Please visit us at our new location, www.bluelinedc.org
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
#15Hours
The planned blue line service cuts this summer will change the headway for Blue Line trains from 8.5 minutes to 12 minutes. That means that the average wait per trip increases by 1:45 seconds. That might not seem like much, and WMATA claims it is a mild inconvenience, but it adds up. At 2 trips per day, for a daily Blue Line rider this is an extra 15 hours per year spent waiting for trains.
When combined with the earlier Blue Line cuts, compared to 2012 Blue Line Riders will be spending 26 hours per year longer on Metro platforms than they used to.
15 hours per year is like your boss offering you an extra two vacation days. What could you do with the extra 15 hours that WMATA is taking away?
Sign the petition and ask WMATA not to further cut service on the blue line:
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Metro's new Blue Line plan among the longest wait-times nationwide
We all know that the wait times for DC blue line service is bad compared to the rest of the lines in DC and that it is getting worse. But how does it compare to that seen at other subway systems around the country?
I went through the posted schedules for 12 of the subway systems with the largest ridership in the country (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, Baltimore, San Juan, San Francisco, Atlanta, and LA, and of course Washington DC) and determined their average wait times during rush hour. For systems with staggered schedules, like the DC blue line before the additional service cuts, I counted the number of trains during rush hour to get an average across the stagerring. Recognizing that some estimating was involved, all results are averaged to the nearest half-minute.
The results are below and largely speak for themselves.
There are 72 rail lines across these 12 cities. The blue line comes in tied for 67th. Contrast that with the other DC lines which all are near the top, including the red line which is the most frequent rush hour subway train in the country.
What about those 4 lines that are worse than or tied with the blue. The LA expo line which is tied with blue. That's a new line that is easing-in to Rush Hour service. Assuming things go as planned and they have the expected demand, they may improve service to every 6 minutes, which would drop the blue line to 68th out of 72.
The only lines with worse wait times than the Blue Line are all San Francisco BART lines. Even they have an advantage over the Blue, however, since unlike on the DC Metro, BART offers their riders a fixed time schedule during rush hour. As a result, riders know when to show up at the platform so they can cut their commute times. Apparently these time-points are pretty accurate since BART was dissapointed when the on-time performance fell to 93.7%. It would be great to show up at the Metro platform and know that almost 94% of the time the train will be arriving almost right when you get there.
Washington DC has one of the best metro systems in the country, so let's not let the blue line be one of the worst. Sign the petition and ask WMATA not to further cut service on the blue line:
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
I went through the posted schedules for 12 of the subway systems with the largest ridership in the country (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, Baltimore, San Juan, San Francisco, Atlanta, and LA, and of course Washington DC) and determined their average wait times during rush hour. For systems with staggered schedules, like the DC blue line before the additional service cuts, I counted the number of trains during rush hour to get an average across the stagerring. Recognizing that some estimating was involved, all results are averaged to the nearest half-minute.
The results are below and largely speak for themselves.
There are 72 rail lines across these 12 cities. The blue line comes in tied for 67th. Contrast that with the other DC lines which all are near the top, including the red line which is the most frequent rush hour subway train in the country.
What about those 4 lines that are worse than or tied with the blue. The LA expo line which is tied with blue. That's a new line that is easing-in to Rush Hour service. Assuming things go as planned and they have the expected demand, they may improve service to every 6 minutes, which would drop the blue line to 68th out of 72.
The only lines with worse wait times than the Blue Line are all San Francisco BART lines. Even they have an advantage over the Blue, however, since unlike on the DC Metro, BART offers their riders a fixed time schedule during rush hour. As a result, riders know when to show up at the platform so they can cut their commute times. Apparently these time-points are pretty accurate since BART was dissapointed when the on-time performance fell to 93.7%. It would be great to show up at the Metro platform and know that almost 94% of the time the train will be arriving almost right when you get there.
Washington DC has one of the best metro systems in the country, so let's not let the blue line be one of the worst. Sign the petition and ask WMATA not to further cut service on the blue line:
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Sign the petition
Thousands of riders take the Blue Line to and from work every day, but Metro is cutting their service to have just one train every 12 minutes. This will cause a major inconvenience for the many people who rely on the Metro for their daily commute, while only providing minimal additional benefits to other riders in the system. After this change the Blue Line will be the only line in the DC Metro system without enhanced rush hour service. We request that Metro respect the needs of the many Blue Line riders and stop the planned service cuts.
If you disagree with the WMATA decision to dramatically reduce blue line service, sign the Change.org petition to Metro asking them to reconsider the decision. No guarantees that Metro will listen (they often don't), but at least they will know people care.
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
http://www.change.org/petitions/dc-metro-wmata-preserve-blue-line-service?utm_source=guides&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=petition_week_one
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Some simple math - trains per hour vs minutes per train
Metro is starting to seriously push the Silver Line rollout. when soon so, they like to tout the number of riders who are helped and hurt by various changes. But it is not just the number of riders on each side of the ledger that matters. What also matters is how much they are impacted. This is where the Metro system's skewed distribution of trains between Blue and Orange becomes problematic.
Under their old distribution of cars through the Rosslyn tunnel, there were 16 Orange Line trains and 10 Blue Line trains. This works out to one Blue train every 6 minutes and one Orange train every 3 minutes, 45 seconds.
Switching 3 of the Blue Line trains to Orange (so 19 Orange trains total) means that Orange trains come every 3 minutes 9 seconds. A time savings of 36 seconds for the Orange riders.
