How Washington DC Got Its Metro | Hacker News Reader

How Washington DC Got Its Metro

construction-physics.com

58 pointsvwoolf43 comments

I recently spent a lot of time in downtown DC with two toddlers, and the headways were absolutely amazing. Never waited for more than 3 minutes for a train. Almost felt like the US was a fully developed country.

I would love nothing more than to move my family to such a situation full time. I have immense thanks for the architect and executors of the DC metro, and whatever operational genius has restored amazing service levels post-Covid, when most transit agencies have anemic service and are now in a death spiral.

I grew up in the DMV area, and the Metro was notorious for its long waits, single-tracking, and super expensive tickets.

The last time I took the metro was about 7 years ago, and at that time there was lots of political turmoil in the Metro leadership. I hope it has changed as I loved the concept and design. But like most things that go wrong, execution is what spoiled it for me.

DC Metro was great when I lived in nova a few years back. Huge upgrade from riding Bart in the SF Bay Area.

I grew up in the DMV region and always get annoyed when people cite NYC/Chicago as the (mostly, only) functioning local train system(s) in the country.

The Metro definitely has points where it gets annoying, but for the most part it connects things really well and it's the biggest thing I miss when living on the west coast.

How nice are headways compared to timetables? I realise a lot of behind the scenes programming occurs to make it all just work, but as a commuter, that little bit less effort spent planning v. using makes such a huge difference.

Last year our bus switched from running every ten minutes to every fifteen minutes, but it matches our ferries better.

Since I used the metro for impromptu movement rather than to make appointments, the biggest feature is high frequency. At peak times trains are every three minutes in the DC metro, and the slowest seemed to be six minutes.

10 or 15 minute intervals, or the 20+ minute BART intervals, make a system very inconvenient.

I had to look this up. A headway is basically "trains come every n minutes" as opposed to "train comes at 7:12 and 7:32 and ..."

Seems simple and approachable.

In large cities with frequent service, it's often only the headway time that is shown when traffic or passenger load would make it difficult to keep exactly to the scheduled times.

Example bus stop timetable in London with exact times only given in the early morning and for the last buses of the night: https://twitter.com/se1/status/963786580593905666

People who visit DC almost invariably marvel at the metro because they use it for a couple days likely not at peak times. For day to day commuting it is awful and a running joke for people who live there. Elevator outages and trains getting stuck on a regular basis.

I grew up in DC and moved to NYC and it’s painful to compare the two systems, DC’s is a total embarrassment.

It was designed to take tourists to museums and government workers from suburban parking lots to work in the morning and evening. That’s it.

The two fatal design flaws are lack of express trains and stations that are high ceilinged and deeply buried so it takes like 14 minutes to get from the tracks to the street.

It’s barely a subway it’s more like a odd suburban light rail hybrid that happens to run into an actual city.

Ok, but realize that a lot of the readership here is in California, and the DC Metro is a far far bigger step up over our systems than it is from the DC Metro to, say, Tokyo.

There were three and four minute headways between trains in DC! This is just incomprehensible technological advancement for Californians.

Well yeah, compared to NY, DC itself is mostly an odd suburb. The entire region only has like 5 buildings over 30 stories tall; most are in the 15-story range or lower. Of course the NY subway is denser and runs more frequently.

DC is also not flat like NY. Some Metro stations are deeply buried in hills, but a bunch are shallow and many are actually above ground.

And also the fact that, anything outside of tourist attractions typically only has one or two lines serving them. If you’re going from the Smithsonian museum to any number of hotels, you’ll have a variety of trains to take. Otherwise, you may need to wait longer.

It’s like an old childhood friend — they may be in a bad spot and you can’t stand to be around them, but the love is still there. I love metro and hope it improves. It’s getting there, slowly but surely. Still fails to deliver and eliminating off-peak pricing is hurting those who have no other option.

Worsening traffic and skyrocketing Lyft / Uber prices sent me to Metro for both my commute and general getting around. Metro has had its fair share of problems but it really seems to have gotten better!

Totally disagree. I’m happy to be standing on a Metro platform right now for my commute instead of dead stopped on 95.

