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.

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.

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.