A look at how Metro riders used Uber during the shutdown, in 3 charts

When Metro shut down last week many commuters turned to biking, walking and riding the bus.

Thousands of others took Uber. The company said it had a record day of “pool” rides in D.C. on Wednesday, with 1 in 4 trips being taken on the service, though it declined to provide exact ridership figures. UberPool is the ride-hail company’s lower-cost ride-splitting option, which allows a customer to share a ride with another commuter going in the same general direction, kind of like a bus.

Below, you’ll see the visual evidence of how ride-hail services picked up Metro’s slack Wednesday. The black dots represent Metro stops while the blue ones represent uberPool pickups. The darker the dot, the more pickups occurred there.

And if you look closely at the trip data, you can almost make out…a couple of Metro lines? Particularly the Orange and Red lines in Northwest Washington.

Uber’s commute pattern Wednesday largely mirrored the D.C. Metro map, something consistent with its statistic that 60 percent of its trips start or end within a quarter mile of a Metro station. This is a daily phenomenon, but it intensified Wednesday. In addition, transit-dependent pockets with relatively few Uber pickups the week before, like Rosslyn, Courthouse and Clarendon, saw noticeably more using the service Wednesday.

Uber declined to say what constituted “many” pickups compared to “few.” One additional point of confusion: why uberPool pickups were made  March 9 in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Before Uber expanded its “pool” coverage area last week, the service was only (officially) available within District Lines and in parts of Virginia, according to the company’s website. But the data seems to show Uber has tinkered with its coverage area.

And while Uber declined to say exactly what its ridership was during the Metro shutdown, the company provided a graph that shows just how high demand was compared to a typical Wednesday.

Another map shows Uber’s dropoffs during the morning commute. Unsurprisingly, trips centered on the downtown core, where people work, and to areas served by Metro, where there’s a high density of offices.

Uber said its most popular routes along the extended route included Tysons Corner to downtown, end-of-line Metro stations (i.e. Vienna and New Carrollton on the Orange Line) to downtown, and Shady Grove to downtown. The company says it saw a high volume of trips all along the I-270 corridor, trips it believes would typically be served by the Red Line.

Uber said last week a record number of its drivers were on the road Wednesday — 50 percent more than during the same period a week earlier.

(Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos is an investor in Uber.)

Safety checks during Washington region’s rail system's 24-hour shutdown revealed severe cable damage in three sections. (Video: YouTube/MetroFoward)