Posts about Late Night Service

How does Metro stack up?

I looked at all the heavy rail and light rail systems in the United States, and out of 30 total systems, Metro is the 6th earliest to close.

Because every rail system is different, it's difficult to compare any one system to another. The measure I used seems to be the most reliable way to compare systems, though it's not perfect.

To compare each city, I looked up when the last train leaves the central station of each system. For Metro, that's 12:06 am, when trains leave Metro Center in 4 directions.

5 systems close earlier than Metro by this measure*. Sacramento is the earliest by far, with the last train leaving downtown at 10:23 pm. Norfolk, Salt Lake City, and San Diego all have their last trains through the core before midnight, and Houston's last departure is at midnight.

Most cities run later. In Atlanta, the last MARTA train leaves the airport at 1:00 am and passes through downtown at 1:35 am, almost 90 minutes after Metro has closed. Even BART, Metro's suburb-oriented cousin in the San Francisco Bay Area, has its last train departing Embarcadero almost an hour later than Metro, at 1:02 am.

3 American systems operate around the clock. The New York subway, the PATCO Speedline, which goes from Philadelphia into southern New Jersey, and PATH, which connects New York with northern New Jersey.

In Chicago, the Red and Blue lines run 24/7, though the other lines shut down at night. The last train on Chicago's Yellow Line departs Howard at 11:00 pm. And while Philadephia's SEPTA closes the Broad Street and Market-Frankford lines, it does run night owl buses along the same routes overnight.

*Note, that this measure looks at the last train leaving the core on any line. In DC, that time is roughly the same for all lines and directions, but in other cities, it can vary a good deal. For example, in Sacramento, the last train from the core is a Blue Line to Watt/I-80 at 10:23. But the last Blue Line train in the other direction (to Meadowview) leaves the core at 9:30.

Applying it to Metro

Metro closes too early. For countless workers in the region, Metro's early closing time keeps them from jobs or forces them to own a car to get around. For sports fans, Metro's early closure makes it difficult to take transit to games and means bad press when fans get stranded.

When Nationals games run late, fans need a way to get home. And in special cases, the Nats should be willing to chip in.

But the region as a whole needs to start funding later transit service. Increasing mobility won't just help baseball fans. It will make the region more accessible to more people.

Metro could extend service so that the last trains departed their terminals after midnight by adding 2 more departures to each line. With 20-minute headways, 2 departures would extend the span of service by 40 minutes, which would be a great start to running service over an even longer span.

That would be enough to bring Metro up to par with its peers in other cities. Of the heavy and light rail systems in the United States, the average last departure from the core is 40.42 minutes after midnight. Adding 40 minutes of span would result in Metro's last train departing the core at 12:46 am.

Of course it is true that nothing comes for free. WMATA and its member jurisdictions would have to pay for longer hours. But 2 more trains each way on each line wouldn't add very much cost. At the regional scale it would be affordable, and definitely worth the benefits.

Metro has been using the off periods for track work, but the short night periods don't give much time to achieve a lot, especially since it takes time to set up and break down a work zone. That's why Metro has been doing more weekend closures of whole segments of lines, when they can finish more work at one go.

Cronin worries that lost tax revenue to the city will exceed the amount WMATA will save if service is cut. "I want to see the numbers make sense," he said. He predicts his business will probably drop 20% on Fridays and Saturdays, and that a number of the city's establishments will go under. "The whole District will be damaged by it," he worries.

Cronin predicts such a dramatic loss because weekend parking in Adams Morgan is already at critical mass, and there will be no method of transportation to replace Metro. "It's a horrible parking situation," he laments, "We do a valet, but the valet fills up."

The Woodley Park station, about a half-mile away from one of the top club districts on the East Coast, is one of the most utilized Metro stations between midnight and 3 am. Cronin also expressed concerns over drunk drivers, and taxi shortages plaguing Adams Morgan come last call. "This is the capital of the free world, and to have a Metro that doesn't run past midnight is just embarrassing."

Just outside the District, the concerns about cutting Metro's late-night service are not tied to losing business. At Union Jack's in Ballston, operations manager Anthony Murphy actually believes business will increase if the changes take effect. (Full disclosure: I am a former bouncer at Union Jack's in Bethesda and Anthony Murphy is my brother.).

Union Jack's has locations adjacent to both the Ballston and Bethesda Metro stations; despite this, Murphy states that "people will not Metro into the city, instead staying the the suburban area closer to their homes." At both locations, you walk past a parking garage to get to the Metro station.

