"Metro Rider's Guide" in the Express is the worst map of all time

I spotted this on @imgoph's Twitter today: it's a "Metro Rider's Guide" that the Express newspaper published on Wednesday. However, it appears that whoever made the map has never ridden the Metro, and possibly never actually been to DC.

There is literally nothing correct with this map, except that they did get DC's boundary right, and they put Maryland and Virginia in the right place. Other than that, it's terrible. (Click it for a bigger version.)

For one, it puts the Georgia Ave/Petworth Metro somewhere in far western NW DC. That looks like the Palisades. The Green line does not go there. The Benning Road Metro on the Orange and Blue lines located right next to Nationals Park in SE DC. Then the Suitland Metro is located near the very southern tip of DC, when it fact it's about 6 miles to the east of there. You know, in Suitland, Maryland, rather than Washington, DC. The Silver Spring Station seems to be in northern Bethesda, meaning the Red line in the Glenmont/Silver Spring direction would take you in the same direction as the Red line to Shady Grove, while Pentagon City is not in Arlington at all, but rather sort of in the middle of Lake Barcroft. Roughly.

In short, if you use this Metro Rider's Guide, you will be completely lost. You might even end up on whatever planet whoever made this map is from.

Graffiti advertising somebody's Twitter and Instagram at the Petworth Metro

Graffiti in our area can be interesting or boring -- or, pretty funny, as this quick scrawl on an iPhone ad in the Georgia Avenue-Petworth Metro proves. Whoever it is really wanted the world to know about their tweets and Instagram pictures.

Pretty amusing that this is what people graffiti about now -- not my neighborhood is cool, or this is my gang or here's my graffiti tag name. What's next, Snapchat user name? Tinder profile?

WMATA to test SmarTrip recharging stations at 16th street bus stops

Sounds like WMATA is working to think of some ways to make the bus system more efficient -- next June they're going to start testing kiosks to load money on your SmarTrip card at some bus stops on 16th Street.

The idea is that it will make boarding quicker -- right now it takes between 5 and 30 seconds for people to reload the card while boarding the bus, and often that happens once per every 14 or even 7 riders on some routes, meaning there's a lot of delays.

As a person who has both forgotten to add money to their card and a person who's been behind somebody taking forever to add money, I think this is a great idea. Even short delays can result is longer ones -- you wait a few seconds, miss a light, more people show up, buses get clustered, and so on -- it cascades. Everything we can do to make the system quicker would help.

Now if they'd just get rid of half of the stops on 14th Street!

Image from PlanitMetro

I hate the 14th Street bus.

I consider myself a pretty easygoing guy. A fair amount of things annoy me (people live tweeting TV shows, duck face, Phillies fans) but I don't really hate that many. I hate the 14th Street bus right now.

This morning I checked Nextbus on my phone and the 14th Street buses (the 52, 53 and 54) were 4, 6 and 8 minutes away. Great. I got to the bus stop at 14th and Spring at 9:07, which still left me 3, 5 and 7 minutes (assuming time is linear, which is a longshot when using Nextbus sometimes.)

Then 13 minutes later, no buses. About 15 minutes later, a 53 shows up, which is not the best because it turns east at L Street and I work near F Street. But I was sick of waiting and angry at Nextbus and Metro for being way off on their estimates/predictions/random numbers posted to the internet so I started to get on and saw that the bus was completely packed. The driver says to the throng of people on and trying to board (who generally don't move back, but that's another annoying issue) that he can't move if he can't see, and another bus is right behind him. Another guy and I get off to wait for that next bus. One minute goes by, then 2, then 5. Still no bus.

At this point I'm tweeting up a storm to @metrobusinfo with no response. Why is Nextbus so wrong? Where is the bus? The only bus that showed up was packed, where's the next one that should have arrived 15 minutes ago? Is there only one bus that serves this entire route, so it has to make a loop? Does it actually exist? Are there buses at all? Do any of us exist? Why are we here? Is this some kind of nightmare? It was like I was in a David Lynch movie, but thankfully a bit less creepy.

Then 26 minutes after the I got to the stop, 22 minutes after the first bus should have arrived, a second (and with it, a third, naturally) bus arrives. It's not packed and I get on. It's going its usual turtle-ish rate to downtown. (According to my calculations from before, the 14th Street bus usually takes about 30 minutes to go the 2 miles to downtown. That's 4 miles per hour. That's how fast a person walks.)

But then it gets slower and slower. Traffic is backed up. People start to get off in droves. I abandon the bus at K Street, about an hour after I got on. It's just sitting there. As I walk down the street I see some of them are closed off, apparently due to the Iraqi prime minister at the Willard Hotel and the mayor at the new Marshall's at 14th and F. I have no idea why the mayor needs as much police protection as I saw at a Marshall's grand opening. Maybe he's afraid he's not going to find the belt he wants and flip out or something.

So anyway, today was a commute from hell. But even when things are going well, in a relative sense, they still suck. Traffic is bad in the mornings starting at DCUSA, sometimes backing up all the way past Spring Road. Why? I don't know. That's crazy. And the bus stops way too often, usually every block -- sometimes the stops are a few dozen feet from each other.

