Photo by racoon81d

Metro General Manager will present the 2014 budget to the system’s Board of Directors today, and while it contains no fare hikes, it also doesn’t foresee the addition of more eight-car trains during rush hour, reports WAMU:

Sarles’ $2.5 billion budget proposal contains about $900 million to continue Metro’s system-wide rehabilitation: fixing escalators, repairing tracks and signals and more.

Metro has ordered 430 new train cars for the coming year, but they will replace the old 1000 series on existing lines and be used to carry passengers on the Silver Line when it opens at the end of the year. None will be used to create more eight-car trains for use during rush hour. That’s a process that will take time, according to Metro general manager Richard Sarles.

“It takes improving the traction power capacity. It means buying more cars. It means providing more yard space to store the cars and to maintain the cars,” he says. “It’s something that is going to take several years to get to. We probably couldn’t get there till the end of this decade, but it means starting an investment now.”

Making Metro exclusively run eight-car trains won’t be cheap: $1.4 billion in capital funding. Metro officials have said that they need increased funding from D.C., Virginia and Maryland to make that a reality.

According to Metro, switching over to eight-car trains on all lines would increase capacity on all lines—from 14,000-17,000 riders an hour to upwards of 20,000 an hour. On the other hand, if the current mix of six- and eight-car trains is kept through 2040, just about every line will be considered overcrowded.

At this morning’s presentation, Sarles said that more eight-car trains could be added in five or six years, when Metro exercises options to buy new railcars.