Metro morsels
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:
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:
- Columbia Heights, 25.8% (11,325)
- Eisenhower Avenue, 17.9% (
2,2922,177) - NY Ave/Fla Ave/Gallaudet, 16.6% (4,024)
- Smithsonian, 15.8% (
9,2979,115) - U Street/AACWM/Cardozo, 14.2% (
7187,118)
Declines:
- Stadium-Armory, -11% (2,989)
- Farragut West, -3.7% (22,748)
- Landover, -3.3% (2,676)
- Anacostia, -2.2% (7,737)
- Minnesota Avenue, -2.2% (3,585)
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.