(Photo by Tim Brown)

After a year of discombobulated commutes, Metro wants its customers to know that they are appreciated. So WMATA is flooding the transit system with hundreds of employees bearing thank you notes during Thursday’s evening commute.

“We know that SafeTrack was an unprecedented burden on so many of our rail customers, and this is a way for us to get out there and say thanks,” Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld said in a release. Almost 700 members of the administrative staff, like office workers and managers, will be greeting customers with the notes (and a mysterious “small token of appreciation offered by a Metro partner”).

Though an aggressive track maintenance effort continues, the year-long maintenance program officially ended on Sunday. With SafeTrack in the rearview tunnel, Metro has high hopes that fallen ridership levels will recover.

One week into SafeTrack last summer, Capital Bikeshare and local trails set new record ridership levels. By the fall, Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said Metrorail ridership plummeted across the system.

A report released last month showed that the downward trend in Metrorail ridership continued through the third quarter of fiscal year 2017: total ridership was 13 percent below the forecast. The average weekday ridership decreased by 10 percent from the year prior, with off-peak ridership declining twice as much.

But WMATA says there are signs that things are already returning to some semblance of normal: with SafeTrack over, the system yesterday recorded the highest weekday readership so far this year, nearly 700,000 trips.

Meanwhile in other Metro news, the transit agency announced today that they’ll have to shut down a chunk of the Red Line for four weekends in a row in an attempt to solve a chronic tunnel leaking problem. The Grosvenor-Strathmore, Bethesda, Medical Center, and Friendship Heights stations will be closed each weekend between July 10 and August 11. On weeknights, trains will single track between Friendship Heights and Medical Center, starting at 9 p.m.

Welcome back to Metro.