Photo by Pianoman75.

When WMATA announced yesterday that it would close Farragut West and McPherson Square and shut down Blue and Orange line service at Metro Center over the entire Columbus Day weekend, we thought it would be messy. It’s arguably the busiest section of the system. There’s sports games, concerts, and a lot more people in town that weekend who will want to get around. Plus, there are a large number of Washingtonians who work in offices in the center of town who just don’t take Columbus Day off and would normally use Metro to get into and home from work on Monday.

Oh, right, and the World Bank’s annual meeting is also going on that weekend. Oops.

It appears that WMATA didn’t take into consideration the World Bank’s meetings in their decision to close the Farragut West station. (It certainly wasn’t in their press release announcing the closures.) We can imagine several people would probably like to use Metro to get to the annual meeting, considering that it’s but a short stroll from the site of the meetings at 1818 H Street NW. Anyone who’s lived here long enough can tell you that the annual meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are a massive deal, and draw a boatload of people to the World Bank’s headquarters — including large numbers of foreign journalists, protestors and civil society representatives who are unfamiliar with the city and might not know that our subway system will be shutting down operations for maintenance work.

The worst part? Sources tell us that the dates for the World Bank conference were announced last year. It’s mind-boggling that Metro would totally blank and close such a large, centralized portion of the city’s mass transit system during such a massive event.