Even with the potential for more business, there are concerns about the changes. Murphy worries about drunk driving. "If a bar can be held accountable for a drunk guy getting behind the wheel of a car, then the Metro should also be held accountable if they make this change."

Union Jack's will also likely close their kitchens earlier. "Many of our back-of-the-house employees depend on Metro to get home," Murphy said, "This change could create a lot of unemployment in the industry." Murphy's wife, Paige, also relies on Metro to get to her job as a bartender at the Chesapeake Room on Barracks Row near the Eastern Market Metro station.

The increase in business, it seems, is just not worth the added liabilities. "Metro should do a bake sale or a car wash or whatever they have to do to get the funds to not keep the Metro from shutting down earlier, but also maybe have it stay open later," said Murphy, calling the service cuts an "irresponsible move."

Indeed, bar owners throughout the city are weary. If the late-night service cuts happen, it could mean drastic changes in revenue, increased liability issues, and difficulty for employees getting to and from work.

In the meantime, Metro will continue to serve tens of thousands of customers during weekend late nights. And for hundreds of gussied up bar patrons, the late night parade across the Calvert Street Bridge will remain a staple of the Adams Morgan night life experience.

NOTE: the station traffic, total entries and exits, is indicated by the diameter of each circle, not the area. If you're interested in seeing the raw data, it is available here.

As one might expect, traffic is centralized around several major nightlife centers and drops as you move farther out of the city center. In many respects, the picture underscores all that much more the importance of late night service, while in other respects it raises interesting questions.

First, some assumptions. An entry between 12 am and 4 am most likely represents the location a person was spending their evening. An exit between 12 am and 4 am, with slightly less but still relative certainty, likely represents the final destination of a rider, i.e. home. Thus a station more weighted toward entries should be a nightlife hub, while a station weighted toward exits is likely a residential area.

On the entries side, this seems to hold true in the aggregate, though the stations with the three highest entry to exit ratios aren't exactly the epitome of nightlife. Farragut West had the highest, followed closely by Federal Triangle and Archives. Their entry to exit ratios are 7.3, 6, and 5.4 to 1, respectively.

What's telling about those is that they are near some nightlife destinations, but not ones that would be considered late-night attractions, and are also generally devoid of residences.

The biggest circles, on the other hand, are places with diverse nightlife activities, as well as more (or growing in the case of Gallery Place) residential areas. Of the four busiest stations, Dupont Circle and Woodley Park are the least red, with respective entry to exit ratios of 3.6 and 3.1 to 1. These are also the two with the most residential density nearby.

As a result, you might expect a truly livable, "balanced" neighborhood to have relatively even entries and exits. This holds true in many cases: Columbia Heights and Eastern Market are relatively busy but have ratios between 0.8 and 1.3 to 1.

More suburban activity centers are also relatively busy but tend to lean more toward exits than their center city counterparts. Silver Spring, the busiest station outside the District, has nearly 2 exits for every entry.

Bethesda and Ballston, too, have more exits than entries. Of major activity centers outside of DC, only Clarendon and King Street have more entries than exits, and King Street only by 4%.

Meanwhile, suburban stations, where there is little development around and the stations boast large park-and-ride lots, are generally bright, bright blue.

Several end-of-the-line stations are even quite busy and are also the most heavily exit-oriented station. Vienna was actually the 14th busiest station on this particular Saturday night and had nearly 14 exits for every entry.

What's more interesting are the anomalies. Eisenhower Avenue, one stop from the end of the line, and within walking distance of practically nothing, actually has more entries than exits, though just barely. Suitland, home to a sprawling federal campus and several small, low density neighborhoods has nearly 2 entries for every exit!

Largo Town Center, at the end of the Blue line, actually ties with King Street, in walkable, Old Town Alexandria, for the most balanced station, with only 4% more exits than entries. Interestingly, the more distant stations in Prince George's County are noticeably more purple than those in Montgomery or Virginia.

What could explain these outliers? I can't say for sure. Perhaps with the comparatively poorer populations served by the eastern stations, more people enter late at night to travel across the city to a night-shift job, but that is difficult to tell. What do you think explains the anomalies?

The primary point is this: DC's evening travel patterns are complex. Far more complex than they used to be, too, as Ben pointed out. Late night service serves a variety of people coming from and going to a variety of places for a likely variety of reasons.

