The Monstrosity of Metro

If this had been last night I would be saying that Metro is a God Damn, Mother F%#@ing, Piece of Sh#!

But I've calmed down since then and put in punctuation marks to somewhat mask the swear words.

Here's my tale with Metro. I went to the Nationals' game last night. They unfortunately lost the game. A game I think they should have won. And where a couple of strange things happened but I'll discuss that in the post on the game.

The game ends. I head out to Metro to go home. I get to the Navy Yard stop, which is on the Green Line,  in fairly good time. As I get to the platform, a train is just pulling out of the station. In a couple of minutes another train comes into the station. In fact this train is eight cars and completely empty. The train waits for a few minutes to fill up and off we go.

So far so good I'd say. Well that's when things start to go down hill in a big way.

I arrive at Gallery Place. I go up to the platform where I catch the Red Line train. My wait starts. A train pulls into the station going in the opposite direction. I figure one should be coming in my direction toward Glenmont soon. I look up at the electronic sign showing when trains are arriving. There isn't a train listed on it at all. The sign is blank. It then scrolls through all of the delays that are going on at the current time. The Red Line is on that list in fact all of the lines are on that list. So I figure I'm in for a little bit of a wait.

I look at my watch. It is now 10:41 pm. A train does not arrive until 11:08 pm. So essentially I had to wait 30 minutes. That is to say by the time I got off the Green Line train coming from the game it was 30 minutes before I could get on a Red Line train going to Glenmont. 30 minutes. Half an hour. 30 freaking minutes. I wouldn't have been as upset except for the fact that there were not one, not two, but three trains going in the other direction.

WHAT GIVES! Notice I didn't add a swear word to that phrase but I think you can add the appropriate one.

This is how a major metropolitan mass transit system is supposed to operate. Yes, they did announce there was track work going on at the time. But to have to wait 30 minutes for a train is nuts!

This is ridiculous.

Oh yes and when the train finally did arrive it was full of people. Full of people like it was rush hour. And to top it off the car I got on the air conditioning wasn't working. Thankfully I only had to go a few stops.

I have some advice for Metro. Time to admit you are not a first rate transportation system. Time to start cutting your losses. It seems to me after 10 pm just close the damn thing. It's not like the subway is in any way shape or form reliable after that hour.

As for weekend service well that's a complete joke now. Every weekend most if not all the lines are being worked on sometimes in more than one place. Metro says to add up to 20 minutes to your ride. More like 30 minutes to an hour or more especially if you have to transfer lines. To add insult to injury, every three to four weekends stations are closed for the entire weekend. This type of weekend "service" is scheduled to last for years to come.

Why not just close at 10 pm on Friday and open up again at 5 am Monday. Would it be massively inconvenient to people? Sure it would. But no more  then having to rely on a completely unreliable systems. At least people would not have to guess when they might get somewhere as they do now.

And the kick in the pants is come July 1 we get to pay even more for this horribly, crappy, lousy excuse of a transportation system.