Category: Transit in D.C.

That would do me in immediately.

Andrew T. Baker lays down the DC Metro Challenge. He recently traveled to all 86 stations, from Shady Grove to Largo Town Center, in 7:27:49. Can you do better?

ᔥ Greater Greater Washington

I spent one of my votes on a write-in candidate in Metro’s poll on station names for the Tysons-to-Herndon section of the Silver Line: I plumped for “Freedom Hill” for the station on route 7 near the Westpark Drive intersection. I am very pleased that “Scotts Run” is in the running for the east-end route 123 station. Maybe they picked up on my suggestion.

Metro has a policy that requires that names be:

• Relevant: Identify station locations by geographical features, centers of activity or be derived from the names of cities,communities, neighborhoods or landmarks within one-half mile (or walking distance) of the station;
• Brief: Limited to 19 characters with spaces and punctuation, including both primary and secondary names;
• Unique: Distinctive and not easily confused with other station names
• Evocative: Evoke imagery in the mind of the patron

Take the poll and hold them to it!

Prefab walls are being dropped into place at the Wiehle Avenue work site—I saw the first one going in last weekend. The terra cotta with gray accent course will be an attractive change from the classic concrete look.

It looks like the running title for these posts won’t have to change: a (rough) draft Metro system map colors the line to Dulles Silver and uses the abbreviation SV.

Metro map designers are floating the possibility that the line won’t be silver after all. The Post has the story and image of a draft transition map.

(Link via DCist.)

Via Greater Greater Washington, John Hendel links to videos produced by Metro’s Brian Anderson demonstrating the gear and techniques used for track maintenance.

Metro is considering a return to sanity, and by sanity I mean at least following its own guidelines for station names, as Kytja Weir reports. A naming policy review is planned for this week.

Some 15 of the 86 existing stations violate the 19-character limit, Metro says, and seven of those have more than one hyphen or slash mark separating the names.

Transfer stations have an even higher violation rate: three of the eight hubs exceed the 13-character limit.

The problem was highlighted last week when the blog Greater Greater Washington sponsored a fantasy map contest, asking its readers to submit redesigns of the existing Metro map. Of the 17 submissions, some maps struggled to fit the long names on their designs — and left off some stations altogether.

(Link via Washington Business Journal.)

(Washington Examiner web site team, your hack of the copy button is not unnoticed.)

The teal-blue frame of the elevator shaft is visible rising above the mezzanine level of the future station for Wiehle Avenue. Concrete station walls have been poured, with the surface finished in Metro’s signature rough board-and-batten pattern.

With the closure of the Reston East park and ride lot, I have to be more creative in finding places to park so that I can stop and take these shots.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has submitted a list of dull, wordy station names to the Metro board. These names are for the new Silver Line stations that lie within the County, so the Loudoun stations aren’t on the list. Emphasis mine in the quote:

The WMATA policy indicates that station names should involve the following:

• Identify the station location by geographical features or centers of activity;
• Geographical names may be derived from those of cities, communities; neighborhoods, squares, circles, Metro-intersecting streets, etc.;
• Centers of activity may be derived from schools, stadiums, parks, hospitals, airports, depots, shopping centers, galleries, museums, government installations, etc.;
• Names should be distinctive and evoke imagery; and
• Names should be relatively brief and be no longer than 19 characters.

Most of the entries on the Board’s approved list fail to meet the fourth and fifth criteria above:

• Tysons-McLean
• Tysons I&II
• Tysons Central
• Tysons-Spring Hill Road
• Reston-Wiehle Avenue
• Reston Town Center
• Herndon-Reston West
• Herndon-Dulles East

Here are the names I would use. Several of them are the placeholder names that have been on planning maps for years—eminently useful because they told you where the station was located with no hyphenated hoohah.

• Scott’s Run (or Scotts Run, if you want to be postal about it)
• Tysons Center
• Freedom Hill (sorry, there can be only one center)
• Spring Hill Road
• Wiehle Avenue
• Reston Town Center
• Monroe Street
• Sully Road (I’m not so sure about this one, since it seems to lie between Sully and Centerville Roads)

I would also consider “Dulles Gateway” for Route 28, if some property developer hasn’t already snapped up that name.

Or maybe we should go the naming-rights-for-sale route and call the Tysons-McLean station “Tysons-Capital One” and be done with it. Until Capital One goes bust, of course.

Via DCist, Ann Scott Tyson (for Dr. Gridlock) explains those shiny clear plastic domes that have been appearing over the smart card targets on Metro fare gates. According to spokesperson Angela Gates,

The domes are intended to allow the antenna of the SmarTrip card reader to be better positioned to communicate with the card…

Sometimes, in radio communications, 1 centimeter makes all the difference.

Aaron Morrissey visits WMATA HQ and finds an omnibus sign with all of the known and planned Metro stations. I have an old D.C. map from about 1980 that shows the planned station at Chillum (which decamped to West Hyattsville) and maybe I’ve seen a reference to Federal City College (which became UDC). The unpaired Franconia station name tells me that the sign was made before the split tail of the Blue/Yellow lines was conjoined into the single terminus of Franconia-Springfield. But the planned then deleted Oklahoma Avenue station does not appear.

Steve Offutt reports that Metro expects to begin testing a software patch that would open up the virtual tunnel between the two Farragut Square stations.

Wikipedia’s Silver Line entry recently achieved good article status.

Via Greater Greater Washington, John Cambron posts an extensive set of photos of Silver Line (N route) construction at its junction with the K route of the Orange Line in Falls Church.