Yellow Line to Expand
Hurrah! I can barely contain my excitement! The Yellow Line will be expanded to Fort Totten in a trial program starting in January!
For me this means no more getting off at Mount Vernon (which can be a bit sketch at night) and waiting forever for a Green Line train on trips home to U Street from NATIONAL (sorry Jeff, couldn’t resist) or Pentagon City.
Fantastic! I only wish I didn’t have to wait til next year for it to start…
Two glaring problems with that article:
1: “The 18-month pilot program would begin in January and would affect service on the two lines during weekday off-peak hours and on weekends.” -so during the weekdays, during rush we still have to transfer, eh? Um, kinda thanks, I think.
2: “Contractors are responsible for maintaining 287 escalators, with Metro personnel responsible for the remainder. But in four years, Metro intends to phase out the contractors and rely solely on in-house personnel for escalator and elevator maintenance, though a 2002 task force convened by Metro found that private contractors were doing a better job of keeping the equipment running.” -Metro’s problem in a nutshell.
I’m with Wayan on this: I definitely hope that make it a permenent thing, but man…if Metro would either stop relying on contractors (or at least crappy ones) to do some of their service critical work, I think we wouldn’t have anything to complain about. :(
Between these contractors and the MetroAccess contractors, it makes me wonder what kind of contract review process they’ve got down there…
Phoenix, you have that backwards – the escalator contractors are better than the Metro employees in fixing escalators, but Metro is phasing the contractors out anyway.
I’m sure the only reason that contractors are doing better than Metro employees is the same reason for all of other Metro’s problems – Metro management. If Metro would get their house in order and crack the whip they could get some decent work out of their employees.