How D.C.’s Metro Is Planning its Comeback
On Saturday, as massive crowds of protesters gathered in the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C.’s Metro system carried nearly 70,000 passengers — its highest one-day ridership total in the past three months. It’s a sign that the nation’s second-largest transit system is coming back to life. But that figure was still just a fraction of an average Saturday in February 2020, before coronavirus arrived.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) operates 91 rail stations covering 117 miles of track and more than 10,000 bus stops. On a normal pre-pandemic weekday, the system carries about a million people. But as in so many other cities, Covid-19 triggered a dramatic collapse in ridership and service — by the last week of March, rail ridership was down 92%, and bus passenger numbers fell 75%. Nationwide, stay-at-home orders forced public transit systems in many cities to reduce service levels while gutting their budgets. And the road back will be a long one: WMATA general manager Paul Wiedefeld says he does not expect full service to return until spring 2021.
The agency plans to cautiously bring back rail and bus service in phases, but Wiedefeld remains bullish on transit’s future — and in the future of urban areas served by public transportation. (Metro’s fortunes had been on the upswing before the pandemic arrived: Weekday rail ridership was up 9% over the previous year.) He is now co-chairing a national task force formed by the American Public Transportation Association that will offer U.S. transit systems recommendations on how to safely recover from the pandemic. Bloomberg Radio’s Martin Di Caro talked to Wiedefeld about where D.C.’s transit comeback goes from here.
Why do you expect it will take a full year to return to full service at WMATA?
First and foremost, I think it is important to understand that over 100 of our employees have come down positive with Covid. Our first priority is to protect our employees. In terms of rail ridership, we are down almost 95% from last year. In the first quarter of last year, we were at 75 million passengers. In this quarter, we are estimating 9 million. That gives you a sense of the scale of what we are dealing with.
What does the shape of D.C.’s transit recovery look like over the next few months?
We have a three-stage plan. We are in the stabilization phase, which we see running through summer until schools come back. Then we enter into what we call managed reentry, when we will almost double our rail service and bring back all the original bus lines that we have shut down. The reality is the public — our customers —will drive when we come back. We obviously have to do everything we can to have the capacity to support them, but at the end of the day, it will be personal decisions that people make to use the system.
How will you balance protecting your workforce and providing enough service for the people who most rely on public transit? Is it a matter of keeping service levels just ahead of demand as you ramp up?
It is doing exactly that. But I think all of us have the same priority, which is to protect our employees. The system doesn’t work without employees. That is our mission. That is our job. We will provide the service when it is safe to do it.
You’re co-chairing APTA’s task force on resurrecting transit service. What are you hearing from other transit officials across the country? Are there places you are looking at as models around the globe?
We are looking at everything from cleaning standards to communication plans to different policies and protocols. We are due by the end of the summer to have that report done, but we will be setting up a portal that provides information so [transit systems] can start immediately looking into alternatives they may want to try.
I think when we look around the globe we have to think about how those concepts would work in our society. Something that is done in China may be different than what we can do in Washington, D.C., for instance. Or in Moscow — I have been looking at a number of things in Moscow, like how the [Moscow Metro] is metering passengers.
Are you concerned it could be years before some people feel comfortable on a crowded train or bus?
People live in urban areas because they want to be around people, for a lot of reasons — the social interaction, the amenities that an urban environment provides. Transit is part of that. I don’t see any of that changing. If you look back through history as a nation and from a global perspective, there are a lot of things that we go through, but at the end of the day we as a society have chosen to do this. We [public transit] will be part of that in the future.
American cities have a rare opportunity now to reimagine their street grids with so few cars on the road. What will be transit’s role in urban areas during the recovery?
One of the things [WMATA] has been looking at with our local communities is providing exclusive bus lanes, which allows us to move buses quicker. If you can turn those buses around much quicker, you can keep social distancing [for passengers] in place. There is an opportunity now because of the traffic reductions. Is there an opportunity to replace that [with bus lanes] rather than fill it back up with traffic?
It’s common to hear people say the pandemic is the death knell for movie theaters or gyms. Is the pandemic the death knell for public transit?
By no means. I was the head of BWI [Baltimore-Washington International Airport] after 9/11, and if you go back to those headlines we were talking about the same things, like aviation would take decades to come back. Within a year we were building a 26-gate expansion of the terminal building for Southwest Airlines.
The reality is things will change. Public transit is critical to major urban environments. I am certain it will come back, and it will probably come back stronger because there are opportunities for us to learn and things we can do better. When that occurs is obviously anyone’s prediction but I have total confidence it will come back.