The removal of the wreath at Union Station is the official sign of the holiday season being behind us. I took this pic this morning. I was lucky enought to get dropped off at there, opposed to metro'ing from Largo.
Last night I decided to give the Trip Planner a pop quiz. Those of you following me on twitter already know that it failed miserably. I expected this result, but I just wanted to verify first-hand that things were still consistent...consistently bad. The commute started on-schedule. As the red line train made its journey, things went sour after a while. There were multiple random stops due to a train directly ahead of us...leading to the phrase "moving momentarily" being permanently ingraind in my head yesterday. According to the trip planner, I was to arrive at Metro Center at 5:25. We arrived four minutes later than that. In reality, this isn't bad at all in my opinion; my connecting train (Blue line) wasn't scheduled to arrive until 5:32, so I had some leeway for my transfer.
The transfer got a little interesting yesterday. There was a guy standing on the left side of the escalator, a commuter sin. I thought to myself "oh great...thanks a lot asshole!" But then I looked ahead to see it was a big guy with a cane, so even if he were to stand on the right side of the escalator, we were still screwed. He was handicapped, so I guess he gets a pass. When it came time to exit the moving staircase, this guy was SOOOO freakin slow. Slow to the point where he prevented people from exiting the escalator!! A human pile-up quickly began to form. It almost got really dangerous, as nobody had anywhere to go.
A few minutes after 5:32pm, my train arrived. It was packed to the gills as expected. Usually the front of the train is less crowded, but I NEEDED to be toward the rear to save time in effort to catch my bus at Largo. Much to my surprise, the operator held the doors open substantially longer than normal. This was the gift and the curse. The "doors closing" chime didn't cause the frantic crush to board the train, but this extra time caused the train to be more and more late by each station. Estimated time of arrival at Largo was 6:01pm as per trip planner. Well, we got there at 6:09pm, just in time for me to see the C22 departing from the rails above. The bus is always on time when I'm running late.
But oh well, I'm not the only one experiencing these types of commutes...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/getthere/2010/01/orange_line_delays_leave_platf.html
While you're at it, check out a synopsis of some of the service cuts:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/getthere/2010/01/metro_considering_budget-balan.html
0 comments:
Post a Comment