Reply to The Pandemic Hit Cities Hard And Then There's Washington, DC

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm more concerned about Metro. Will they ever get back to full ridership? They already had budget shortfalls before the pandemic.[/quote]
It's a vicious cycle for Metro. Reduced ridership during covid led to reductions in service, which led to reduced ridership. I'm not sure how Metro breaks the cycle.

I used to take a bus to work from my home in NWDC. I tried that again when we started going back into the office part-time, and found that bus lines had been cut, and service on the remaining ones was unreliable. So, I went and bought a car so I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle anymore, and Metro has lost another rider for life. [/quote]

It's simple. Low demand. Massive supply. Buses run at 5% capacity. Trains at 10%. They need to downsize capacity. Is the silver line even needed right now? Why not delay the opening? And they need to build a more flexible system that isn't so tied to capital expenditures that consume 50% of their budget.

VRE is running trains with average utilization of only a couple people. This is nuts. Federal backfill money that fills 90% revenue gaps won't last forever. At some point you need to size the system to reality.

https://www.vre.org/service/rider/train-utilization-trends/[/quote]
What's incredible to me are the vast numbers of people egging this wasteful spending on. They are actively reducing rush hour service which is their largest generator of fare recovery to run more empty trains when no one wants or needs them. Commuters, who they desperately need back and particularly paying for parking, are being discouraged from returning due to the poor service all so its more convenient for some underemployed and self-proclaimed urbanist-transit bro in Silver Spring to meet a Tinder date in Petworth for an afternoon coffee who can then make either a virtue signaling post online about his journey or hopefully not a harried reprimand to WMATA about "safety" because other people on the train are not profusely thanking him for taking transit.

They need to provide service in response to demand and bank those Federal dollars for when the money runs out in two years, because they were losing huge sums at 4x the ridership even before the pandemic. Reading this article indicates that WMATA does at least have a clue at the crisis they are facing, but for some reason they don't seem to see any urgency to address it. I can only assume based on the quotes that they are just thinking the Federal government will bail them out with Federal workers returning to the office and probably also expecting another bailout in two years time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2021/09/25/metro-pandemic-federal-worker-commuters/[/quote]

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