Dear Dr. Gridlock:
Anyone who must keep an appointment on the weekend has to be crazy to use Metrobus or Metrorail services. Bus schedules have been changed, and Metrorail is always subject to delays, not to mention the nonoperating escalators.
Who suffers from this mess? Certainly the downtown businesses and restaurant do. The only beneficiary is the D.C. government, as the number of fines increase for motorists from the suburbs trying to indulge in the pleasures of our capital.
Metro is broke, literally and figuratively. Repairs will be costly, but there is no alternative.
Nelson Marans, Silver Spring
DG: The letter pulls together two statements that are equally true: The repairs that Metro is making are necessary, and they’re a royal pain for riders.
Metro’s leaders say we’ll begin to see that the ride is getting better, but they also say there’s no end in sight for the disruptions caused by the repairs.
If these repairs, and the resulting travel disruptions, are going to be a routine part of D.C. transit life, Metro should focus more attention on softening the impact.
The letter writer mentions the out-of-service escalators. Here’s an area in which Metro is paying more attention to both engineering and customer service.
The new capital budget calls for replacing more than 90 of the escalators, which frequently break down and aren’t worth refurbishing. That’s better engineering. But Metro also has been providing riders with more timely information about which escalators are out and when they will be back in service. That’s better customer service.
Now, how about moving on to the train and bus schedules? If these disruptions to upgrade equipment are going to be routine for years, we need a communications system that gives riders the information they need to compensate for them.
Give us a Trip Planner that adjusts to the off-peak and weekend schedule changes. Under normal circumstances, Trip Planner does exactly what its name implies. It tells people who use the feature on Metro’s home page at www.wmata.com how to get from one place to another in the most efficient way via transit.
But it doesn’t account for all the schedule changes. Give us passenger information displays in the stations that actually show when the next train is coming.
The system we have now relies heavily on schedules and is too easily fooled. Give us a Next Bus system that’s reliable enough for riders to trust, even when heavy traffic inevitably throws buses off schedule.
Gaps on I-66
Dear Dr. Gridlock:
Recently, the Virginia Department of Transportation did a great job in resurfacing the Interstate 66 corridor in the Fairfax-Vienna area.
However, on the eastbound section of the highway, they left four or five strips unpaved. It would seem to a novice that this creates a weakness in the overall structure of the pavement that, even when patched with new asphalt, would leave areas that would more easily break up later.
Why were these not resurfaced?
W. Eugene Morris, Fairfax
DG: They’ll be back.
Last April, the Virginia Department of Transportation started a $48 million resurfacing project along 61 / 2 miles of I-66 between the Capital Beltway and Route 50. Many drivers didn’t see the lane closings for this work because they took place overnight.
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