So what did the Blue Line riders give up? Since they already had less trains, the loss of three more is much more painful. The average Blue line wait increased from 6 minutes to 8 minutes, 34 seconds. So every Blue Line rider loses on average 2 minutes 34 seconds compared to the old allocation. Ouch!
But wait, it gets even worse when WMATA plans to move two more lines over to the Silver/Orange corrodor. Now, with 21 trains per hour heading towards Falls Church, the average wait for a Silver/Orange train is 2 minutes 51 seconds. A gain of a whopping 18 seconds for these riders.
Blue line riders on the other hand will now be up to a 12 minute wait. So to give riders taking the Orange Line 18 seconds, Metro is asking riders of the Blue line to give up another 3 minutes 26 seconds for each trip. This certainly doesn't sound like a good trade.
Under their old distribution of cars through the Rosslyn tunnel, there were 16 Orange Line trains and 10 Blue Line trains. This works out to one Blue train every 6 minutes and one Orange train every 3 minutes, 45 seconds.
Switching 3 of the Blue Line trains to Orange (so 19 Orange trains total) means that Orange trains come every 3 minutes 9 seconds. A time savings of 36 seconds for the Orange riders.
So what did the Blue Line riders give up? Since they already had less trains, the loss of three more is much more painful. The average Blue line wait increased from 6 minutes to 8 minutes, 34 seconds. So every Blue Line rider loses on average 2 minutes 34 seconds compared to the old allocation. Ouch!
But wait, it gets even worse when WMATA plans to move two more lines over to the Silver/Orange corrodor. Now, with 21 trains per hour heading towards Falls Church, the average wait for a Silver/Orange train is 2 minutes 51 seconds. A gain of a whopping 18 seconds for these riders.
Blue line riders on the other hand will now be up to a 12 minute wait. So to give riders taking the Orange Line 18 seconds, Metro is asking riders of the Blue line to give up another 3 minutes 26 seconds for each trip. This certainly doesn't sound like a good trade.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Why not just take the yellow line!
DC Metro's expectation in cutting Blue Line service was that many Blue Line riders would switch to the Yellow line and transfer, thus reducing the overcrowding. While it may be a questionable planning strategy to make individual's preferred path so aweful that they choose an alternate route, it is true that Blue Line riders have an alternate route into the core. In their initial planning, WMATA expected between one-fifth and one-third of Blue line riders to transfer instead of dealing with the insufferably long wait times.
Turns out, transferring is more painful than WMATA expected. Just 14% switched - hence, overcrowding on the blue line.
So why was Metro so wrong. It turns out that people really hate to transfer. Some papers looking at the psychic cost of a transfer in subway systems suggest that adding a transfer is equivalent to adding almost 10 minutes to a trip (one study I found says subway transfers have a psychic cost of 8 minutes, another says 9.5 minutes).
So when Metro is giving riders a choice between taking a Yellow/Orange transfer or waiting 10 minutes for the next Blue line train, the psychic transfer-cost alone eats away all of the time savings. When you add to that fact that taking the immediate yellow line train may not even get you there sooner, it's no surprise that Metro was off with their projections.
This also means that Metro is substantially underestimating the true costs that they are imposing on the Blue line riders by cutting Blue Line service.
Turns out, transferring is more painful than WMATA expected. Just 14% switched - hence, overcrowding on the blue line.
So why was Metro so wrong. It turns out that people really hate to transfer. Some papers looking at the psychic cost of a transfer in subway systems suggest that adding a transfer is equivalent to adding almost 10 minutes to a trip (one study I found says subway transfers have a psychic cost of 8 minutes, another says 9.5 minutes).
So when Metro is giving riders a choice between taking a Yellow/Orange transfer or waiting 10 minutes for the next Blue line train, the psychic transfer-cost alone eats away all of the time savings. When you add to that fact that taking the immediate yellow line train may not even get you there sooner, it's no surprise that Metro was off with their projections.
This also means that Metro is substantially underestimating the true costs that they are imposing on the Blue line riders by cutting Blue Line service.
Introduction
As many Metro riders in Northern Virginia are already aware, in the summer of 2012 the governing organization of the DC Metro system, WMATA, "enhanced" Metro service with their new Rush+ system. In the process, they cut service for Blue Line riders by 30% from 10 trains per hour to 7 during Rush Hour. As a result of the change, Blue Line riders have longer waits and overcrowded cars during peak hours.
WMATA (rightfully) note that the Rosslyn tunnel is a major choke-point in the system. However, they dramatically misrepresent to the public the impact of the service cuts to the Metro riders who live along the Blue-line corredor in Arlington and Alexandria.
When the Metro System finally gets the silver line operational, WMATA plans to cut Blue Line service further from 7 trains per hour to 5 per hour, so all Blue Line trains will be 12 minutes apart. As a result, the Blue Line will be the only line in the core of the metro system that does not have enhanced rush hour service.
This site is one blue line rider's attempt to spread the facts about the problems that Metro is creating on the blue line, in the hopes that they decide against imposing their planned service cuts.
WMATA (rightfully) note that the Rosslyn tunnel is a major choke-point in the system. However, they dramatically misrepresent to the public the impact of the service cuts to the Metro riders who live along the Blue-line corredor in Arlington and Alexandria.
When the Metro System finally gets the silver line operational, WMATA plans to cut Blue Line service further from 7 trains per hour to 5 per hour, so all Blue Line trains will be 12 minutes apart. As a result, the Blue Line will be the only line in the core of the metro system that does not have enhanced rush hour service.
This site is one blue line rider's attempt to spread the facts about the problems that Metro is creating on the blue line, in the hopes that they decide against imposing their planned service cuts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)