Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I take my kid on the Metro regularly and have not had this experience.

+1. I've been riding for 20 years (and with kids for 10) and have never had this experience. Sure, an oddball weirdo once in a while, but that's few and far between. Metro is usually perfectly safe.

+2 I ride all the time and with my special needs child (he loves riding!). I have never seen anyone and we've been on all the different lines.

Anonymous wrote:I have been riding metro daily for almost 30 years and I feel safe. A few times a year I change cars do to someone who is high or drunk etc..but that is about it. The new fare gates may help keep kids from just jumping in to just fool around which might make further improvements.

Kids ride free, although many of their parents use their student cards, from the light colors that flash. Still see loads of kids jumping new gates or sliding through. I avoid the system right after school lets out, same as always.

I recently saw a person smoking crack on the red line, not the station, heading toward Shady Grove, had gotten on at Farragut North. I changed cars and reported it to WMATA police via text. Was glad kids were not with me.

I think it can be hit or miss. The WMATA police basically driving around the Beltway worked when the system was far more orderly. The comments making it sound as safe as it was 10 years ago are not always true, unfortunately. Sometimes formerly tranquil bus lines like the L2 have gotten a bit sketchy too.

In general feel safe much of the time on the system, but, not always. There do seem to be more flashers/masturbators, I know one guy has been arrested multiple times at Van Ness per MPD.

OP, you have teeny kids yes? That is probably affecting your lens more than anything.

I have been riding metro daily for almost 30 years and I feel safe. A few times a year I change cars do to someone who is high or drunk etc..but that is about it. The new fare gates may help keep kids from just jumping in to just fool around which might make further improvements.

I've lived in Silver Spring and Bethesda, and have never had problems using the Red line to take my babies, kids and now teens to DC.

I grew up in a capital city in Europe, OP. Much of the DC metro is safe and clean.

I've never ridden the silver line, but usually feel very safe with my kids on the metro.
We had one time when there were some people who started screaming at each other, and we got off at the next stop and hopped into a different car. But that's the only time I've even been a bit worried.

The Metro went really downhill during and after COVID. I say that as a daily Metro commuter, pre and post COVID. It goes in line with the general observation that people seemed to have forgotten how to act in public during COVID and that rule enforcement was lax on the metro when ridership dropped. There is a lot more issues with homeless soliciting on the metro, teens fighting or assaulting people, and general uncleanliness (openly smoking on the metro and, in one foul case, a homeless man defecating all over his seat and the floor around him that spread.) I never experienced this in the 15 years pre-COVID, and all of this in the last 3 years.

With that being said, while it's gotten worse, it's the minority of the time I spend on the metro and these are issues that you see in most other major public transit systems. I do feel safe taking my kid on the train, and we use it regularly. She'll need to learn to navigate the system if she's growing up here.

I take my kids on the metro all the time, never felt unsafe. The only thing on your list (assuming the people "on something" were not aggressive or anything) that would bother me was the screaming. I'd just move to another car.

Just statistically: Your kids are DRAMATICALLY safer on the metro than in a car. It's not even close. It's absurd to drive instead for "safety."

Anonymous wrote:We went to the zoo last weekend and took the metro in. Admittedly, I haven't been on the metro in the past 5 years (before I had kids). I was shocked at how many people on the metro seem like they are half out of their minds. Screaming to themselves, smelling like feces, clearly on something, etc. I felt so uncomfortable having my kids near them and I regretted not just buying a zoo parking pass.

Maybe the metro has always been like this, but I never noticed before I had kids. Do you guys skip the metro if you have young kids?

That's how suburbanites see urban centers because they aren't used to that environment. Its very much a country mouse visiting his big city cousin.

Anonymous wrote:We went to the zoo last weekend and took the metro in. Admittedly, I haven't been on the metro in the past 5 years (before I had kids). I was shocked at how many people on the metro seem like they are half out of their minds. Screaming to themselves, smelling like feces, clearly on something, etc. I felt so uncomfortable having my kids near them and I regretted not just buying a zoo parking pass.

Maybe the metro has always been like this, but I never noticed before I had kids. Do you guys skip the metro if you have young kids?

Yes, you should. You don't need to shield them from the world, you need to teach them to handle the world, good, bad and ugly.

That being said, metro is mostly safe and its better for kids to learn to navigate big cities with parents instead of doing it with their high-school or college freshmen friends.

We're in DC and often take the bus to school, and metro on weekends. We see far more people like you describe on the street walking to the metro, than on the metro itself. That's part of city living I guess. We did avoid certain nearby metro stops when there was a spate of violent crime at them, but that's been resolved.

I take my kids (1 and 3) on the metro frequently as we don’t have a car. Buses too. We also went to the zoo last weekend. While we definitely see odd people sometimes most people are normal and a lot are very nice (giving up seats for the kids, making faces at them, etc). Even the people who seem like they’re not really in the same world as everyone else (because of drugs or mental illness or whatever) are usually only making trouble for themselves.

I could see 8 am on Sunday morning being kind of weird. Or at least, the out of their mind people not being greatly outnumbered by commuters and tourists as it usually is. I’d give it another try at a more “regular” time if you can. I think we’ve all had bad public transit experiences but overall I don’t think metro is even close to the level of weird (at best)/unsafe (at worst) of the NYC subway system.

Sorry, is this a real question? Yes, we take our kids on the metro all the time and someone of us actually commute by metro with our kids! My teen takes metro to school on his own.