Elephant In Exile

Nothing Works...

Late last week I had to run around town filing some papers at the court house, and stopping off at various offices. They were all close to metro and it wasn't too hot out, so I figured...what the heck, I'll take the subway rather than a cab. Big mistake.

My journey took me to four metro stations. McPherson Sq., Metro Center, Judiciary Sq. and Faragut North. In each instance, the escalators between the platforms and the mezzanine weren't working, and in the deeper stations the escalators to the surface weren't' working. (I'm not being a wuss, in some cases we're talking 200 to 500 steps to the surface). This is on top of a five year program to spend $100 million plus to upgrade the escalators, and they still don't work. Perhaps they've outsourced the escalator work to NASA or something.

It's great to have a decent (Metro gets a C+ in my book) mass transit system as an option to get around, but it is not the be all end all that the enviro folks would like it to be. But with funding issues and station maintenance being deferred, it looks like metro will get much worse before it gets any better.

Blogger "Oh Metro!" has the goods...
http://ohmetro.blogspot.com/

WMATA rebuilds make some escalators worse
http://thirdrail.smorgasblog.com/archives/001696.html