Photo by las.photographs.

The DC Council’s Committee on Public Works and Transportation sent Metro a long list of questions about budget and upcoming projects in many areas. Here are a few interesting facts from Metro’s responses:

Greatest passenger growth and declines: The following stations had the “fastest passenger growth” as of February 2009. (The answer isn’t clear on whether this is year over year or something else. These numbers compare July 2007-February 2008 with July 2008-February 2009.) The numbers reflect percentage change and absolute change

average weekday ridership. (Update: Metro got back to me with updated numbers, fixing the clearly-inaccurate U Street number and correcting a few more.)

Growth:

  1. Columbia Heights, 25.8% (11,325)
  2. Eisenhower Avenue, 17.9% (2,292 2,177)
  3. NY Ave/Fla Ave/Gallaudet, 16.6% (4,024)
  4. Smithsonian, 15.8% (9,297 9,115)
  5. U Street/AACWM/Cardozo, 14.2% (718 7,118)

Declines:

  1. Stadium-Armory, -11% (2,989)
  2. Farragut West, -3.7% (22,748)
  3. Landover, -3.3% (2,676)
  4. Anacostia, -2.2% (7,737)
  5. Minnesota Avenue, -2.2% (3,585)
The “invisible tunnel”: Metro expects to deploy the next version of the SmarTrip software in early 2010. That will permit free above-ground transfers between Farragut North and Farragut West and between Metro Center and Gallery Place, should the Metro Board choose to allow them.
Additional bicycle parking: Metro has already or will shortly replace deteriorating bicycle racks at Cleveland Park, Congress Heights, Dupont Circle, and Foggy Bottom. Capitol South, Eastern Market and Georgia Avenue-Petworth will get their first racks, and Columbia Heights, L’Enfant Plaza, NY Ave/Fla Ave/Gallaudet and Woodley Park-Zoo/AM will get more racks in addition to the ones already there. Metro didn’t specify the numbers.

NextBus: A business would be able to purchase and maintain an electronic real-time display sign for about $5,200, plus about $1,070 in annual maintenance costs.

The Committee also asked what would be required for Google Transit to integrate NextBus. (Of course, Google still hasn’t integrated the regular schedule data.) Metro officials replied, “NextBus has a well defined data feed (use by the IVR system) that Google could use to receive real time arrival/departure information. Metro would have to authorize Google to have access to this data.” The other, possibly more interesting question, is whether other developers can access this data to build other applications. Hopefully Metro can permit that access.