WMATA may shut down entire rail lines for months in order to catch up on maintenance more quickly (though, officials noted, no decisions have been made yet and they will talk to the public before doing anything). If a shutdown does happen, Metro must thoroughly prepare, communicate, and provide riders who rely on Metro with reasonable alternatives.

Special event bus shuttles. Photo by DDOT DC on Flickr.

A months-long shutdown may make sense

For years, WMATA has been struggling to perform maintenance at nights and on weekends. There’s so much work to do that they can’t complete it all.

Meanwhile, many riders who’ve endured year after year of worsening service are abandoning Metro, especially on the weekends when trains can be 30 minutes apart.

A months-long shutdown would theoretically put an end to that, or at least significantly reduce the need for weekend track work. It would let WMATA catch up on all its maintenance needs for a line in one fell swoop. We’d be trading a few months of pain for years of happiness.

WMATA GM Paul Wiedefeld says he is indeed considering the idea. He adds, “In the last few years, we’ve been trying to do this [maintenance] in a sort of piecemeal way, and basically we’ve alienated everyone.”

He’s right. Working at night and on weekends is fine when you’re just doing preventative maintenance. But after years of increasingly terrible weekend service, it’s become clear that model won’t work with WMATA’s need for major rebuilding. With no end to the rebuilding in sight, it’s time to try something new.

This is getting old. Photo by the author.

Closing an entire line end to end may not prove necessary. You can rebuild the Virginia section of a line without closing the Maryland section, for example. And closing the core is much harder than closing outer sections. But closing long segments of a line, say four or five stations long, may well make a lot of sense. On the other hand, if a whole line needs work, maybe shutting it down completely is the way to go.

Whether or not WMATA has the equipment and work crew capacity to do such a big job is an open question. But if so, or if it can expand as needed to do so, it may not be a terrible idea.

Leaving riders without options wouldn’t be acceptable

So yes, it’s very possible that closing major segments of Metro lines for months would be the best way to get this painful decade of rebuilding behind us.

But we absolutely cannot simply shut down Metro and hope for the best. Metrorail is not an optional service for the Washington region. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on it every day, including many who don’t have access to cars. Telecommuting saved us for one day, but can’t work for months on end.

We’ve literally built our region around Metro. Without it, 166 blocks of downtown DC would have to be bulldozed and converted to parking garages.

Simply closing Metro without providing alternatives isn’t an option. Too many people wouldn’t be able to reach their jobs. It would be a calamity, economically and for thousands, personally:

We’d need bus shuttles, bus lanes, and more

If this is really going to happen, WMATA and the affected jurisdictions would have to work together to provide transit alternatives. We’d need special bus shuttles to replace the shuttered Metro line, temporary bus lanes to make longer-distance bus travel fast enough to be practical, greatly expanded transportation demand management, and more. We’d need a comprehensive transportation management plan.

Such a plan might look something like what Matt Johnson suggested in 2013, when WMATA considered closing part of the Red Line for six weeks. That shutdown hasn’t happened, but many of the same ideas would be necessary anywhere.

Luckily, these are not impossible ideas. Other cities have made long term closures work. We could too.

It wouldn’t be easy, and it would require sacrifice from everyone, including drivers who don’t use Metro. It’s impossible to stop running a transit line that carries a hundred thousand passengers without making life hard. Substitute buses absolutely would not be as good as Metrorail, not for transit riders and not for car drivers who have to share road space.

But the current situation is hard too.

WMATA will need to study this concept in detail. Then they’ll need to share their detailed findings with the public. What are the real options, what are the trade-offs, how much time and money would this save, and what will the Metro system look like when it’s over? If Metro expects the public to buy this idea, they’ll need to be forthright.

But it’s possible. WMATA could do this and it might be successful, if and only if they take the time and money to plan, prepare, and do it correctly.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

Dan Malouff is a transportation planner for Arlington and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has a degree in urban planning from the University of Colorado and lives in Trinidad, DC. He runs BeyondDC and contributes to the Washington Post. Dan blogs to express personal views, and does not take part in GGWash's political endorsement decisions.