PART ONE — That morning Red Line train might not be too crowded with commuters when it rolls out of Silver Spring, but chances are it’ll be slammed with people by the time it hits downtown DC. At least in the year 2025, anyway, one transportation expert predicted.
Photo: Please don't crowd the doors with your fat head. Courtesy of PunkWalrus; reprinted with permission.
“We’ll hit one million riders a day in 2020 — that was the system on Inauguration Day,” warned Nat Bottigheimer, an assistant general manager with Metro. “We’re looking at very packed [train] cars starting in the next couple of years.”
Bottigheimer, who unleashed his predictions on the Action Committee for Transit this summer, said the problem isn’t in Metro’s ability to transport riders from Glenmont and the system’s other outer reaches. Instead, the problem is what to do with all those commuters once they get into The District’s core, where all the juicy jobs are.
“Even at stations designed to pump people in and out, we have to think about moving them,” Bottigheimer said. Additional stairs and entrances might be needed in stations like Farragut North and Judiciary Square just to keep the platforms from becoming mosh pits and impeding train movement, he suggested.
While the Red Line dodges much of the heavy congestion (defined by Metro as more than 100 people per car during peak hours), riders transferring to any of the system’s other lines are totally screwed. Train on the Green, Yellow and Blue Lines will pack up to 120 people per car by the year 2020, Metro data predicted, making for a crappy ride to L’Enfant Plaza.
That’s partly due to shared track in some spots, which spells log jam if one train experiences delays, Bottigheimer conveyed.
Photo: Rush hour on the Red Line. Courtesy of PunkWalrus; reprinted with permission.
But that’s nothing compared to what will happen with the Orange Line, according to Metro data. By next year, cars on the Orange Line could be carrying up to 120 people per car during peak hours; by 2020, the line will have exceeded its capacity.
Peg that in part to the Orange Line’s extension to Dulles Airport, Bottigheimer said. While the Dulles extension gives suburban Virginians a nice commuting option, it only feeds more people into The District’s crowded core, he explained.
How Maryland’s proposed Purple Line plays into the grand scheme of things remains to be seen. While the light-rail system is designed to shuttle people between New Carrollton and Bethesda, it’s unclear how many of those riders will transfer to the Red Line at Silver Spring or Bethesda, or to other intersecting Metro lines.
“No one’s done a system-wide study on the impact of the Purple Line on core capacity,” Bottigheimer said. Still, he worried that the Purple Line would only add to crowding in Metro’s core, even if it gives Silver Springers an opportunity to dodge downtown DC en route to Bethesda.
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“That’s partly due to shared track in some spots, which spells log jam if one train experiences delays.”
First, whoever designed metro without a third rail was an absolute moron. Most, and probably all, other transit subway systems have them for this very reason.
Two, I wish we were all smarter and would scrap the purple line and the Dulles line and instead pour those funds and any other DC, MD, VA could muster to building a third line for when trains breakdown or metro crashes and murders 9 people. I can’t imagine the cost, but it would make metro a million times better. Metro needs to stop expanding and improve what we have.
If the Purple Line is going to be a rail line, then it should connect the two legs of the Red Line with a Metro heavy rail connection, not light rail, to create a seamless circuit that improves the Metro system. This could be tunneled underground or built along the Beltway from Silver Spring to Bethesda Medical Center.
This Metro Loop would allow commuters to take a “one seat ride” from Union Station to Bethesda Medical Center via the direct connection from Silver Spring to Bethesda, without making a transfer, AND without having to travel through downtown DC.
This circuit connection would alleviate Red Line saturation and congestion downtown.
However, if there is a light rail Purple Line connection between Bethesda and Silver Spring, a trip from Union Station to Bethesda Medical Center using the light rail, would require two transfers – from Metro to light rail to go from Silver Spring to Bethesda, and from light rail back to Metrorail, to continue north to Medical Center.
Metro’s service after the accident at Fort Totten would have been better if there had been a Metro connection between Silver Spring and Bethesda. Metro bused people north of the accident, because there was no train access when the tracks were shut down. A Metro heavy rail connection would have allowed trains access from Bethesda to Silver Spring and north to Glenmont.
A Metro rail connection between Bethesda and Silver Spring would improve Metro’s service and infrastructure. It would serve more commuters, travel faster, take more cars off the road, relieve congestion and alleviate global warming.
How is it that Virginia can get a 16-mile Metro heavy rail line between Tyson’s Corner and Dulles, and we can’t even get a 4-mile Metro line between Bethesda and Silver Spring, connecting the two legs of the Red Line?
Thanks for your comment, Pam.
According to Nat Bottigheimer, the transit expert cited in the article above, both the Purple Line and the Dulles extension can create problems in downtown DC. That’s regardless of what form either line takes.
To JG, I agree with the idea of an extra set of rails. Bottigheimer said Metro would give the idea a hard look, but that it’s a long-term, uber-expensive solution.
However, I’m not ready to give up the Purple Line. Gots to get my ride from Silver Spring to Bethesda (en route to county council meetings in Rockville).
“First, whoever designed metro without a third rail was an absolute moron. Most, and probably all, other transit subway systems have them for this very reason.”
JG:
I don’t know what you think you are talking about. The third rail is the 750v DC rail parallel to the traction rails that power subway cars. They were certainly included in the initial design, selected handily over telekenesis. I’f you’re talking about a third set of tracks on all the lines to handle breakdowns, emergency track repairs, etc., The cost would have been prohibitive. And what subway systems have this feature?
