willing to put up any additional funding to meet the needs.”

Yeah, that sounds like we (as in the people) need to start calling our state representatives and making sure that Metro gets additional funding. It isn’t going to be easy, of course, but as Zimmerman said earlier, Metro is vital to the region. We can’t afford to have worse service than what we put up with now.

On proposed changes to the Metro board, Zimmerman says the talk is a bit of a distraction. “I think that mostly what people are looking for is anything to change so they can change something that doesn’t involve the actual pain of having to pay for it. I think that’s the real problem we have right now: It’s one distraction after another.”

‘Thirty #112′
courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie’

We spoke a bit about what can be done for long term planning and not just at Metro. “We need to use the existing infrastructure more efficiently. You can move a lot more people on the road network that we’ve got if you put them in transit vehicles and if you give transit priority.”

“We need to do things like use ‘bus on shoulder’ on our highways, something that Minneapolis has a couple of hundred miles of, and queue jumpers at intersections, and signal priority, and dedicated lanes on the streets, and then you can move lots of people. If we build the street car – light rail networks that are on the books now, [if we build] the purple line, those things all can add tremendous capacity to the region, but we have to invest in them.”

And that’s the rub, really. Zimmerman says that if we don’t have the willingness to fix and improve the existing systems, getting money for other improvements is going to be very difficult.

“I pushed real hard for years to get 8-car trains. We’re at maybe 20-25%, at best, 8-car trains in the peak time. We were supposed to be at 50% by now. The inadequate funding combined with the things that have to be done to respond to the NTSB is pushing all that out.

“Our number one concern should be how we get the most out of the system, how do we get to actually taking advantage of the design capacity? That means more rail cars, and it means more operating funds. We can do that, and we can add a few hundred thousand riders a day, and that’s not insignificant.

“But we have to be willing to pay for it. We’re not willing to pay for the system we have now, it’s hard to talk about adding new capacity.”

While Zimmerman paints a less than rosy picture about the future of Metro, I don’t get the feeling that he’s quitting to send a message or out of frustration. He’s very passionate about the system and about transit, and he’s not dropping out lightly. He’s even got his replacement ready to go, and has already picked out his replacement from Arlington’s board. Mary Hynes will be taking over the reigns, and Zimmerman feels she’s more than qualified for the position, and that she’s suited to that work.

As an Arlington resident (shh, don’t tell the We Love DC editors), I’m sorry to see Zimmerman step down. In my mind, he was arguably one of the best on the board, and certainly one of the more passionate members. I’m hoping Hynes will be able to fill his shoes, and I’m glad we’ve still got him fighting the good fight.

Screen capture from the WMATA youtube video of today’s first bag swabs

I know – you expect me to say “security theater” and gripe about their ineffectiveness. I may, at the end, but let’s stick to the somewhat interesting factual description for the moment.

Although the WMATA press release doesn’t explicitly say-so, the general description from observers and media indicates that WMATA isn’t doing full bag checks on everyone they wave over. Instead they’re doing a quick swab of the outside of the bag and only asking folks to open it if there’s a positive result. It’s unclear whether this is an effort to make the process faster, a recognition of how difficult it is to effectively visually inspect a bag, or an effort at avoiding constitutional challenges by allowing them to claim they only really invade your privacy if they have a slightly better cause.

Be that as it may, maybe you’re interested in how this works. Let me tell you about it.

If you’ve seen one of the ten thousand crime procedurals clogging up the airways then you’ve seen someone do a version of what’s going on at the metro stations. It’s possible you’ve experienced some form of it at the airport, where it looked more like what WMATA is doing. In almost all the cases what’s happening is some form of spectroscopic analysis. You might not think that astronomy and examining distant planets would have a lot in common with looking for contraband, but there you go.

‘Probing the Last Gasps of Doomed Star Eta Carinae’
courtesy of ‘NASA Goddard Photo and Video’

If you look at the image above from NASA you see how this works on a big scale. Peaks in the visual plot let scientists see what sort of materials are in that distant object in space. From left to right you see where they’ve marked things with the chemical symbols for helium, argon, iron, and nitrogen. In this case they’re looking at light that was created when something burns all on its own, or perhaps is lit from behind by some other source in nature.

WMATA and the TSA don’t have the luxury of some sort of supernova shining through you and your bag, so they have to sample in another way. When it’s done on the television crime shows they put a sample of the object they’re checking in fluid – which the scientists would call a medium – and shake it all up before scanning it. Since you don’t want them to snip bits off your laptop bag they use a swab method instead. Besides, they’re not really interested in what your bag is made out of – they want to know if you’ve been making little animal shapes out of PETN.

So they swab your bag to see what sort of crud is on it and they put the swab into a machine to see what shows up. In this case it seems to be a Smiths Detection MMTD machine. MMTD stands for multi-mode threat detection, meaning it’s capable of looking for a number of things – drugs and chemicals used in the making of methamphetamine as well as explosives.

The Smiths Detection MMTD seems to match the one shown in the WMATA video. Image from the product page.

The MMTD uses a small radioactivity source – don’t panic, it’s safe unless they let you eat it – to excite the particles on that swab to see what turns up. That’s called ion mobility spectrometry.

The MMTD product literature promotes the fact that it’s possible for them to look for both explosives and drugs at the same time if they want. “Additionally, a dual mode setting allows for the simultaneous detection of explosives and narcotics from one sample.” Later on in the information they list the usage modes:

• Simultaneous Explosives/Narcotics
• Explosives only
• Narcotics only
• Chemical Warfare Agents/Toxic Industrial Chemicals

A WMATA representative assured me via phone that they’re only looking for explosives residue, which would indicate they’re not being used in the dual sensing mode. It’s reassuring, but past experience with the TSA shows us that it’s pretty common for safety screenings to begin to cross over into other non-safety measurements and arrests.

But that’s dangerously close to a civil rights rant, so we’ll let it go for now. Instead I’ll just point out one security theater issue: these devices check for chemical traces but they don’t tell them what’s inside the bag, only what’s on the outside.

Above is an analysis of fluorescent light, which shows that there’s mercury in the bulb. Click it to read more details.

Meaning that when they swab a bag and it doesn’t set off an alarm it doesn’t mean that there’s not a brick of explosive or heroin inside. It just means that none of it ended up on the outside of the bag. Maybe that’s because it’s well wrapped up or the materials have simply washed off. Or, more likely in the case of a real attacker, they’ve just strapped the dangerous stuff to their body and there’s no reason it would show up on the outside of the bag.

Or when the alarm goes off, perhaps it doesn’t mean anything at all is going on. False positives can result from heart medication or because you’ve worked with fertilizer. I’ve had it happen myself when going through the TSA checkpoint, though in that case they moved to another machine and a supervisor began fiddling with the one that had alarmed. I presume he was recalibrating it since I didn’t set off the new one and am not writing this from Guantanamo.

Lastly, there’s plenty of things that could be in that bag that wouldn’t set off an explosive residue detector if they hadn’t been fired in its presence. Things it would have been perfectly legal to take on with you at the Braddock metro so long as you got off before crossing the Potomac.

‘Gangbusters: Seized firearms’
courtesy of ‘governmentofalberta’

Feel safer?