WMATA’s PR Brilliance
Last week, WMATA announced that they would preview the new 6000 series railcars at National Airport today form 9:30am to 12:30pm. Being a closet transit foamer, I put it on my lunch hour to-do list.
Arriving at 12:04pm sharp, I expected an interesting walk-thru of the new and shiny railcars. Silly me!
The train conductor would not let me on, even with 5 minutes of cajoling, and I had to placate my enthusiasm for the new cars with photographs through the glass.
Thanks for the great PR opportunity WMATA! Nutting like passing by your riders to garner love with your fans.
If you’re interested, I made a Flickr set of my railcar preiview photos.
Is that a surveillance camera?
Sure looks like it, Don. BART in SF has cameras in most of their cars now, I figured we were due.
Yes, Don, that’s a ceiling-mounted video camea. I went into detail about it and other modification on live from the third rail
Did Metro say whether the cameras are permanent, or just being used to study traffic flow, as they did with some of the current cars, for a before/after comparison?
No clue, Mike B, no one was there to even let me on the train, much less answer questions.
Mike: Here’s WMATA’s comment on the cameras:
Cameras installed on the railcars will record passenger flow for six weeks. The recordings will be compared to the previous information gathered.
“After that point they will be purely for garden-variety peeping.”
Don – it’s to get terrorists and save the children. Don’t you know that by now??
Found in today’s Express — picture of the new metro railcars, girl …. and girl “in the” train. Wayan, with all your charm and wit, how did you not make it to the inside. How does that happen ?