Editor’s note: New York’s subway system has a third (and fourth) set of tracks. — JD (Sep 23, 2009)
Planners so often speak of density, density, density — as though it were some fabulous nutrient that cities just cannot get enough of. There are only so many human beings that can be crammed into a transit vehicle. Only so many showers worth of water in a watershed, and only so many toilet flushings a sewage system can withstand. If rail is so great, put it in Detroit, Toledo, and many smaller cities that have lost industrial jobs and have vacant land. You want all those folks to move here in a frantic effort to become government contractors, or at least deliver pizza to them?
And when will we talk the impact of making additional people? The Reagan years had a certain barefoot & pregnant quality, along with “free” markets and meddling in Central America.
Pam Browning makes some excellent points. However, we already have transit-oriented zoning, and officials keep cranking it up. Last year, the state definition of transit-oriented zoning area was doubled, from a quarter-mile to a half-mile — with token language about local zoning included. If a Metrorail loop were created, I bet those dudes would come up with a Super Duper Looper Transit Zone, that would really eat into small-scale neighborhoods. The only trees would grow in those little boxy things along the sidewalks, you know, the ones they have to rip out and replace every 3 years or so? These guys don’t get as hot and bothered over buses, so buses have a greater chance of actually providing transit to the people already living/working in an area.
One of the things I hate the most is how just one asshole can bring down the entire system. Just one person. Doesn’t even need to be a bomb-wielding maniac with sarin gas, and no one has to die or do anything radical. This is what I see almost every week:
1. Guy really wants to get on car during rush hour. Can’t wait for the next one. As the doors close, he jams his arm in the doors. The Metro can’t move without opening the doors again to free him (a nice safety feature I actually approve of). But when the doors open, the guy does NOT pull his arm out, but tries to jam himself in MORE. Keeps this up, because dammit, he’s got to get on that train. Sometimes, this results in the door mechanism breaking.
2. If the door breaks, the operator opens and closes the doors several times until all doors register “all clear.” The mechanisms jam constantly, even without the help of an asshole in a hurry. After about two minutes of this, the driver is forced to empty the entire train.
3. Before he empties the train, people have been piling up on the platform. The trains at the stations behind him can’t move, so all THOSE stations have people piling up in them. Or piling up on the train if the train is stopped with the doors open on the station. Once the operator makes te final decision “can’t close the doors, everybody off!”, everything behind him has piled up. Other trains hear, “We will be moving shortly, there is a train on the platform ahead of us.”
4. As the operator of the busted train leaves, now we have a train’s worth of people on the platform, PLUS the people that had been piling up. The next train is already full of people, so ALL those people now on the platform try to jam in. This results in more delays. This ripple goes backwards: the platform of the station behind us is already full of people who haven’t had a train, who are now trying to pile up on a full train, resulting in delays, which passes it onto the station behind THEM which has even MORE people waiting even LONGER for a train and so on until you get to a station that usually doesn’t have a lot of people; usually an end station, to break the chain.
5. This entire chain reaction will spill over when the first full train reaches a transfer station. A shitload of people will get off, and transfer to another line, spreading the problem across lines not related to the tracks of the first breakdown.
6. After a while, so many angry people are piled on station platforms, this makes them unruly and try and cram people tightly on each car when one finally arrives. This sometimes results in ANOTHER door jamming. That trains has to unload after 2-4 minutes of door opening and shutting, and now the problem is DOUBLE. There have been mobs so determined to get on, I have actually been FORCED onto trains I didn’t meant to get onto because I could not free myself from the mob. One day, I fear dozens of people will be pushed onto the track like the cliff scene from “300″ by the sheer number of people. And the escalators leading to the platform don’t give you a choice once you get on them.
7. If the timing is just right, the train that has to go away doesn’t have a third track or spare tunnel to hide in until rush hour is over. This clogs the line until it gets there, and all the passengers see in those stations is a train that says “NO PASSENGERS” and just passes by. This makes them even angrier.
One guy. One guy can do this without even meaning to. The irony is, he will be even later to whatever by his need for speed, but he probably has no clue this is how it works: trains magically appear and disappear and sometimes are late.
Grig, that is a great description. Several years ago I saw some afternoon rush hour “platform rage” at Gallery Place, and it wasn’t even 5:00 p.m. In the past couple of years, I’ve had some scary incidents myself. Once a man ran past me, hitting the bag on my shoulder and nearly spinning me around. In another case, a man wearing a silly pair of shorts with stringy things dangling got one of them caught in an escalator to the down platform. I and other escalator passengers were nearly crushed — no one hit the emergency stop button. Gallery Place is MUCH too small to be a transfer station. Before building any more rail, that station should be expanded. And they should build ped tunnels between some of those close stations — Dr. Gridlock (W. Post) has often mentioned that. But NOOO, work has already begun on the Metrorail extension to Dulles, and MD officials are pushing the “light” rail Purple Line.
What we need are more lines that do NOT go through Metro Center and Gallery Place; the purple line should help rather than hurt, if they would build it right (as part of the Metro system or at least a compatible system). If they run trolley tracks down Wayne avenue instead of building a real train system, the purple line will just be one more constant problem to deal with and will be no more useful than the current buses.
I disagree with everything LuvMyHood writes.