These patterns make late night Metro service extremely difficult to replace with night buses and shuttle services. And they make cutting that service even more detrimental to way of life our region has fostered over the last few decades.

A letter from a retired Metro employee to Unsuck DC Metro absolutely places engineer convenience ahead of the actual purpose of a transit system:

Metro's decision to operate trains as late as they do on the weekends was the second most misguided decision the authority has ever made. It was a cave in to politicians on the board who know nothing about rail and want nothing more than to spout platitudes to their constituents that they live in a "world-class city."

World class in some ways, maybe, but Metro? Hardly.

Metro was never conceived to be a "world class" subway, at least according to what we think world class is in 2011. It was conceived to bring workers downtown in the morning and take them home at night. Sorry to break it to you, but that's how it's built. ...

It is a smart, if temporarily unpopular move, to close Metro at midnight, and they should never let it run until 3 again.

You know what else is a two-track system? Paris. Moscow. London (except for two very small pieces). Many others. In fact, more than 2 tracks is extremely rare worldwide.

Most world-class cities do have more lines, so they can shut down some lines and people can use others. London's lines are very close together in the center city. So are Paris's, plus they have RER as well as the Metro. Berlin has the U-bahn and S-bahn.

We often compare Metro to New York, but sometimes that leads to drawing the wrong conclusions. New York, by the way, does sometimes close down some of the tracks on their 4-track lines (or 1 or 2 on their 2-track lines), but not every night. Most lines, most nights, run all night. (They don't run most express services all night, but still aren't doing any maintenance on those express tracks).

Why, then, does Kubicek want to close the system at midnight every day?

This is the key issue. There's a big difference between shutting down some lines, some of the time, to do extended repairs, and shutting down every line at midnight. Kubicek says he has some people unable to do the most important work because of the hours. Would they be working on all five lines every single weekend?

It could make sense to shut down even, say, one line on weekends for a few months or more if that will get that line substantially back to good repair. But Metro should only shut down what it absolutely needs to while it puts every possible maintenance person into the shut-down area.

There are the closures that will really benefit maintenance, and then there are the closures that will just make Kubicek's job easier. Right now, we can't tell the difference.

Benjamin told the RAC that sometimes Metro staff do fall into this trap of thinking about the system in terms of moving the trains instead of moving the people. A friend who works for a transit company said a number of employees there come from a freight operator, and they preferred moving freight because it doesn't complain.

Having no weekend hours would certainly save some work for Metro management. The scheduling would be simpler. They wouldn't have to communicate varying weekend closures or explain to the staff how to make the proper announcements. If only Metro structured its service around the needs of its managers, then things would be so much better... from the perspective of the managers.

Unsuck's letter writer blames politicians for getting Metro to play a bigger role in our region than it did when it opened. If politicians are the ones who dream big while the engineers want to cut everything back and make it fit into a simple but narrow box, then we need more politicians, not fewer.

Not only are there almost 50% more riders each week, but they take a very different mix of trips. Commuters still flock to offices in the old downtown, but they are not Metro's future. In May 2010, fewer passengers exited Dupont Circle in the morning rush hour than in the same month of 1995. The two Farragut stations were up, but only by 5%. As a share of Metro's total weekly ridership, morning commutes into the old downtown plummeted from 9.8% to 7.2%.

The biggest source of ridership growth is the emergence of new commuting destinations as the land around stations has been redeveloped. A new downtown blossomed between Gallery Place and Union Station while the federal buildings south of the Mall produced more riders, and reverse commutes to the suburbs soared.

But the real key to understanding Metro's growth is found elsewhere: in the explosion in non-commuting trips by area residents. The best way to measure this is by looking at Saturday night travel. In 1995, 39,198 people entered the rail system after 7:00 Saturday night. By 2010, the number was 94,646. The increase of 142% dwarfs the 43% growth in weekday morning commutes.

Not only are more people riding on Saturday night, they are different people. The ten busiest Saturday-night stations are listed in the table. Back in 1995, tourists going home late were numerous enough to give Smithsonian tenth place on the list.

Today that station's ridership has risen from 1830 to 2457, but it ranks 25th and is barely ahead of Fort Totten. Columbia Heights and U Street—one not even open in 1995, and the other rarely used—have surged high on the list.

These busy Saturday nights are the key to understanding Metro's ten years of growth. The root cause of ridership growth since the late 1990s has been increasing demand for an urban, transit-oriented lifestyle.

