Metro Nightmare
With the protest ebbing, and rush hour flowing, you can imagine what sort of nightmare Metro was tonight. I arrived at Metro Center along with a throng of post-protest travelers, as well as post-work-day commuters. Metro Center was a complete charlie foxtrot. There was no room for exiting commuters to get through the crowd, and half the faregates for the ingress stopped working due to “system overload” according to the Metro official that was giving directions. Either way, it took nearly 30 minutes to get from the top of the escalators at 12th and F to the Metro platform itself.
The trains were yet another matter, as they’d fill instantly at Metro Center and be unable to pick up commuters at Farragut West or Foggy Bottom or McPherson Square. Worse still, changing trains at Rosslyn was a near impossibility for those who tried to do so. I finally escaped the incredibly crowded metro car at Courthouse, and I was thankful as the commuters were none too pleased with the matter.
Say, whose bright idea was it to end the protest in the middle of Rush Hour?
I left my office at 12 & I NW shortly after 6. I usually take the bus but was heading over to Brookland to meet a friend. When I headed toward Metro Center, it looked like there were just throngs of people on 12th outside of it. I walked to Gallery Place instead and found metro employees on the platforms assisting with the flow of people in and out of trains. The platform did not seem that crowded however. The trains coming from Metro Center were though. I managed to barely get into one car. At Judiciary Square, I was given an unwelcome lesson in how my required personal space differs from others as a family of 3 squeezed in to the space I did not think existed and made me very uncomfortable with body parts touching. The car I was on, luckily, had a fair number of people empty out at Union Station so I was able to continue to Brookland without the body parts of strangers bumping into mine.