One significant source of walkers to National Airport station would be people who work at the airport walking between their jobs and Metro. But I suspect your explanation also covers a significant portion.

by Josh B on Aug 3, 2009 12:44 pm  

So are tourists driving to Arlington Cemetery and taking the Metro from there? Is parking at the cemetery really cheap? I wonder if Fodors recommends it or something.

by Reid on Aug 3, 2009 12:50 pm  

Yea, I also found the National Airport results to be interesting. If I've just got off a plane and I walk to the Metro station there and someone hands me a survey and the question says "How did you arrive at the station?" wouldn't I feel a little bit silly to answer "by plane?" Clearly the percentage of people who live nearby and walk to the station must be miniscule. Why would you? However, there must be a large number of people who work at the airport who would come and go by Metro. It would be interesting to see the breakdown. Especially in light of the "other" numbers at West Falls Church, which are huge.

I notice the very large number of people who arrive at the Pentagon station via bus. Makes sense. But I'm surprised at the large number who say they arrive by car. These are Pentagon employees who have meetings downtown for one reason or another?

Surprising to see the car numbers so high at EFC. I didn't think the parking lot was that big.....then again, I guess the Kiss N Ride area there does stay pretty busy.....

by Josh on Aug 3, 2009 12:50 pm  

Reid -

Parking is certainly not expensive at the cemetery and what with the convenience factor - might as well just leave it there and hop on the train for the rest of the day's sightseeing. Your trouble then, as a tourist - figuring out how to manage the roundabout at the western terminus of Memorial Bridge. During rush hour.

by Josh S on Aug 3, 2009 12:54 pm  

How about East Falls Church's bike share? Anacostia's funneling of lots of River East bus traffic.

The density change map pretty much makes PGC look disgraceful.

by цarьchitect on Aug 3, 2009 12:56 pm  

Messed up the tag. Change of density map is here.

by цarьchitect on Aug 3, 2009 12:57 pm  

West Falls Church "other" is the Fairfax Connector Bus.

by Mark S on Aug 3, 2009 1:01 pm  

Fairfax Connector for sure at WFC. One Washington Flyer bus every half-hour from the Airport is a drop in the bucket. As others have commented, use of Arlington Cemetery for park'n'ride is interesting.

by Paul on Aug 3, 2009 1:15 pm  

At West Falls Church Washington Flyer bus is mostly empty except on major travel days, so I doubt that is it. There are a lot of corporate and residential shuttle buses that ferry people between Tysons Corner, maybe that makes up the number? But from my observations it doesn't seem like that big of a percentage.

by Joshua Davis on Aug 3, 2009 1:17 pm  

@Mark S
So if it's not a WMATA bus it's not a bus? That sure is stupid way for them to present the data considering all the different bus systems in the area.

by Joshua Davis on Aug 3, 2009 1:18 pm  

Huh? West Hyattsville has the highest bikeing per capita? Is that what I see?

by RJ on Aug 3, 2009 1:27 pm  

Biking numbers seem off (at least visually speaking). Bethesda has a large number of riders, as does foggy bottom and columbia heights. Apparently all of those stations have fewer cyclists as a percentage of users than Twinbrook? I'm Missing something here.

by JTS on Aug 3, 2009 1:34 pm  

WMATA's bus numbers count anyone arriving on any public transit bus, not just Metrobuses.

by Matt Johnson on Aug 3, 2009 1:38 pm  

Maybe they arrived by taxi?

I also think the park-n-riders are interesting at Arlington Cemetery. Then again, it's an underutilized station, and the parking garage for the visitor's center is both highly visible and seems tantalizingly close to the station itself.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Pentagon and Anacostia seem to be the only two stations with a majority of bus riders, but I expect it's more for express buses in the first case and local buses in the second case.

by J.D. Hammond on Aug 3, 2009 1:53 pm  

No way is WFC Fairfax Connector bus. If that were the case, there would be a lot more "other" showing up at all the outer stations served by Ride-On, ART, CUE, DASH, etc.

My guess is that JD Hammond is right - it's probably taxis.

by BeyondDC on Aug 3, 2009 1:55 pm  

West Hyattsville's bike share makes tons of sense. It's in biking distance of legacy walkable urban places such as Mount Rainier, the Chillum section of Hyattsville, and the northern part of the Brentwood section of DC, but not in walking distance of any of them. There are also a lot of residences that are within walking distance by the crow flies, but are cut off by a stream or some woods. (A friend of mine in grad school lived in apartments that would be a 10 minute walk from the West Hyattsville station but refused to walk through the woods after dark.) Plus, the west branch of the Anacostia snakes through there so there are ample bike trails in and around the station.

The station itself is also somewhat of an anamoly. It is surrounded by fields and abandoned warehouses, yet there are two local-serving small downtowns just beyond the empty land. It is an area that is ripe for further TOD. As it is now, it is ripe for bicycle users. The only problem with that is that it is somewhat underused due the lack of TOD in it immediate surroundings. For better or worse, only so many people currently view bicycles as transportation rather than recreation at the current time.

by Cavan on Aug 3, 2009 2:19 pm  

Oh the Cemetery numbers don't surprise me at all. When I was growing up, my parents would park at that garage whenever we were sightseeing. It was the closest cheap garage during a weekday that we knew about, and it was rarely full. It was also really easy to find, as The freeway signs all direct people to the Cemetery. And if we walked along the Mall, we could just trek across the bridge to our car.

by Joey on Aug 3, 2009 3:00 pm  

I assume that "plane" wasn't an option. So a large chunk of the National Airport people said "walk," then a small chunk said "other" to mean plane. But if it wasn't an option, there's a good chance many people didn't put it.

