Metro General Manager John Catoe is considering replacing late night weekend trains with buses — both as a way to save money and to create more time to complete track and station maintenance tasks. This is very bad news.

No one could argue that Metro needs to rethink how it accomplishes maintenance tasks — the number of weekend track work delays, regular elevator and escalator outages, and out of service trains that need repairs has been out of hand for some time. Neither could anyone argue that Catoe isn’t doing exactly what he was hired to do, which is figure out how to make Metro financially solvent. But late night Metro service, which runs from midnight to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights and has been around for less than a decade, is not a feature of Metro that should be considered when trying to find solutions to either of those problems.

Late night metro service on the weekends reduces the amount of drunk drivers on the road. Getting rid of after midnight service isn’t going to stop many people from going out to bars on the weekends — it’s only going to change how they get home. Responsible people will turn to cabs, but countless others will try to drive home even though they’ve had one too many. Alternative bus options don’t seem likely to change this outcome significantly. For better or for worse, late night buses have a stigma of being less safe attached to them, especially among people who come into the city to drink from Virginia and Maryland and are less familiar with bus schedules and routes. It would take a serious marketing campaign to convince weekend party kids to start busing home, and even then, we’d have our doubts that it would work.

Photo by carolyn k.