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version seven. http://demongin.org |
DC Metro Sucks
In which I lay down the general answers to the frequently asked question, "how does DC Metro suck?"
Wednesday, 2009-09-23 | Careerism, NPC Encounters, Social Studies, Washington DC, Zona Roja
| One of the Seven was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through. |
| Sir Francis Bacon |
Frequently, when I gripe about the Abysmal state of public transportation in Our Nation's Capitol, people--generally people who have never lived in a major city--will say to me something like, "oh, come on--it's not so bad: what's so bad about it?"
And, generally speaking, when people attempt to refute my assertions regarding the DC Metro in this way, I either a.) ignore them because they are sweetly stupid small town rubes who naively believe that a badly dilapidated college town with an infant mortality rate that rivals many developing and so-called "Third World" nations and which boasts an utterly unimpressive 300 thousand residents if and only if all the universities and the various representative bodies of the US Federal Government are in session is somehow the Paris of the Eastern Seaboard or I b.) tell them to follow @UnSuckDCMetro on Twitter for a few days.
In certain rare instances--when I'm feeling good natured about The Swamp because I haven't seen a police car break up a group of young black men in a few minutes or because the choking humidity hasn't wall-papered my t-shirt to my back--I'll tell them the one about how world-class concert violinist Joshua Bell, posing as a street musician, once played during rush period in a crowded DC Metro stop on a violin handcrafted by Antonio Stradivari in 1713 and fewer than 50 people even noticed.
And if they ask me how that proves that the DC Metro sucks--"that could happen in any major city's subway!"--, I'll mention that R Kelly was discovered on the CTA and that New York's MTA has a whole official program (called MUNY, or "Music Under New York") for subway buskers that organizes performances by world-class musicians on a regular basis.
But this morning I am feeling charitable. Well, maybe "charitable" isn't the correct word. "Retributive" is probably better, come to think of it.
And since I am feeling retributive, and since it is undoubtedly and irrefutably the case that the DC Metro, just like the rest of the badly wasted infrastructure of this rotten banana republic of a "city", significant only for the tedious official mandates and cumbersome federal edicts that are its only exports, does indeed suck, here comes an ordered list.
Beginning with the most obvious and ending with the subtlest reasons, here's why the DC Metro Sucks:
- Scheduling: a recent re-Tweet from UnSuck jokingly remarked that you wind up with the Metro's trademark scheduling conflicts as a natural consequence of doing your scheduling with napkins and Crayons. Basically, if you ride the DC Metro enough times--particularly during rush periods--you will become the victim of one of the hilarious "stop-and-go" episodes in which your train will either a.) wait for three to 15 minutes at two or more consecutive stations while other trains "clear the station ahead of us" or otherwise disentangle themselves or b.) find that you are trapped in a long, dark, musty-smelling tunnel while your train inches forward 40 or 50 feet and then stops, only to repeat this stop-and-go routine (which is, obviously, the sort of thing generally associated with automobile traffic and therefore that much more heart-breaking/infuriating when it happens on a train track) several times during your commute.
- Tourists: If you live in, say, New York or Chicago, you probably imagine you have a pretty bad tourist problem. When they're not turning left against the signage, yanking stupidly on the arms of their litters of fat-faced, High Fructose Corn Syrup Zombie children or demonstratively flinching at the presence of non-whites, they're standing around in cargo shorts and Church camp t-shirts, breathing the air, patronizing the Nike Store or the Old Navy and just generally being a nuisance. In DC, however, they're not merely annoying: on the Metro, they're nothing short of ubiquitous and manage, in their ubiquity, to be thoroughly obstructive on account of the poor design of Metro stations. This has a lot to do with the following two reasons why the DC Metro sucks:
- Escalators: most Metro stations, probably because (original DC city "planner" Pierre Charles) L'Enfant's cousin owned a mining company or something, are hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Earth and, idiocy of idiocies, the only way to most train platforms, is to take an escalator. A long escalator. An escalator that, if walked, would probably be something like 150-200 steps. These escalators, due to their exceptional length and the fact that they are fucking outside and exposed to the elements frequently break down. And when they're not broken down, there are the inevitable clots of tourist idiots who fail to heed the overhead warnings to "stand on the right and walk on the left when using the escalator" and bring the whole unfortunate situation to a (literally and figuratively) confounding halt.
