Hundreds of thousands of people took Metro trains downtown Sunday for the We Are One concert, the official opening of the four-day celebration of Barack Obama’s inauguration.
For Metro, the day was a test of the system in advance of Tuesday, when the city expects as many as four times as many people for the actual swearing-in ceremony.
“This is as busy as I can remember seeing it,” Metro Transit Police Officer Charles Ullmann said Sunday afternoon from the platform of the Foggy Bottom station.
Metro officials modeled the train schedule on the system’s Fourth of July service, running trains at most six minutes apart from 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. But Ullman, who has worked nearly every Fourth of July celebration since 1977, said traffic seemed much heavier.
As of 6 p.m., Metro had 454,397 entries to its rail system after just 11 hours of service. That marked the third highest ridership for a Sunday in the system’s history with hours yet to go in the day.
Yet many riders said it all moved relatively smoothly. “I’m pleasantly surprised,” said Rick White, who took Metro in from Falls Church with his wife and two kids.
Of course, the family from Atlanta expected crowds — and saw them. It was so packed at their station in Falls Church that a full train passed them. Then they got onto a crowded train with room for only their 8-year-old daughter, Jaden, to sit.
Because many riders were new to the system Sunday, people slowed down at exits, trying to remember where they stashed their fare cards. Others stumbled on how to use the farecard machines. However, transit police and Metro staffers stood by at each downtown station to answer questions and keep people moving.
The system did run into some snarls, though.
One train had a door malfunction around 10 a.m. at the Columbia Heights station and all passengers had to be evacuated from the car, Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said. Another train’s brakes locked up around 1 p.m., she said.
But in much of the system, it wasn’t the number of trains that was the problem. It was getting people into and out of stations.
In some cases at the Foggy Bottom station before the concert, a full train arrived even as riders from a previous train were still trying to exit the platform up the escalators.
The real test, however, came at the end of the welcome ceremonies. People had arrived at the Mall in a steady stream starting early in the morning, but when the concert ended, people rushed to leave at the same time.
Starting at 4:30 p.m., a wall of people filled both lanes of 23rd Street Northwest starting at the edge of Lincoln Memorial up to the Foggy Bottom station six blocks away. By 5:30 p.m., lines were still stopped in front of the station. Some decided to grab an early dinner to wait for the crowds to thin before heading back to the trains, as Metro advises riders to do after the events end Tuesday.
Editor Keith St. Clair contributed to this story.
