Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
D.C. Police Seek Suspect in Series of Bank Robberies
Suspect in 9-Year-Old's Murder Found Dead in D.C. Jail
Photo of the Day: November 25, 2009
Ballou HS Rocks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Absolutely zero surprise here: WMATA says the Metrorail system recorded high ridership on both Saturday and Sunday. If anything, we would have thought it might have been a little higher. This weekend marked the third highest Saturday and fourth highest Sunday ridership days in the history of Metro. Riders took 713,148 trips on Saturday and 469,751 trips on Sunday, both figures that are well over 200,000 higher than the same days last year. We always enjoy WMATA's press shop's inclusion with these announcements of the events going on when previous records were set. Sunday ridership records are obvious: the highest was the weekend of President Obama's Inauguration, and second and third are both Fourth of July related. But the Saturday records are more surprising: the top spot still belongs to the 1991 Desert Storm victory rally, and the second the 1997 Promise Keepers march.
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Made the mistake of venturing on the Red line to avoid traffic. Made me long for rush hour. Nothing like waiting 8 minutes for a train and not getting on because a*@!@# tourists make like rats for the opening doors and don't let a solo parent with toddler in stroller (Volo MF!) on the train. Nearly repeated after waiting 8 minutes but ran over some toes the second time.
I mean seriously tourists -- do I visit your Cracker Barrels and Hardees and block you from stuffing your pieholes?
Trust me, you probably still saved loads of time vs sitting in traffic. It was gridlock out there..
Seriously. I-66 was messed up in both directions when me and some friends headed out to the East Falls Church area around 3:45 p.m. Eastbound was backed waaaaay up. Well past Ballston. Westbound was messed up thanks to an accident right by the Ballston exit. Fun stuff.
Yeah I made the stupid, STUPID(!!) mistake of trying to drive down past the Tidal Basin to Hains Point. So many parents were using strollers to stop traffic in order to jaywalk across the street on Independence, 15th, Constitution, everywhere. While that was obnoxious the worst part was that there were babies and children in those strollers! All you needed was one out of town driver or impatient local to make a quick move and the result would have been horrific. Didn't quite make it to Hains Point, went around the Tidal Basin but had to avoid killing so many tourists that I hit Rock Creek Pkwy and headed home.
The worst part about the traffic gridlock was that it was expected due to the great weather and of course, neither the MPD nor the Park Police were prepared. I didn't see a single MPD officer out directing traffic or actually enforcing the bus parking rules. Some intersections were total chaos with a combinations of people, cars and giant busses all trying to move at once. At one point Maine Avenue approaching the bridge was completely stopped while several tour busses stopped, in the middle of the roadway, to drop off their tourists.
In a real city (I hate to bring up New York, but they do know how to do things like this), the police would have shut down the traffic lights (which at this point were useless) and used officers to direct traffic. Its pathetic that DC has absolutley no idea how to handle large crowds of tourists.
Ah yes. The 1991 Desert Storm victory rally. After so much bloodshed, peace comes to one tiny corner of the Middle East. A peace which we still enjoy to this day, if I'm not mistaken.
The posts about problems on the Metro are getting a little played, DCist. Everyone is aware: trains get crowded, sometimes there are delays, every now and then something catches fire. WMATA has a really great thing called THEIR OWN WEBSITE which relays all this information.
Am I alone in thinking these posts are useless at best and tediously uninteresting at worst?
Did you read the post? It had nothing to do with problems on metro. I think record ridership numbers are of interest to most area residents.