Is it perfect? No, but neither is DC traffic…

Probably more than 10 years ago now, I created a personal web app that pulled the "headway" listings for the various stations. The idea was you could be outside the station and know when to go to the station or know if you had to rush down the stairs to catch a train. During hon-peak hours, the interval times could be 15 - 30 minutes, so timing was everything. Back then (and maybe now) Metro would not report a time greater than 20 minutes, but you could check stations up the line to see if a train was coming to your station. The system worked okay unless single tracking was involved, in which the data is not reliable.

> Knowing that the project could easily get bogged down in bureaucratic delays and debates from WMATA’s board, the manager of WMATA, Jackson Graham (a former brigadier general of the Corps of Engineers) adopted a cynical, realist strategy of project management:

"...we want to get as much under construction as we possibly can, so it would cost more to cover it up than it would to finish it. Always we wanted to give the board…an unacceptable alternative, so that we would take them down the road we wanted to go. If we hadn’t done that, everything would have bogged down into bureaucratic debate, and quibbling, and so forth that goes on all the time."

...

> But Metro proved hard to kill. The financing bust inspired another round of studies, but these tended to find that paring down the system based on what was already under construction was surprisingly difficult. The individual lines were “like colored wires on a B-movie time bomb: clip one and the whole thing explodes”:

"Deleting any route would provoke the affected jurisdiction to demand tens of millions of dollars back from the Authority, with interest. It was easier for WMATA to keep borrowing, especially since each cut would only save a small percentage of the system cost."

Looks like the general's plan actually worked!

That’s really clever

I'm reminded of the theory that in airplane food menus you only get one semi-passing decent option like chicken or whatever and 2-3 horrible ones so there's no much thinking about it but you felt you at least had the choice

Be comforted by the fact that in the case of a water landing, your airline food can be used as shark repellent.

That was also Robert Moses' main strategy in New York. "Dig a really big hole, so they have no choice but to finish the project to get rid of the hole".

> The second period of subway building began in the 1960s. The downsides of the car and the infrastructure it required were becoming apparent, and some cities turned to subways to address the problems of traffic congestion. Metros built in this period include Atlanta’s MARTA in 1979, San Francisco’s BART, and Los Angeles’ Metro Rail.

Miami's Metrorail deserves a mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrorail_(Miami-Dade_County)

I live in DC and have travelled to Asia, Europe, and South America. The dc metro pales in comparison. All other ones were cheaper, had more frequent trains, and were more modern. Asia and Europe also had more extensive coverage. Still even a worse metro is a lot better than driving on the beltway and I feel fortunate that it exists.

"The Architect of the Capitol, George Stewart, wouldn’t allow a station to be built under the Capitol, requiring it to be moved a few blocks away. The University of Maryland rejected a proposed station on campus, forcing “a complicated redesign that later caused commotion in College Park.”

The most difficult government agency proved to be the National Park Service. WMATA had originally planned many station entrances in the city’s downtown parks, like Farragut Square, McPherson Square, and the National Mall.

A planned station at Farragut Square that would have required moving the statue of David Farragut was rejected, resulting in two separate stations – Farragut North and Farragut West – just a few hundred feet apart."

This part is great, answers some questions I've had for a long time. Though there's at least one mystery unanswered: why is the Woodley Park station nearly half a mile from the Zoo?

> The Architect of the Capitol, George Stewart, wouldn’t allow a station to be built under the Capitol, requiring it to be moved a few blocks away. The University of Maryland rejected a proposed station on campus, forcing “a complicated redesign that later caused commotion in College Park.

It boggles the mind that those institutions would actively resist having direct access to the subway system.

I wonder if this is a hint to how deeply rooted car-centric sentiment is in the US.

I believe so. Just look at how much resistance there is to anything non-car in other parts of the country, like in Culvert City CA where they removed cycling lanes. Also, Portland OR where the local government is trying hard to make biking more dangerous by putting the bike lane between parked cars and fast-moving traffic, all because some hotel and business owners want street parking to be more convenient.

Even today in DC, there's still no convenient public transit access for wealthy Georgetown, because they resisted building a station there. M Street is horribly crowded with both cars and pedestrians.

> like in Culvert City CA where they removed cycling lanes

That's likely unrelated to anti-car sentiment and more so because bicyclists are (on average) complete assholes on the road, since there is no accountability for their behavior.

