D.C. Red Line to Boost Weekday Service

Commuters in the Washington, D.C. area will see shorter headways on the well-used Red Line train. As Abigail Constantino reports for WTOP, “Trains will operate every eight minutes all day Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, which have become Metro’s highest ridership days, the transit agency said in a news release.” Red Line trains will continue to operate every eight minutes at rush hour and every 10 minutes the rest of the day on Mondays and Fridays.

Like other transit agencies, Metro has been dealing with an operator shortage, problems with its 7000-series trains, which put many of them out of service, as well as a dispute over operator training. Last January, the Metrorail Safety Commission “discovered that Metro was ‘deliberately ignoring’ its own training standards, allowing operators to skip a required eight hours of initial hands-on training overseen by instructors on out-of-service trains.” Metro was later able to make an agreement with the commission that prevented it from having to reduce service by providing operators with the required additional training. 

As a TransitCenter blog post recently outlined, the District’s transit recovery after the disruptions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has been halting, with ridership remaining below pre-pandemic levels and service reaching fewer jobs in the region than before.