Washington DC reliably provides the worst public transportation service I’ve ever experienced – and that includes a nightmarish bus ride from Cairo to Sakkara one sweltering September morning.
The last 24 rage-inducing hours is not atypical of Metro’s incompetence. On Wednesday night, I walk as usual to the Dupont Circle Metro Station, where I find (shock) one of the escalators leading down to the platform blocked with wooden walls, and the other one open but un-operational. The platform itself was so packed that people looked on the verge of being pushed out onto the tracks. “What happened?” I ask a man next to me. “Train broke, they had to offload it,” he explains ruefully. Another train finally arrives to service the platform, and is so packed that nobody can enter. People trying to exit the train are straining to climb the one (but not running) escalator, against the tide of people trying to get down. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
The next morning was even more hellish. After waiting forever at the Rockville Metro platform (in 18 degree temperatures) an already- packed train finally arrives bound for DC. The train is overcrowded, brutally hot, and crawls along the track in fits and starts, throwing the still-groggy passengers to and fro and slamming people into each other. We stop at each station for five, ten minutes. At last we are told there is a cracked rail on the Red Line, and they are single tracking – during rush hour!
The train stops at Medical Center, for fifteen minutes. It stops at Bethesda, for twenty minutes. It stops in the tunnel between Friendship Heights and Van Ness for God knows how long. At each stop, crowds of people on the platform survey our jam-packed car with visceral frustration; they know there’s no way they can squeeze in, and who knows when the next train will come?
When finally I arrive at Dupont, I fight my way out of the car, with much cursing and grunting, and ascend to find two of the three escalators leading to the street not working! Of course, I think, watching an elderly women struggle to walk up the long, broken escalator in below freezing temperatures.
All told, my usually hour-long unpleasant commute was turned into a two-hour long test of my faith in humanity.
Again, the last 24 hours are hardly atypical of my Metro experience. To add insult to injury, often literally, on top of the routinely poor train service and constantly malfunctioning elevators and escalators, the customer service dispensed by your average Metro worker can charitably be described as “surly.” Most of the time, when you ask them a question they look at you like you just woke them from a nap – which in fact you may have.
For this I pay $200 a month?
Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation (HarperCollins, 2010). His email is [email protected].
