Metrorail's Blue Line, which serves as a main passageway for commuters traveling downtown, will face an 18-day SafeTrack surge beginning Feb. 11. The surge comes just days after a massive downtown closure that impacted riders on the weekend of the Super Bowl. SafeTrack surges are construction segments along the Metrorail that require lines to shut down for an extensive amount of time.
During the SafeTack surge, there will be no Blue Line service. Arlington Cemetery station will be closed, but Metro will be operating shuttles at the Pentagon and Rosslyn stations to compensate riders for the station closure at Arlington Cemetery. Metro officials encourage riders coming from Northern Virginia to take the Yellow-rush Line, which will be running all day, and transfer at L'Enfant Plaza station to take the Orange or
Silver Line if they intend to travel through downtown. Officials are also encouraging riders from Maryland to take the Silver line.
Because Arlington Cemetery is the only closed station during this surge, residents of them D.C. Metropolitan Area should not be “severely affected” said Lorraine Silva, Virginia’s vice chair of the Riders Advisory Council.
In 2016, Metro recorded an average of 1,500 riders entering the station daily, this being largely due to the fact that it services a popular tourist site.
Although the changes will also impact Arlington residents, officials are not expecting their travels to be as strenuous as tourists.
The Blue Line surge is the 12th surge of the 16 scheduled to be completed as a part of them SafeTrack plan. The plan, which is intended to improve safety and reliability within the Metro system, was implemented by General Manager Paul Wiedefeld last June.
The surge comes a week after a major Metrorail closure during Super Bowl weekend, which caused stations between Foggy Bottom and Eastern Market to close in order to allow Metro workers to install cell phone and radio communication technology. The installments will provide riders with better radio and cell reception. Workers also repaired ceiling tiles and railway tracks.
Although shuttles were made available to riders traveling through downtown D.C., the delays were noticeable among riders.
Many of the stations on the Blue Line as well as the Orange and Silver Lines encounter the most ridership throughout the Metro system. In 2016, L’Enfant Plaza, Farragut West, and Metro Center, which were major stops experiencing closures, encountered on average 20,000 to 25,000 riders daily. Rosslyn and Pentagon stations, which will be affected by the next Blue Line surge, saw more than 13,000 riders daily.
James Rice, a student at the University of the District of Columbia, primarily uses the Blue Line to get to his home in Northeast D.C. However, the system changes that occurred over the Super Bowl weekend made his commute difficult.
For Rice, who relies solely on Metro as a form of transportation, a trip home meant taking time away from other things. “I’m just going to have to wait (for the Metro shuttles) like everyone else,” Rice said. “There’s no uber-ing because that (cost) can add up.”
Metro officials were aware of the problems that the Super Bowl weekend closures could cause.
“It is never a good time to do that work,” Wiedefeld said. He acknowledged, however, that because the Super Bowl weekend draws one of the lower riderships averages of the season, with ridership down 3 percent for this weekend in the past four years, the decision to schedule the rail and tunnel work was intentional.
The 12th Blue Line surge won’t affect Rice since he can take the Silver and Orange Lines to get home, but he said that WMATA does “a bad job” of informing customers of closures. “They only let you know of a problem when you're actually on the train or in a station,” Rice said. “Who has time to be on their website to check updates every minute? They need to get it together.”
The SafeTrack plan was originally intended to take three years to complete, but the modified plan that was implemented will complete the necessary repairs in just one year. Wiedefeld said that if the Metro work went beyond three years, delays would have worsened.
“We didn't want to put the work off because the tires and the railings were deteriorating,” he said. “The work needed to be done as quickly as possible.”
Wiedefeld also said he adopted a new way of handling unexpected mechanical problems in the Metrorail system that are not included in the SafeTrack plan. “We are doing work when we find things now,” he said. “We aren't waiting years in the future to do it.”