PlanItMetro

 Metrorail’s special Veterans Day schedule handily served commuters and concert goers alike.

On November 11, 2014, Metrorail served a reduced commuter market, as well as a large event on the National Mall, the Concert for Valor.  Metro ran a modified rail schedule, with near-peak service levels throughout most of the day, and Blue Line trains replaced with additional Yellow Line trains.

Compared to a Typical Weekday:

• Total ridership for the day was 515,000 trips, which is about 80% of a typical weekday
• The AM Peak commute was roughly half of a typical weekday.

Compared to Veterans Day 2013:

• Ridership was up by around 40%, or 147,000 trips.
• Ridership at most stations was up by about 25-50%, while five stations serving the National Mall doubled and tripled last year’s numbers.
  • Federal Triangle and L’Enfant Plaza were over quadruple last year’s ridership
  • Ridership at Arlington Cemetery was down by half, coinciding with reduced service to that station.
  • The morning commute (until 9:30am) was up 13% over last Veterans Day, evenly across most stations. This is another sign that when the federal workforce, most impacted by the drop in the federal transit benefit, is (mostly) removed from Metrorail’s commute market, ridership is up.

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On Monday, hundreds of thousands thronged the National Mall to watch the Presidential Inauguration and parade, and many came by Metrorail.  To accommodate the crowds, Metro ran rush-level service for 17 consecutive hours.  Just how busy was Metrorail?  Here are some highlights, using our preliminary faregate counts:

Metrorail ridership (entries) by fifteen-minute intervals, Inauguration Day 2013

• Total rail ridership came in at about 800,000 passengers for the day– higher than a typical weekday, 2-3 times the level of a weekend day or holiday, but lower than the 2009 Inauguration.
  • It should be noted that this year Inauguration Day fell on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.  Therefore, part of the lower ridership this year is likely due to many people having the day off this year when in 2009 they did not.
• Early start! Over 90,000 customers entered the Metrorail system before 7:00 am.
• By the time the President began speaking at noon, Metrorail had already provided 343,000 trips.
• From miles around!  End-of-line stations saw the biggest increases in ridership.
• Carpooling helped many more people access rail at stations where parking is limited.  Franconia-Springfield, for example, recorded over 16,000 rail system entries before noon – 10,000 more than normal, and well over the 5,069 parking spaces available.
• Hundreds of tour buses at RFK Stadium helped generate 10,200 entries at Stadium-Armory before noon, about 5 times that station’s normal ridership.
• The afternoon peak lasted nearly 5 hours from 12:30 to 5:30pm. During this time, another 300,000 passengers entered the system – nearly half through only six stations downtown.

Rail ridership was especially concentrated at a few stations around the Mall:

• By noon, the top 10 busiest stations near the Mall had collectively seen twice as many passengers exiting as a normal weekday.
• L’Enfant Plaza station recorded an impressive 70,000 exits before noon on Monday (normal is around 15,000 for the same timeframe on a weekday). At one point, between 8:00 and 8:15am, 3,600 people exited at L’Enfant Plaza – about 240 passengers per minute.
• Gallery Place handled 53,000 entries after noon on Monday (more than twice its normal ridership for the same timeframe) and experienced three “peaks” – 1-2pm after the Inaugural address, 4-5pm after the parade, and then again at 10pm-1am for late-night revelers.

1. Franconia-Springfield: 16,319
2. Vienna: 14,289
3. Greenbelt: 12,500
4. New Carrollton: 11,917
5. Shady Grove: 10,431
6. Pentagon City: 10,303
7. Stadium-Armory: 10,245
8. Silver Spring: 9,630
9. Branch Avenue: 9,520
10. Crystal City: 8,567

Top 10 Stations for Entries, After Noon:

1. Gallery Place: 53,077
2. L’Enfant Plaza: 36,628
3. Metro Center: 34,125
4. Union Station: 31,574
5. Farragut West: 22,618
6. Farragut North: 20,030
7. Federal Triangle: 19,331
8. Foggy Bottom: 18,152
9. Judiciary Square: 14,458
10. McPherson Square: 13,161

Did you ride Metro on Monday?   These numbers provide one perspective, and we’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

About ten days a year, Metrorail operates on a holiday schedule. On some holidays, most commuters have the day off, like Christmas, Labor Day, or Independence Day. But other days can be holidays for some, but not others – like Columbus Day, Veterans Day, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday – and these often fall on a Monday or Friday to make a long weekend.  Federal workers, whom we estimate at over a third of peak ridership, usually get these days off, as do others.  Metro often uses some holidays to do trackwork. So what happens to rail ridership on holidays?

To answer this question, this post examines total ridership on holidays over the past few years, by holiday, and by time of day. I excluded Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Independence Day, since these holidays are strongly influenced by how they fall in the calendar, and by the events on the National Mall on Independence Day.

Here’s a look at ridership on the remaining 7 holiday weekdays.  For the sake of comparison, I also show an average weekday, Saturday, and Sunday for May 2012.

Historical Metrorail ridership on holidays, compared to average May weekday, Saturday, and Sunday

So, all holidays shown have much lower ridership than a typical weekday, and are more in the range of a Saturday or Sunday. A typical weekday on Metrorail shows around 730,000 riders per day, with Saturdays about half that, and Sundays around a third of a weekday.  The holidays shown above are in the range of  200,000 to 400,000 riders per day.

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