Transit

How did Metro station balance change since 1995?

by Ben Ross, Matt Johnson, and David Alpert   •   December 6, 2012 12:27 pm

We could tell a lot about land use and commuting patterns in our region by looking at the balance between entries and exits at Metro stations. Comparing the new 2012 data with the 1995 data shows how land use and job patterns in our region have evolved.

View station balance: 1995   2012

Which stations' balance has changed the most since 1995?

A station's balance is the ratio of the entries to exits, with the greater number divided by the lesser. This chart plots each station's balance in 1995 against its balance today. The closer to the bottom a station is, the more balanced it is now; the farther to the left, the more balanced it was in 1995.

Stations right on the blue diagonal line had no change in their balance or imbalance level, while stations farthest from the line have shifted the most in balance. Overall, Metro's stations were less well balanced in 1995, as you can see from the way most stations fall below the line.

(Note that a station might have grown or shrunk in overall ridership tremendously, but not move on this particular graph, because it just looks at the balance, not the absolute ridership numbers for the station.)

The biggest permanent loss of balance is at Medical Center. (Federal Center SW has an inflated balance for 1995 because the east entrance to L'Enfant Plaza was temporarily closed at that time.) Here we see the effect of post-9/11 security—closing the NIH campus to the public severely curtailed pedestrian and bus access to the Metro station.

What happened to the most balanced stations?

The stations Matt identified as most unbalanced were similarly unbalanced then—in fact, the very worst balance was at the same station, Federal Triangle, in both years. But most of the stations that are well balanced today looked very different 17 years ago.

Overall, Metro's stations were less well balanced in 1995. Only six stations in 1995 had balance ratios below 1.31, the threshold to make the top ten in 2012. Only two, Union Station and Waterfront, are in 2012 top ten. The other four were Rosslyn (1.07) Eisenhower Ave. (1.10), Medical Center (1.13), and National Airport (1.28).

11 of these 14 stations have shifted in the direction of more exits—that is, relatively greater use of the station as a work destination. The only stations in these top lists that have become more entry-oriented are Crystal City and Waterfront, which both lost major government employment centers, and Eisenhower Avenue, which had a lot of new residential construction.

At some stations, like Mt. Vernon Square, King Street, and National Airport, new construction is an obvious explanation for the rise in arrivals at work, but the shift has been substantial even where the mix of uses has not changed much. Clearly, a lot more people are using Metro to reach job sites outside the downtown DC core. The particularly sharp rise in exits at Pentagon, Medical Center, Brookland, and Tenleytown suggests that the trend is strongest among students and government employees.

Circle area size represents AM peak ridership.

The data for Ballston are particularly interesting. Fewer people are entering that station in the morning today than 17 years ago. Population in the area has increased, although more slowly than in the rest of the Orange Line corridor.

A more likely explanation is, again, the growing popularity of reverse commuting. Two decades ago, you got an apartment in Ballston to take Metro into DC for work; today, the attraction is the ease of getting into DC in the evening, and you're more likely to commute by car to Tysons or Reston.

Some other close-in stations in largely residential areas have seen similar stagnation or even decline in entries in the AM peak. Cleveland Park, for example, has been essentially flat, with 2,321 morning entries in 1995 and 2,329 in 2012. Brookland's AM peak entries have fallen from 2,172 to 2,075. But these stations, unlike Ballston, have lost population within walking distance, so it's hard to judge what role reverse auto commuting played.

Ben Ross is Vice-President of the Action Committee for Transit and chair of the Transit First! coalition. He is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment and is writing a book about the politics of sprawl.

Matt Johnson has lived in the Washington region since mid-2007. He has a Master's degree in Community Planning from the University of Maryland and a BS in Public Policy from Georgia Tech. He has worked in the planning field since 2006 and lives in Greenbelt, where he serves on the city's Advisory Planning Board.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.