I know there are bigger problems in the world. But why the bus is so terrible so often boggles my mind. A decent bus system needs to be consistent to work properly and serve the people who ride. The riders need to know they can reliably get to X destination if they have Y minutes . That isn't the case with the 14th Street bus, and it is maddening to me. It's almost random whether you're going to get where you need to go when you need to be there. It drives me crazy. I hate it. Some of that randomness happens from being in a city, but I feel like there has to be something Metro and the city can do. Fewer stops. More buses. Fix the blockage at 14th and Irving. I don't know, something, anything.

I'm going to buy a bike helmet and join the growing crowd heading down the 14th Street hill. Hopefully some idiot won't walk into the bike lane while looking the wrong direction.

Has your commute been affected by the shutdown?

While the shutdown is hopefully ending soon (fingers crossed) I've noticed that it seems to have affected the traffic patterns and the commute. Today the 14th Street bus was virtually empty, though maybe that's also because of the holiday yesterday.

Assuming you are still working (sorry if you aren't! That really sucks) how was it been for you? Faster, the same, slower?

I was pretty happy I could sit anywhere on the bus and it seemed quicker too, maybe because there were fewer people waiting to be picked up. I haven't noticed an effect on Capital Bikeshare and I don't usually take the Metro in the mornings, but has anybody noticed a difference there?

(Someone else mentioned more business at coffee shops in the mornings, maybe from people wanting to get out of the house.)

New Metro logo, color scheme?

The other day I was checking out WMATA's site for some info, and noticed that things looked a little different -- in particular, they were blue.

It seems that WMATA has started to shift from a black and white color scheme for Metro to a blue and white one, with a slightly tweaked blue M logo -- namely it's blue and white rather than black and white, but the font is also a little different, a bit more bold and maybe even a different typeface -- hard to tell.

I haven't seen anything about this new logo and color scheme, but I like it. Of course, I'd prefer fewer delays and more functioning escalators.

You can see the blue scheme below:

Metro says escalators working better than ever: not sure that applies at Columbia Heights Metro

Metro's escalators have long been a scourge of our transit system: they're often broken, meaning long walks up (or down) the stairs. However, Metro is saying that lately, things have gotten much better. Metro says that 92% of escalators are working, the highest rate in 5 years.

That sounds good, but DCist reports on some other folks doing some data crunching: one Georgetown student reports that every 17 minutes, a new escalator goes out of service. Metro has 588 escalators, so while that's a lot, it's only a small percentage.

The student, who published his report on the blog Unsuck DC Metro, also argued that some outages weren't being reporter by Metro, meaning the actual rate should be lower. Metro's spokesperson refused to comment because their spokesperson because it was posted on Unsuck DC Metro -- a pretty lame and shortsighted reason.

So while 92% is a lot, I feel like the frequently broken Columbia Heights esclators aren't a shining beacon in the system -- it seems like the ones to the street level, especially on the east side, are often busted.

But then again, maybe I only notice when it's not working. What do you think?

Check out this awesome 1970s Metro promotional video

Oh man, this is great. DCist published a real gem: a 1970s promotional film for our Metro system. The video shows the brand new Red Line, which was the only line operational when the system launched, running from Farragut North to Rhode Island Avenue. This film includes Dupont Circle Station, so it must have been from around 1977, when that station opened.

There's has a lot of amusing throwbacks, but at the same time it has a lot of things we'd recognize today: namely that the cars and stations look identical. Amusingly, a lot of the people in the film look like they could be stylish folks today (or, less charitably, a DCist commenter joked "Man, the 70s sure had a lot of f**king hipsters.") That said, I could go for more afros these days.

Some of the predictions are a little out there though, like that you could travel from Shaw to Medical Center in 13 minutes or East Falls Church to Metro Center in 12. Maybe that would happen if the trains skipped every station in between and time somehow slowed down. They also talk about "no long waits, just train after train moving people" -- joke's on you, Red Line.

There's also a few other interesting historical nuggets, like the shots of big parking lots downtown. Those are mostly gone, as the last ones I can think of around New York Avenue and 5th Street have been condo-ified. There's also the Union Station-Visitors Center Station, named for the National Visitor Center, a plan to turn Union Station into a tourist hub for folks visiting our fair city and its monuments. However, it failed to attract many people and closed in 1978, so the station was renamed. Occasionally you can still see an old sign with that name on it -- mainly pylons whose updated station lists have fallen off.

But that said, I really like it, it's kind of strangely heart-warming. What do you think?

Why does no one ever move back on the bus?

Something that's been driving me bonkers lately is how people are so terrible at moving back on a crowded bus. So many times I've gotten on a 14th Street bus and there's a huge crush of people in the front but nobody in the back. 

Usually some of those folks can clearly see there are people who are trying to move back and they don't move, just staring blankly. Then somebody has to yell "can you move back please" and people look around and scoot a little. Then more people get on and the painful process repeats, with diminishing returns as people seem to get tired of being asked to move, even when there's still room.

It's not rocket science, people. If you see some space behind you, move back into it -- or if you're next to the one doofus who is blocking everyone's path, ask them politely to move back. Everyone else ahead of you will appreciate it. 

Live Metrorail data now on Google Maps: delays, track work etc.

Just got an email from Google, who announced that they have launched live Metrorail data on Google Maps, both on the website and the phone app. 

What this means is that you can use Google Maps to plan your trip, and the get live data from Metro's Control Center, so they also include current service information like unplanned delays, track work and single-tracking. 

You can also use it for planning alternate routes, although the live information is just for Metrorail, not the bus.

It sounds like a good alternative for getting around the city. Here's more on their blog about it.