I'd be fine with bicyclists if we could use cameras/facial recognition to issue fines and arrest warrants, thereby finally domesticating them.

What’s the annual death rate of incidents caused by cyclists. And the rate by incidents caused by car drivers?

What causes so much danger and suffering and pollution and death are the vengeful sociopathic un-empathic car drivers who combatively view bicyclists as "complete assholes", and go around posting their ignorant, asinine, toxic opinions on social media to justify injuring and killing so many of them, and voting for ill-conceived, short-sighted legislation that makes it so dangerous and impossible to ride bikes safely, instead of providing safe, clean, green bike infrastructure and public transit, all because of their violent, childish misconceptions and greedy, narcissistic, bullying laziness, plus their complete lack of care and empathy for their fellow human beings and the environment.

Medice sp527, cura te ipsum, because your own recent post applies perfectly to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37671630

>> 'Some with sociopathy may not realize that what they’re doing is wrong while others may simply not care. And sometimes, Dr. Coulter says, it can be both.

>“There’s just a total lack of empathy or recognizing that what they’ve done has hurt someone or it’s only benefited themselves,” he says. “And sometimes they might recognize what they’re doing is wrong, they just don’t care or they justify it to themselves.”'

> https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sociopath-personality-dis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician,_heal_thyself

"Like an unskilled doctor, fallen ill, you lose heart and cannot discover by which remedies to cure your own disease."

You sound like you're deeply entrenched in bicyclist activism or something, but I'll try to elaborate on my view any way:

Keeping bicyclists off the road hurts no one. There are cars, public transit, Uber/Lyft, sidewalks+crosswalks, etc. No one is entitled to be able to ride a bike on the road in the same way that no one is entitled to be able to transport themselves via jetpack. If it can't be orchestrated in a way that deters misbehavior, then it's not a workable construct.

[flagged]

The potential station in Georgetown was skipped for geotechnical reasons. The original town was sited on an enormous and very hard rock above the river and surrounding swamps and that made blasting the huge station cavern prohibitively expensive. The running tunnels are already extra deep there to run under the Potomac.

The Rosslyn station is directly across from Georgetown in the same geologic unit.

There's already plans for a new line that will have a station in Georgetown.

If it makes you feel better(?)... The National Assembly (= Capitol) Station of Seoul's line 9 also almost got moved to a different corner due to the lawmakers' demand, and Seoul isn't exactly known for its car culture. I guess politicians being asshats are universal.

Amusingly, the Seoul Metropolitan Council (which would correspond to a US State Congress/Senate) said fuck you, it's getting built in the place, so that's how the station kept its place.

For this case I would assume it's the security concerns that go with a publicly-accessible subway line directly under the building.

This was in the ‘60s when there were significantly less security issues.

There’s still a fairly large train station complex underneath the World Trade Center.

Probably not in 1960—Russian nukes would come from the sky. Also the Capitol already has a few tunnels underground.

Cities like London and Madrid actually have had bombs on trains. It's not a "security threat" to buildings above.

What is a security threat to infrastructure are roads, where you can drive massive vehicles into people, transport and explode bombs, etc. The Manchester bombing for example was a truck exploding parked on a public road.

If it was security, those concerns certainly weren’t shared at the Pentagon where the Metro entrance and exit were into the building for decades.

Car-centric is a bit of a stretch.

Capitol Hill politicians have their own subway system and other underground spaces. The Metro stop is directly behind the Cannon House Office Building. Lobbyists send documents and gifts by bicycle courier. Biden famously commuted in from Delaware by Amtrak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_subway_s...

https://www.washingtontunnels.com/capitol-hill-map

>Biden made Amtrak trips between Washington and his home in Delaware on most days as a senator when Congress was in session so he could help raise his sons. The Amtrak round trip is actually 220 miles or 354 kilometers, not over 260 miles (418 km) as he described it.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-biden-amtrak-e79af0...

Racism is very deeply embedded in these discussions.

There’s a school of thought that sees subways as a conveyor belt of undesirable people into a neighborhood that bring crime and “problems”.

As ridiculous as it sounds the phenomenon is very real.

Wish us luck. Metro has a projected $750m budget shortfall next year. Very unclear what's going to happen next. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/09/26/dc-...

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