The MT Position

By John Catoe

On January 18th, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) moved 616,324 people on Metrorail, setting a new Sunday rail ridership record by 75,000. On January 19th, we set a new weekday Metrorail record with 866,681 people. And we broke that record on January 20th, carrying close to 1.1 million people. On Inauguration Day, our combined rail and bus totals broke 1.5 million trips. In short, we provided excellent service, and the months and months of planning paid off. Just as important as that planning, though, was our flexibility.

In the military, they say that no battle plan survives the first engagement with the enemy, and that’s true for anything. No matter how well you plan, there are things you can control and there are those you can’t. For those things you can’t control you need the flexibility to react, a flexibility that comes from having knowledgeable and well-trained employees and volunteers. We were able to react quickly to a constantly changing situation and put the right resources in the right places throughout that weekend.

Let me give you a dramatic example. On Inauguration Day, one of our riders, a 68-year-old woman, fell onto the tracks and survived what could have been a life threatening situation, with only minor injuries.

She survived because a volunteer transit police officer from the Houston Metro transit authority was on the scene and able to get the woman to safety by directing her to crawl under the platform’s overhang where there is about two feet of clearance. This was all done with only seconds to spare as the train pulled into the station.

The woman was lucky. She was lucky that the officer was there, and lucky that he knew what to do because he’d been trained by Metro Transit Police officers the day before. Planning, training and flexibility; those things contributed to saving a woman’s life, and they contributed to our successful service during the inauguration.

Having successfully supported the inauguration, I think it is very important for us to realize that in the next 20 years, Metro will be expected to carry close to this many people every single weekday. We’ll need the resources to do that. We’ll need to fully leverage our bus service with rapid and express routes as we did then. Our special corridor service carried more than 200,000 people that day, which helped take pressure off of the rail system.

We now have a concrete idea of what it’s like to carry more than one million people in a day on Metrorail. It isn’t just an abstract number anymore, and it highlights the importance of funding for transit, in Washington, D.C., and across the nation.

John Catoe is the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s general manager.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 7:13 am and is filed under Transit Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.