True, the majority of the added trips have been travel to work. But there has been little growth in Metro travel between existing homes and offices. Growth in Metro commuting has followed mixed-use development near the stations.

Transit-oriented development is, of course, market-driven. And what the market demands is the opportunity to take non-work trips on foot or by Metro. This can be seen clearly in Arlington's Orange Line corridor from Courthouse to Ballston. Morning rush-hour travel from these stations increased only 20% from 1995 to 2010, less than the growth in population. Saturday night travel rose 165%.

In the nineties, you got an apartment in Ballston for an easy commute into DC Now, you live there because you want to be in the city but are stuck with a job in Tysons.

Last week, some WMATA staff and Board members suggested eliminating late-night rail service on Fridays and Saturdays to save money and facilitate maintenance. That is a cut Metro cannot afford, because it undercuts the future growth of all-day ridership.

New development is what has brought new riders, not increased mode share in existing markets. To cut back on what makes transit-oriented development appealing—mobility without an automobile—would be to destroy Metro's future.

Busiest Metro stations on Saturday night
(total entries and exits after 7:00 pm)

May 1995:

1. Dupont Circle - 5,336
   
2. Union Station - 5,169
   
3. Foggy Bottom - 4,062
   
4. Metro Center - 3,821
   
5. Pentagon City - 3,399
   
6. Stadium-Armory - 3,077
   
7. Silver Spring - 2,501
   
8. Woodley Park - 2,087
   
9. Rosslyn - 1,905
   
10. Smithsonian - 1,830

May 2010:

1. Gallery Place - 14,060
   
2. Dupont Circle - 11,119
   
3. Foggy Bottom - 6,637
   
4. U Street - 6,354
   
5. Metro Center - 6,287
   
6. Columbia Heights - 5,755
   
7. Union Station - 5,669
   
8. Pentagon City - 5,499
   
9. Silver Spring - 4,803
   
10. Woodley Park - 4,501

Maryland's Peter Benjamin asked about providing bus, taxi, or other service as an alternative to rail service, to avoid completely cutting off riders from having transit options. Such a program could blunt the pain of such a cut.

Rail operations head Dave Kubicek said the late-night Friday and Saturday service forces WMATA to pay the equivalent "adding an eighth day of work" each week. Cutting back the hours to midnight from 3 am would effectively give them 45 more days per year to perform track work.

The Board also discussed plans to hold hearings and give the public a chance to weigh in on these issues.

New Board member Mary Hynes from Arlington suggested presenting the idea of earlier closings juxtaposed with whatever can be accomplished in the extra time. "Our goal is Metro 2.0," said Hynes. She argued that if riders knew what could be fixed and how much faster, it could help them decide whether to support late-night cuts.

Unfortunately, this also risks pitting rush-hour only riders, more often those who drive to stations and don't live in walkable areas with ready transit access, against people for whom transit is a 24-7 mobility tool. Federal member Mort Downey already started down that road by talking about how Metro is a "demand-driven" service, organized primarily around the times of peak usage, which also happens to be what matters most to the federal government.

Tom Downs, DC's voting member from the Gray administration, also expressed an interest in exploring this, though he also made very clear that rider input is vital. As Kytja Weir noted on Twitter, cutting late-night service is something Jim Graham constantly fought, often tenaciously and to the irritation of some of his colleagues or the Board of Trade.

We're seeing the effect in this meeting of the new Board. Gone are two of the more vociferous defenders of transit service, and the new members either won't be fighting as hard or haven't yet found their footing to do so. While the Board hasn't necessarily decided to make these cuts and members haven't committed to supporting or opposing them, in the old Board, we'd have heard members making impassioned speeches against this idea the moment it came up.

Or, perhaps members will just be more subtle about it. Another item on the list of potential cuts is Yellow Line service to Fort Totten off-peak, which keeps riders between Mount Vernon Square and Fort Totten from facing very long midday and evening headways. Tommy Wells asked staff to also add Red Line turnbacks at Grosvenor to the list, which represent a potential Montgomery County-only cut to parallel this DC-only cut.

About half of Red Line trains stop at Grosvenor rush hours instead of continuing to Shady Grove. Years past, this happened off-peak as well, but Maryland secured service sending all off-peak trains to Shady Grove and only turning any back during the peak.

If one is on the table, it's fair to put the other on as well, and perhaps a comparable service pattern in Virginia. All would be terrible, however, and the Board needs to look hard at alternatives before jumping to this option.

Update: Tommy Wells criticized this option when talking to reporters after the meeting.