Photo by Amber Wilkie

The weather cooperated. There wasn’t another Purple Tunnel of Doom. Kelly Clarkson kinda nailed it. Vice President Joe Biden proved that he’s a parade sort of guy. There were enough porta-potties to avert a gotta-go crisis.

All told, yesterday’s inaugural festivities went pretty well. The crowds were larger than expected—roughly one million people showed up yesterday, up from the 700,000 that organizers had originally said would. But as with any event of its magnitude, there were things that went wrong. Some were preventable, others less so.

Metro started the morning well, with reports of half-empty trains smoothly getting people down to the National Mall without incident. But as soon as the swearing-in ceremony was done, Metro was swamped with people, trains were delayed and stations were closed. At one point, every line in the system was suffering some type of mishap. Metro recovered quickly enough, but yesterday’s performance will only serve to convince existing skeptics that the system is unreliable and unable to handle mass events. (Metro carried 719,000 riders yesterday, down from over a million in 2009.) Metro officials have defended themselves, saying that the committee that organized the festivities mistakenly directed people to the Federal Center SW station, which isn’t able to handle that number of riders at once.

As for ticketing, that people didn’t get stuck in a tunnel all day is certainly a step forward, but there were complaints about access for Orange ticket-holders. According to one DCist tipster, confused directions allowed late-comers to snag better viewing positions than the people who showed up early; we even heard a few complaints that frustrated ticket-holders jumped barriers to get a better spot.

During the inauguration itself, pity the folks that were standing by the Washington Monument, where audio on some of the Jumbotrons went in and out during the most important part of the day—President Obama’s speech. Some people were said to have bailed, others opted for handheld radios. (WTOP’s got the audio; it sound like Robot Obama’s hardware was on the fritz.)

And for those who wanted to call their parents to share the moment, tweet out pithy observations or upload pictures to Instagram, well, it wasn’t always easy. Despite additional cell phone towers installed as a means to avert the same outages that hit during the 2009 inauguration, we heard plenty of complaints of strained networks making it impossible to place calls, send text messages or transmit data. Neither Verizon nor AT&T were able to give exact numbers on usage throughout the day, both companies essentially said the same: when a lot of people try to use their networks at once, outages may occur.

“When you have hundreds of thousands of people in a concentrated area attempting to access our network at the same time, some could experience intermittent congestion,” an AT&T representative explained. “The sheer number of attendees and, more importantly, the concentration of crowds at some locations during specific day parts resulted in congestion for periods of time. Throughout the day our network teams monitored usage, made adjustments to maximize the capacity of our sites and address usage shifts in effort to accommodate high network demand, to the extent that was possible,” said Verizon’s spokesperson, Melanie Ortel.

Finally, the toasts. After the swearing-in, Obama and congressional VIPs headed to the U.S. Capitol, where they sat down for a delicious luncheon and bipartisan toasts. All the while, hundreds of thousands of spectators waited outside. And waited. And waited some more. The inaugural parade was delayed by some 40 minutes, partly due to toasts that never seemed to end. The parade ran so late that by the time Obama’s motorcade passed, people streamed for the exits; some of the 58 floats and musical groups marched down an almost empty Pennsylvania Avenue as the sky darkened.

Of course, these things happen with any large scale event. And in the grand scheme of life, it could have been way worse. It could have been any normal morning commute on Metro, right?