A Metro rider found an unpleasant surprise on his daily commute at the Franconia-Springfield station on Monday: human feces smeared on the pedestrian bridge into the station. And making matters worse, it was still there Tuesday and Wednesday. No one had cleaned it up.
Austin Lasseter said he spoke to the Metro station manager on Monday, then each day thereafter. But she told Lasseter it wasn’t Metro’s problem. The stairs belong to Virginia Railway Express even though it was on the Metro side of the bridge.
“Everyone walks past it on their way into the station, and it stinks,” Lasseter said. “The station manager’s attitude is a perfect example of what’s wrong with Metro. They just don’t care about anything, even crap in their stations.”
The case highlights two problems: communication between customers and agencies — and the unfortunate things that happen in public places.
The Franconia-Springfield station is not the only transit station to be treated as a public toilet. Human excrement also was found at VRE’s Alexandria station on Wednesday, VRE spokesman Mark Roeber said. And it has been found at other stations, with multiple cases occurring at a time.
Officials don’t know who is responsible or have an explanation for why it happens in clustered cases. But it is challenging for agencies such as VRE, which runs commuter trains from Virginia into Washington each weekday. The agency does not have employees manning each station, so it doesn’t always learn of such problems immediately.
Maintenance crews visit stations every day, Roeber said, but they rotate tasks in the cleaning cycle. Trash is picked up daily and the platforms are checked, however areas such as a pedestrian bridge may not be monitored daily.
“All we can do is ask people who see things to communicate with us,” Roeber said.
In the case of the Franconia-Springfield station, Metro and VRE officials both dispatched maintenance crews after being contacted by The Washington Examiner Wednesday morning. The Metro crew ended up doing the dirty work.
“We do our best to be good neighbors and it was quicker to have our staff close out the issue,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.
But Lasseter, who doesn’t ride VRE, asked why Metro couldn’t let VRE know about the problem. Metro station managers don’t generally reach out directly to VRE janitorial teams, both sides said, and must got through a chain of command.
Roeber said he’d work with his agency about opening the lines of communication. Stessel also said Metro is working on its customer service.
“We all hear about customer interactions that could have been handled better,” he said.
