Agency plans new approach to fix system Metro plans to shut down some of its stations nearly every weekend over the next two years to complete a record amount of track work, officials said Thursday.
The transit agency plans to close one or more stations on weekends over 18 months instead of making trains take turns sharing a single track around work sites. Weekends with major holidays or events, such as Thanksgiving, July 4 and the Cherry Blossom Festival, won’t be affected, but Deputy General Manager Dave Kubicek said at least one station would be shut during about 50 out of 78 weekends. That means most of the agency’s 86 stations will be closed at some point — or affected by other closures.
| Board opts not to increase weekend rail wait times |
| Metrorail riders won’t have to wait longer for weekend trains and some bus riders won’t be losing their lines following preliminary approval of Metro’s $2.55 billion budget on Thursday. |
| A board of directors committee voted to approve the budget without cuts to train service. The full board is expected to approve it June 23. |
| The panel’s vote also means the E6 bus line in Northwest won’t be cut, after more than 1,100 people signed a petition to save it. |
| But the District plans to modify a few bus routes. It also plans to eliminate a special fare discount on some Anacostia buses but increase the size of the transfer discount to the rail system. |
| Metro had been facing a $66 million shortfall in its proposal for the budget that begins July 1. The board of directors had discussed extending the wait times between trains on weekends to save about $6 million. But local communities said they could cover the gap by increasing the size of their taxpayer-funded subsidies. |
The agency is still working out the details and hopes to have a schedule of the closures within several weeks. But the first shutdowns likely would be in August, Kubicek said. Officials said they hope the schedule can help organizations and communities plan around the shutdowns.
Agency leaders say the change represents a more efficient, faster and safer way to conduct some $3 billion of needed repairs and maintenance work on the 35-year-old rail system. “It’s not that we’re spending less dollars, it’s that we’re spending dollars more productively,” General Manager Richard Sarles said.
“We’re trying to balance the impact on customers.”
The transit agency has been shutting down clusters of stations during three-day holiday weekends for almost two years, using the three days to get more work done at one time than if the work were carried out overnight or while trains passed through. It has operated free buses to shuttle riders across the closed segments.
Now, the agency said it hopes to use the same idea to meet the backlog of work on the system. Officials argue that a shutdown may affect fewer riders than single-tracking their trains. Forcing trains to share a single track in short sections causes delays throughout the line even if riders don’t pass through the bottleneck. A shutdown, on the other hand, affects only the riders passing through those stations.
The agency still might single-track trains during weekdays, nights and even weekends, though, Kubicek said.
And riders shouldn’t think that they will have perfect service after the 18 months of track work. Keeping the system running well is a constant battle, Sarles warned. But, he said, “The intensity will be less after we do this first round.”
