It is important to do this speeded up maintenance, but it's not the end of the story in terms of restoring safety and reliability to the rail system. I think the scheduling has nothing to do with where the crew members live, but rather it's about the safety of track conditions at particular spots.Īnd let me say again, because I know it will come up again: SafeTrack will not fix Metro. That schedule is supposed to come out in December. We're still waiting for Metro to announce the schedule for the remaining SafeTrack projects, the ones in 2017. There was a disagreement about which spots needed to be addressed first. It's meant to address conditions that already have gotten bad.Īt one point this year, the feds stepped in and said that Metro needed to rearrange the schedule of the SafeTrack projects. I've referred to it as a Whack-a-Mole program. SafeTrack is meant to go after the worst spots. Leaving earlier in the morning and later at night would help, though on the evening side, the crowds should be thinning out by 7 p.m. You won't see much of a dent in that crowd before you reach Bethesda. On your return trip from Farragut North, you will be on the receiving end of all the homeward bound people who boarded at the big transfer stations, Metro Center and Gallery Place. People won't start to get off your train in significant numbers till you reach Dupont Circle. There may be a train just a minute behind that one, and if so, it will probably be much less crowded. The train schedule is uneven, and the bigger the gap between trains, the more crowded the arriving train will be. the peak hour - the trains arriving at the Bethesda platform will usually be quite crowded. If you live in Bethesda, you're on the receiving end of all those stations to the north that have big parking lots at the Red Line stations. But it's a bit more complicated for a daily rider. They tend to be less crowded in the rear two cars.) (There seem to be a lot more eight-car trains on the Orange and Silver lines this week. Still, it's got to make the trains much more crowded than they already are, and some riders might find themselves letting a train go by because they can't jam aboard. Yes, you should be adding extra time to your regular commute to account for the big gaps between trains - though on a Potomac-Federal Triangle trip it affects you a bit less than someone starting from New Carrollton or Vienna. If that's so, then adding more Blue Line trains to the mix wouldn't help. Metro says the trains are spaced out that way so that the who operation has a chance of going smoothly. That's a two-thirds reduction in rush hour service. Trains every 20 minutes at rush hours for the first two weeks of this. Metro officials have been warning that even though the SafeTrack work is on the western side of the region, the effect on the Orange and Silver Line schedules is the same all along their routes.
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