Why doesn’t anyone ever smile on the metro? Take an informal survey. People NEVER smile, unless they’re talking to friends. It’s so morose.

DCist started a long, inquiry and observation based response to this query, spending a week observing our fellow metro riders at various points in time (except the one night when we were way too sloshed on mulled wine to even notice if there were actually other people on the train with us.) We actually dragged our nose out of our book and took the headphones out of our iPoded ears to improve our observation powers. But we kept coming back to two important questions, a few points that need to be addressed, and one general conclusion. All of this added up to a long and thoughtfully snarky answer to this question.