As far as I know, there's almost no reason to walk to the National Airport stop. The closest neighborhood is Crystal City, and it's much easier to get to the Crystal City stop if you're not in the airport itself. Furthermore, I've never been to National, but are you allowed to get to/from the station in you're not going to/from the airport? Isn't it on airport grounds and all?

I'm surprised at the amount of non-bus traffic coming to Pentagon. I've walked there, yes, but it's not a very friendly walk at all. It's very circuitous, and you always feel like the CIA is watching you. As for car, I thought you can only park there if you're an employee. Maybe not.

by Tim on Aug 3, 2009 3:18 pm  

I used to walk to and from Nat'l Airport all the time when I lived right off of Route 1 at Glebe. It's the closest metro station, and a pleasant walk down the bike trail to the underpass at Glebe. Took me about 20 minutes at a leisurely pace. But I was usually the only person getting on or off the train without a suitcase, so I don't think that's what is going on here.

by Simon on Aug 3, 2009 4:02 pm  

Tim: are you sure that most of the people "walking" to and from Pentagon metro aren't working at the Pentagon?

by J.D. Hammond on Aug 3, 2009 4:08 pm  

Wouldn't a large chunk of the car traffic at the Pentagon be "slugs"?

by reptrgrl on Aug 3, 2009 4:24 pm  

One datum that's missing is the total number of riders at each station. By scaling the size of the pie charts to the number of riders, you'd get a better idea of how many walkers, cyclists, drivers, etc. are using the system and where they are boarding.

For example, it seems very impressive that over a third of East Falls Church passengers arrive on foot, until you realize that it's a large proportion of a very small number of passengers who use that station.

by c5karl on Aug 3, 2009 5:20 pm  

I would like to sit down and have a coffee with the person that came to navy-archives by car.

by whom on Aug 3, 2009 5:56 pm  

it would be nice to see these circles also scaled for the ridership levels. that would address some of the comments about relative bike/ped shares, etc etc. probably most of those outliers just don't have too many people riding, so this skews them to look equal to high ridership stations in the district.

by Sam Zimbabwe on Aug 3, 2009 9:15 pm  

As for WFC, the other bus could be Loudoun County commuters that travel between Ashburn and WFC. The other at Morgan is kinda odd since it's not really the most utilized station buswise, even with its proximity to FedEx Field.

by KenCon on Aug 3, 2009 10:28 pm  

@ whom

the person probably got dropped off and thats probably the case with many stations they arent the ones driving there a passenger in the car with someone else driving

@ KenCon

Not many buses serve Morgan Boulevard the only buses that stop there are the 22 and 24 the bus buses and they are monday thru friday so anyone going there is either driving or getting dropped off.

They could have had better answers

How did you get here, did you

walk
drive
bus
get dropped off by someone driving
taxi
bike
airplane for national (some may have thought that the station is apart of the airport since its connected so they put airplane aside from those who work there)

by kk on Aug 4, 2009 8:55 am  

I think this would have been more useful if the size of the pie charts reflected the total number of rides at each station. Simple comparing pie charts does not convey enough information.

by KB on Aug 4, 2009 12:25 pm  

Fascinating indeed. But what is the data source for this chart? It is hard to draw conclusions when we do not know how the data was collected, sample size, definitions, and timeframe.

by MJ on Aug 5, 2009 12:05 am  

This is a good start, but I hope the survey is redone on (say) an annual basis and that the next one is done better, taking into account what we learn from this. (I haven't reviewed all the materials online, so some of these questions may be addressed in the other presentations.)

"Plane" should be an option for the airport; "rail" should be an option for stations with a connection to Amtrak, MARC, or VRE.

It might make more sense for the survey to ask all of the modes the customer took to reach the station, e.g. plane to Dulles, bus to Rosslyn.

For auto, I'd be curious to know taxi vs. kiss-and-ride vs. parking. Similarly, for bikes we might ask if the person parked the bike before boarding or took the bike on board. (I'd also be curious about carsharing and bikesharing, but it might be beyond the scope of a survey about Metro, with an eye toward what amenities it should offer.)

Also, ask MJ mentioned, timeframe (what time of day, what day of the week, and what time of year) could affect this -- I bet walking and biking decline somewhat in the winter.

Finally, I'd love to have demographic data on mode share -- e.g. age, gender, income, disability, race, whether they live in the DC area or are visiting. I bet we'd find some interesting stuff -- are some neighborhoods more friendly to women cyclists? -- and it'd give us starting points from which to identify deficiencies and set goals (e.g. which groups to target to encourage walking).

by Gavin Baker on Aug 5, 2009 11:48 am  

I hear everyone who's asking to have the pies sized by total ridership. However, from books on visual design I've read, our brains don't judge area very well, especially with circles. Simply changing the size of the pies wouldn't convey much information to our eager brains.

Instead, I'd recommend a stacked grid of squares where each square represents, say, 100 riders and is colored to represent the modes of those riders. You could vary the number of riders represented by each square until you found a good fit between conveying nuances of the data and readability. It would definite convey the information better than altered pie sizes.

by Michael on Aug 10, 2009 12:32 pm