Munching on the green grass elsewhere

Fritz from Cycle-licious was in town and left this (edited) comment in the blog:

Thanks to you and others who commented a few days about riding DC Metrorail. I took the Blue Line from DCA to the Metro Center and was delighted to see an escalator take me up right into my hotel. It turns out I could have walked to the Reagan Building from there, but I took the Metro to the next stop (Federal Triangle) just for the fun of it. Metro is just like SF BART in many ways -- the vending machines and tickets and gates are exactly the same. Metro is cleaner and shinier than BART though, no doubt because it's newer. And I LOVE the area maps at each station -- that is SO handy! This out-of-towner had no problems at all getting around DC on Metro and by bike.

Click through his blog link to his Flickr photos on his experience.

The reason I found this interesting is that I have been mulling over for a couple weeks the recent letter to Dr. Gridlock in the Washington Post, lamenting how much WMATA stinks in comparison to (yes) BART in San Francisco and the NYC transit system. See "Even Parking Garage Traditions Are Hard To Give Up ," for this letter by James Hennessy:

As a law enforcement consultant, I often work in other cities for prolonged periods. Recently, I had projects in San Francisco and New York, using BART and the New York subway exclusively. I was never late for a meeting, almost always had a seat and never heard a grating voice demanding that I "Step back!" into a crowded car. The elevators worked, the escalators worked and the signs worked.

Then I returned to Washington. I found crowded cars almost all day, track work delays during rush hours and out-of-service escalators and elevators. Why on earth can we not have a transportation system at least as good as San Francisco's and New York's? Is the only answer to fire everyone in authority, including the Metro board, and start over?

No other system in the U.S. is going to have as much service as NYC because their density and usage allows so much more. Although, because the design intent of the WMATA system was to serve suburbanites, for some reason they didn't think to design multiple tracks. This would have allowed for redundancy and also express service. But the system designers probably didn't think that the population density of the Washington area could support such a service.

Plus, because of ADA and other considerations such as that the WMATA system is much deeper underground to get under Rock Creek, it's a system that relies on escalators and elevators, and WMATA can't compete with the private sector in terms of pay, so they never have enough staff to fix the escalators and elevators. Because the NYC system was built long ago, the expectation is that people walk up and down stairs, although stations have elevators now.

But, I do think that we forget that it wasn't that long ago that choice riders were afraid to ride the NYC subway system. I do worry that as ridership increases with WMATA, that there could be, at some level, civility and safety degradation. I was on a subway ride a couple months ago where a few people were acting out quite a bit--not kids, but adults in the 30s--and it made me wonder about 20 years ago on the NYC subway system.

Getting back to the letter, Dr. Gridlock did comment that it is difficult to compare systems. As soon as I read the letter, I lamented the comparison, because with BART vs. WMATA, the DC-based heavy rail system has two times the daily ridership compared to the system serving the greater San Francisco Bay. You can look it up yourself. (Although I think somehow DC's numbers are overstated, as WMATA reports figures in the 700,000s.)

San Francisco proper does have its own light rail, streetcar, and bus system (MUNI) in addition to BART.

San Francisco's MUNI system has about 130,000 lightrail/streetcar trips per day, 284,000 regular bus trips daily, and 214,000 daily trolley (electric wire) bus trips. That's about 630,000 daily transit trips within the city.

Now, Metrobus service within DC provides about 400,000 daily trips; I can't say how many trips are DC only on the subway system.

The MUNI system has issues (see both the Rescue Muni advocates site as well as the San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project, a joint project of the City's Finance office and the transportation system, and the "SFTEP Briefing Book, July 2006 " on that site) but at the same time, I believe that DC proper needs to rethink how transit service is provided within the city as if the region had both a BART and a MUNI.

More about that later.