A recent visitor to this website asked this question on a previous post: hello, i am a New Yorker who relocated moved to DC last year. in my decades of riding the NYC subway, at $70/month unlimited rides, I have probably experienced a handful of delays and/or major issues with the tracks. in my one […]
Accomodating Ridership Growth at Metro Stations
Metrorail’s relatively new Station Access & Capacity Study provided us the raw data to evaluate how well the Washington region jurisdictions were doing cultivating transit oriented development, but now that summer is here I had more time to go back and investigate it in more detail. The study sought to predict ridership growth and station […]
Measuring Regional Transit Oriented Development
WMATA recently released the 2008 Metrorail Station Access & Capacity Study (PDF) which analyzes how the system can accommodate future growth in detail. David has a good summary of the report’s major recommendations for improvement and expansion. A table in the report caught my eye that showed the estimated number of jobs and households around […]
Metro’s Underperforming Stations
The Washington, D.C. Metrorail system is a massive investment in regional infrastructure. It’s construction and maintenance requires billions dollars of tax money, but few would question it’s importance to the region. It has shaped growth and kept hundreds of thousands of cars off the road daily, improving the quality of our air and city. Although […]
D.C.’s Metrorail Fares in Context
After completing my recent analysis of WMATA’s Metrorail fare increase, I decided to do some more research to better put the fares in a national context, finding D.C. Metro riders pay some of the highest subway fares in the nation. I then did a side-by-side comparison with San Francisco’s BART, considered a sister system to the D.C. Metro. The analysis of BART fares from a downtown San Francisco station shows that Bay-area suburban commuters enjoy even cheaper per-mile fares than their D.C. counterparts.
Metro’s Fares Analyzed
With the D.C. Metrorail’s fares set to increase on Sunday, it piqued my interest in precisely how the system determines charges and the nature of the changes. I decided to take a look at exactly what pattern the famously unpredictable fares took. While most news reports have reported suburban riders would experience the largest absolute increases, my analysis shows they continue to enjoying the lowest cost per mile of all riders, well below the cost of automobile use.
Counting Metro’s Riders
