Photo by Samer Farha

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is a big operation, tasked with moving hundreds of thousands of people around the region every day. And its far from perfect. At any given moment, there are broken escalators, shuttle buses, single-tracking segments, slippery platforms, and many other reasons to gripe.

Naturally, Metro has a chorus of critics, and some are particularly thorny to the transit agency. And yesterday, it got fed up with one particularly aggressive voice—that of Chris Barnes, a Metro rider and blogger who goes by the handle FixWMATA. When a small fire broke out beneath a Red Line train at the Silver Spring station on Tuesday evening, Barnes consistently prodded Metro’s Twitter account—@wmata—for explanations. He was not impressed by the responses, and let his dissatisfaction be known. Well, that got him blocked by WMATA.

But Barnes is far from the only Metro antagonizer who emotes customer gripes in 140-character bursts. The catalogue of Metro’s Twitter critics is vast—and, yes, potentially includes all of us—but some users channel their energy entirely on the transit system. And here are a few worth following:

Unsuck DC Metro: Easily the best-known of all the online Metro critics, Unsuck, published by a blogger who does quite a good job at masking his anonymity, is a clearinghouse of transit horror stories. On Twitter, Unsuck tweets and retweets even more complaints and service delays than FixWMATA, though perhaps not as barbed. In fact, the frustrated Metro rider often will direct a tweet toward Unsuck as often as Metro itself, turning the blog and Twitter account into something of an unofficial spokesperson. Still, Metro is quite aware of its existence, and dreams of rendering it ineffectual. “My goal is in several years, not to need it,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel told Washington City Paper in 2011. Unsuck, though, is still quite necessary.

Good for: Frustrated Metro riders who want a response more quickly than the transit agency can provide.

FixWMATA: Since his unceremonious blocking by WMATA, Barnes is having some nice visibility. Since DCist’s report yesterday, Barnes has also been featured on television, but at last check, he is still blocked by Metro. Yesterday, Metro’s assistant general manager for customer service, Lynne Bowersox, said the move was in response to supposedly nasty tweets directed from Barnes’ account. “Our Twitter feed is primarily to provide Metro service information for riders,” she said in a statement. “Violating reasonable boundaries of professional, civil discourse with profanity, personal attacks and inaccurate speculation is not a service to riders.” Yes, there are a few “fucks” and other obscenities in Barnes’ Twitter feed, but they tend to come in the form of retweets, not his own words.

Good for: Frustrated Metro riders who want a response more quickly than the transit agency, but with some edge.

Fire Dr. Gridlock: The person behind this account has two targets: Metro, of course, and Robert Thompson, who writes The Washington Post’s “Dr. Gridlock” column. Fire Dr. Gridlock feels the Post’s Metro coverage is too soft. True to to the handle, Fire Dr. Gridlock would like to see the Post dump Thompson. The account’s avatar includes a doctored image of Thompson sitting on the lap of Stessel, whose head is pasted on to the body of Mr. Garrison from the cartoon series South Park.

Good for: Frustrated Metro riders who enjoy potshot media criticism.

MetroEscalators: What Metro dysfunction is more common than the out-of-service escalator. Getting off in the depths of the Woodley Park station? You might be in for a severe climb, and MetroEscalators is devoted to tweeting nothing but escalator outages and repairs. In fact, most tweets are offered rather robotically:


Note, though, that MetroEscalators also includes how reliable Metro’s moving staircases are. The personality is a bit lacking, though.

Good for: Metro riders who didn’t wear comfortable walking shoes.

WMATA_HULK: This could be great. Raw, unfiltered, Metro-induced rage boiled down to 140-character thumpings. Unfortunately, this Hulk is a sporadic tweeter, having gone silent since May 3. But some of the offerings can be delightful, if not necessarily tied to any particular service outage:


And WMATA_HULK has a soft side. He’s partial to—i.e., less likely to smash—the Green Line. But the silence is killing us. Twitter has plenty of great Hulk parodies, like DRUNKHULK and FilmCritHULK, but one about Metro could be truly epic. Still, we hold out dreams that WMATA_HULK will one day SMASH.

Good for: PEOPLE WHO WANT SMASH METRO!!!

Filed Under: escalators, fire dr. gridlock, fixwmata, metro, twitter, unsuck dc metro, wmata, wmata hulk,