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M street is perfect. Yes, it is somewhat redundant to the orange line, but that's the point: Metro currently lacks redundancy. Adding it by adding more track to existing lines and tunnels is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, given the rather high density through that area of downtown (the rest of the new Blue is sufficiently far away from the Orange, in my opinion), a more dense network of subway lines isn't a bad thing.

What the new Blue does is not just expand the area serviced by a high level of transit (i.e. within a 1/4 mile of a station entrance), but it allows a greater level of service on both the orange and blue lines outside of their currently shared track.

On that note of interlining, the new Brown line concerns me. As we've learned with WMATA's blue line split proposal, the max capacity for a two track corridor is 26 trains per hour, about one every 135 seconds. The Red line currently operates at peak at 24 trains per hour. How will the Brown line fit into that? Or was there going to be another track added? Also, the proposed Brown line travels under 1st street behind the Capitol - remember that there is already a train tunnel there, connecting Union Station to the south.

Expansions within the core should concentrate on separating the interlined sections. The New Blue does that. At some point, separating the Yellow and Green will become necessary.

Great map, though. I've been daydreaming of a similar kind of map for quite some time, myself.

by Alex B on Feb 19, 2008 10:30 pm • link • report