- Exit Fare: among the most obvious flaws in the the design of the DC Metro is the concept of exit fare. The basic idea is this: you swipe your card or punch your ticket when you get on the train and then again when you get off. Depending on your origin, you are charged more or less. It sounds fair, but it's actually quite backwards for a number of reasons. Most obviously, any public transportation system--whether it is mixed and includes buses, trains, etc. or whether it is just buses--is a "closed loop" with fixed destinations and each "moving part" (e.g. train, bus, etc.) of that network or system operates no matter what the others are doing and it therefore makes little or no sense to charge a traveller for the distance he covers, as the distance would be covered regardless of his presence or patronage At any rate, this concept of exit fare a.) regularly confounds tourists (who, in their defense, cannot reasonably be expected to know how much they will be charged or how much money remains on their cards) and b.) allows owners of the WMATA's "SmarTrip" card to run a negative balance. It is one of the sheerest idiocies of the thoroughly idiotic DC Metro system. It also brings me to my next point.
- The cost: the Metro is unbelievably expensive. What's worse, there are two tiers of pricing: a rush period pricing and an off-times pricing. My personal commute involves getting on the Red Line six stops from its north-eastern terminus and getting off of the Red Line six stops from its north-western terminus; I travel about 15 stops and about 10 miles in total. When I do this on the weekend, it costs nearly two dollars each way. Which, I guess, sounds pretty reasonable. It sounds especially reasonable if you consider the cost of that same trip when I make it at 8:15 and 18:15 Monday through Friday and each way runs me between $3.10 and $3.70 depending on...who knows what? All I know is that my ridiculously overpriced commute is occasionally 50 or 60 cents more expensive, depending on factors that are not known to me.
- The wretched conditions: while the argument is frequently made that the DC Metro is safer than, say Chicago's CTA, and that it's padded seats and well-lit cars put New York's subway to shame, this argument is the last refuge of idiot apologists who are the sort of people who worry more about dying from terrorist attacks than heart disease. Basically, if you have no sense of proportion/scale and are easily confused by superficialities, you will overlook the facts that a.) the Metro, while mostly bereft of bums and muggers, is in fact incredibly dangerous (the June 22nd incident of this year in which nine people died and several were injured grievously was not isolated) and is regularly rebuked by the NTSB as well as industry watchdogs for the wretched conditions of its cars and tracks and b.) the Metro is quite literally on its last legs. Consider the following excerpt from http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com:
Here's the ugliness broken down by line:
As if it weren't bad enough to have to read (at least) once a week about executive incompetence or refusal to comply with federal minimums for safety, there's also the fact that the whole system--i.e. not just one or two lines--that is falling apart. Padded seats notwithstanding, the cars that aren't in the scrap yard are pretty much tube-shaped heaps of rust held-together by a little bit of paint and linoleum.
Red Line: 90 disruptions (39%)
Orange Line: 61 disruptions (26%)
Green Line: 32 disruptions (14%)
Blue Line: 31 disruptions (13%)
Yellow Line: 14 disruptions (6%)
But ... these numbers are startlingly in line with the percentage of Metro's deployed cars each line utilizes. These are from 2008 (page 12),
Red Line: 34% of cars
Orange Line: 24% of cars
Blue Line: 17% of cars
Green Line: 16% of cars
Yellow Line: 7% of cars
Basically, it appears all the lines have about an equal chance of ruining your day. Yeah, the Red Line gets a lot of the glory, but its screw ups are pretty much par for the course.
Rather, the point has been to lay out the basic, irrefutable facts of the situation: between its fundamentally poor design and general lack of maintenance, there is almost nothing positive to say about the DC Metro. The design is fundamentally poor because it does not match the needs of its users. The general lack of maintenance is the result of years of mismanagement and poor technology decisions (which you can read about in a number of different places--just Google "NTSB" and "WMATA") made as the direct result of the general corruption and rot of DC's infrastructure and municipal services.
The DC Metro Sucks.
* The idea of urban planning in DC is about as laughable as the idea that more than a moment's thought went into laying out any other East Cost city that dates back to colonial times.The idea of urban planning in DC is additionally infuriating because of the fact that other cities--say, New York or Boston, for example--have made efforts to grid out certain parts, build expressways and bring some order to the colonial chaos. DC appears to have made no such efforts. Indeed, driving across DC (it's a 20 mile wide circle; imagine bisecting it radially) in a car during a non-rush period literally cannot be accomplished in under an hour.
