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• On the article Metro Slammed for Poor Veterans Day Red Line Service

  Miriam Miller Wolk

  1:50 pm on Tuesday, November 13, 2012

  I commute from Grosvenor into the city, so I was definitely affected by the service issues yesterday. Metro is missing the point. The delays weren't caused by the holiday schedule - they were caused by the decisions to single track on the northern end of the red line and close stations on the orange line. On a typical day, trains arriving at Grosvenor to Shady Grove are standing room only (which is why metro alternates empty trains at Grosvenor during rush hour). Single tracking meant 35 minutes between trains at Grosvenor, and many of the trains were so packed that it look multiple tries to get on. This caused a ripple effect all the way downtown as more people poured into stations and couldn't board trains that were further and further apart. My co-workers on the orange line had it even worse, since the buses routing commuters around closed stations had difficulty meeting commuter demand. If it was just a matter of running fewer trains, but having both sides of the line running normally, you would have had some full trains, but not the utter debacle that was yesterday's service. Metro should stop giving us lip service about "holiday schedules" and acknowledge it made an error in single tracking/closing stations during the rush hour, knowing full well from past ridership data that there would be a significant number of private sector commuters depending on the trains.

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