Photo by the horrible symbolism.

Are you tired of having to battle the crowds at Metro Center in order to transfer between the Red, Orange and Blue Lines? Soon enough, you’ll be able to hoof it, if you so choose: according to Kytja Weir, Metro is planning on installing a “virtual” pedestrian tunnel between Farraguts North and West this fall.

Now, when Metro says virtual, they mean it: there won’t be any digging or construction to build an actual tunnel between the two stations. Instead, customers won’t be charged an additional fee to leave one Farragut station and reenter at the other. The transit agency will be testing the effectiveness of the virtual tunnel to determine whether it would also work between Metro Center and Gallery Place-Chinatown, where customers have been asking for a pedestrian bridge for, well, as long as we can remember. Metro has studied installing an actual tunnel between the two Farraguts in the past, but with money tight and Metro subsidies in question, it just isn’t a financially feasible idea at the moment.

Of course, the idea brings up questions. Is having to exit a train at one station, leave, then walk a block, re-enter the station, and board another train really that much more efficient than riding into Metro Center and transferring? What happens if the faregates at one station break, leaving people in SmarTrip limbo? How much time would riders have to make the transfer? (WMATA told Weir that such details had not yet been worked out.) Then again, it’s nice to see that Metro is at least willing to try giving its stressed-out riders some flexibility to move between stations inside the downtown core.