Metro Deception

Metro never really bothered me when I first moved to Washington, D.C. from rural Michigan.  I have always lived within a five-minute walk of a station.  I lived in Alexandria near the Braddock Road station when I first moved to the area, which meant getting on the Yellow Line and transferring to the Blue or Orange to get to Capitol Hill.  It took anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes to get to the work in the morning, but I could always count on it.

After a year, I moved to Capitol Hill near the Eastern Market station and later the Potomac Avenue station.  I normally walked to the Rayburn House Office Building if the weather was anywhere near decent.  When I did hop on the Metro it only took five to seven minutes door-to-door to get to my office.  I ditched my Toyota Camry because I never drove it anymore.

I suppose the convenience tricked me into thinking that I could get away with moving to the Virginia suburbs within walking distance of the Vienna Station.

I was wrong.

To be fair, on a normal day I give myself an hour to get downtown during weekdays if I’m not in a hurry, and I can count on it one out of every four rides.  However, that 25 percent of the time that it doesn’t run on time completely ruins its convenience.  I have to give myself 90 minutes to get to any given appointment, meaning the best case scenario is that I arrive on time and hang out at the nearest Cosi or Starbucks.  Then when it’s running extremely late or spending 10 minutes at each stop, I need to jump off at some point and pay for a cab to get me where I need to be.  That quickly adds up beyond the $12 I pay for fare to get downtown and back.

I’ve long given up on using it on weekends, even if it is only three or four stops to get groceries or see a movie in Ballston or Courthouse.  Those rides have taken 30 minutes to an hour, and that’s if the tracks aren’t completely shut down and shuttle buses are needed to transport passengers.  Forget about transferring to the Red Line.

Unsuck DC Metro does the best job of chronicling the absolute horrors of stranded trains, overcrowded platforms, broken escalators, inept station managers and hungry passengers so I don’t need to get into that here.

 

So I suppose one of the unexpected joys of being unemployed means that I no longer need to deal with it on a daily basis, often just once or twice a week.

But even that’s annoying.