Why can’t we be like other big cities?
The New York-Washington comparison got under the skin of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and her team.
“A totally unfair comparison,” Chris Geldart, Bowser’s director of homeland security and emergency services, told reporters Monday. “Schools may be open in [New York City] but is it a safe situation for those students to get there?. . .Here in the District, we know our conditions, and what our roadways look like and what it’s like for our residents and children out there and we are making the best decision we can.”
This was after a press conference where, after urging everyone to just keep shoveling while the city scoured the hills for more plow drivers, Bowser’s team said the city would probably need the rest of the week to dig out completely. The mayor said late Monday that D.C. government would reopen Tuesday, but schools would remain closed.
Oh, and Metro officials held a news conference about restoring service at a location that wasn’t near a Metro station — or accessible with the limited bus service that was running. (All while officials were telling people to keep their cars off the streets.)
Safe to say New Yorkers wouldn’t put up with this. But maybe Washingtonians are a patient bunch, which is probably why they’ve put up with losing baseball teams or having no baseball teams for so long. At least on Monday, Metro service was free.
By late Monday afternoon, Metro’s general manager Paul Wiedefeld said rail service would be restored everywhere Tuesday –except on the Silver Line– as of 5 a.m. Wait times are expected to be roughly 12 minutes. (Lately, headways haven’t even been that good pre-blizzard.) Bus service will operate under what Metro calls a “severe” weather plan with service on only the busiest portion of major routes.
“I am of two minds,” said Jill Eckart, who lives in the District. “I think on one hand they’ve kind of taken public health seriously, and gotten everyone off the road and shut things down. On the other hand, I do think if we can get to the place where we are running trains in inclement weather, that’s also important for public health. .. Tons of people who help others for a living don’t have access to vehicles or 4-wheel drive.”
Eckart, 37, was waiting on the platform in Columbia Heights for a Green Line train about 8:30 a.m. Monday to start her commute to her job with a nonprofit in Friendship Heights. Normally, she would hop a bus from her place in Mount Pleasant, she said.
As Metro goes, so goes the city, said Jeff Blackwood, 30, of Arlington.
“If they shut down, the rest of the city shuts down,” Blackwood said. And he admitted that it’s sometimes hard to know whether Metro is forced to take such a step because of the way it’s built — with so many above-ground stations and tretches of track — or because of its history of unreliability.
“I don’t see why the underground trains couldn’t have run,” said Matt Wiest, a market researcher with a private firm. “But it didn’t really impact my weekend.”
Waiting on the platform for a Green Line train to take him to work in Ballston, Wiest noted that the signboards weren’t saying how long the wait would be.
But Wiest also seemed philosophical overall about the city’s response.
“Under the circumstances, I think there’s so much snow you want to cut them a break,” Wiest said. He didn’t think it was fair to compare Washington with Boston or New York.
“We get these massive snowstorms so infrequently it would be difficult to justify the expense” to put more into snow preparedness, he said.
“It’s an easy target when they do come around every five or seven years, but the criticism of ‘Oh, how come D.C. doesn’t do better?’ We’re not a New England city. If we were dealing with this every season, I could see that argument. It really doesn’t surprise me that things sort of get shut down the way they do.”
Jean McMahon said she also couldn’t fault Metro’s decision to close. She thought people were too critical of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority for shutting Metro on Saturday and Sunday in the teeth of a major blizzard.
Metro made the decision before the first snowflakes fell, and that was a good thing, she said. Imagine how hard it would be just for Metro employees to navigate dangerous conditions during the blizzard to keep the trains running, and that would have been possible for trains only below-ground.
“I think it was smart. It’s very easy for everyone to pile on [Metro],” McMahon said. “I think they’re doing the best they can.”
McMahon, 49, who lives on Capitol Hill, said she had 15-minute waits for the Red and Green lines at Union Station and Gallery Place, but then Metro had warned people there would be delays about that long, she said.
Aniket Maitra, 25, a Johns Hopkins University student who spent some time in Chicago, said people have a valid beef with official Washington’s relative fecklessness about handling snow, especially when the entire Metro closes.
“What if I had to get myself to a doctor?” he wondered. “How would that work out?” The upside? He said maybe Washingtonians are more “self-reliant.”
Above ground, people who took to the roads said they were somewhat surprised that traffic was moving so well. In Arlington, Carolyn Steigerwald, 23, said she and her father had been able to get out Sunday in an SUV. On Monday, she and her friend Alla Fletcher, 24, of Silver Spring, said they encountered no problems on the way to pick up some supplies at the Safeway in Rosslyn.
“I think we did well, honestly” Fletcher said. “It’s pretty clear out there for the amount of snow we got and how notorious D.C. is for being unprepared for snow. I thought it was going to be way worse.”
Tyler Ruff, 26, a government consultant on software development who grew up in Columbus, Ohio and lives in Arlington, also thought the trip was relatively smooth on the way to the gym, especially on the main streets. The side roads were often still buried, he said, and he was impressed to see that in Clarendon, some residents had taken matters into their hands and started shoveling the streets themselves.
After parking his Honda Civic near a snowbank in Rosslyn, his major concern was whether he would have to feed the meters. (“All may park. All must pay.”) He figured, naw.
Several commuters said the most pleasant surprise about the storm was how many Washingtonians had cleared their sidewalks, even as many of the secondary and residential streets were still impassable for Metro buses.
“I actually think it’s a lot better than other years,” Eckart said.
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