I grew up in the DMV area, and the Metro was notorious for its long waits, single-tracking, and super expensive tickets.

The last time I took the metro was about 7 years ago, and at that time there was lots of political turmoil in the Metro leadership. I hope it has changed as I loved the concept and design. But like most things that go wrong, execution is what spoiled it for me.

DC Metro was great when I lived in nova a few years back. Huge upgrade from riding Bart in the SF Bay Area.

I grew up in the DMV region and always get annoyed when people cite NYC/Chicago as the (mostly, only) functioning local train system(s) in the country.

The Metro definitely has points where it gets annoying, but for the most part it connects things really well and it's the biggest thing I miss when living on the west coast.

How nice are headways compared to timetables? I realise a lot of behind the scenes programming occurs to make it all just work, but as a commuter, that little bit less effort spent planning v. using makes such a huge difference.

Last year our bus switched from running every ten minutes to every fifteen minutes, but it matches our ferries better.

Since I used the metro for impromptu movement rather than to make appointments, the biggest feature is high frequency. At peak times trains are every three minutes in the DC metro, and the slowest seemed to be six minutes.

10 or 15 minute intervals, or the 20+ minute BART intervals, make a system very inconvenient.

I had to look this up. A headway is basically "trains come every n minutes" as opposed to "train comes at 7:12 and 7:32 and ..."

Seems simple and approachable.

In large cities with frequent service, it's often only the headway time that is shown when traffic or passenger load would make it difficult to keep exactly to the scheduled times.

Example bus stop timetable in London with exact times only given in the early morning and for the last buses of the night: https://twitter.com/se1/status/963786580593905666

People who visit DC almost invariably marvel at the metro because they use it for a couple days likely not at peak times. For day to day commuting it is awful and a running joke for people who live there. Elevator outages and trains getting stuck on a regular basis.

I grew up in DC and moved to NYC and it’s painful to compare the two systems, DC’s is a total embarrassment.

It was designed to take tourists to museums and government workers from suburban parking lots to work in the morning and evening. That’s it.

The two fatal design flaws are lack of express trains and stations that are high ceilinged and deeply buried so it takes like 14 minutes to get from the tracks to the street.

It’s barely a subway it’s more like a odd suburban light rail hybrid that happens to run into an actual city.

Ok, but realize that a lot of the readership here is in California, and the DC Metro is a far far bigger step up over our systems than it is from the DC Metro to, say, Tokyo.

There were three and four minute headways between trains in DC! This is just incomprehensible technological advancement for Californians.

Well yeah, compared to NY, DC itself is mostly an odd suburb. The entire region only has like 5 buildings over 30 stories tall; most are in the 15-story range or lower. Of course the NY subway is denser and runs more frequently.

DC is also not flat like NY. Some Metro stations are deeply buried in hills, but a bunch are shallow and many are actually above ground.

And also the fact that, anything outside of tourist attractions typically only has one or two lines serving them. If you’re going from the Smithsonian museum to any number of hotels, you’ll have a variety of trains to take. Otherwise, you may need to wait longer.

It’s like an old childhood friend — they may be in a bad spot and you can’t stand to be around them, but the love is still there. I love metro and hope it improves. It’s getting there, slowly but surely. Still fails to deliver and eliminating off-peak pricing is hurting those who have no other option.

Worsening traffic and skyrocketing Lyft / Uber prices sent me to Metro for both my commute and general getting around. Metro has had its fair share of problems but it really seems to have gotten better!

Totally disagree. I’m happy to be standing on a Metro platform right now for my commute instead of dead stopped on 95.

Is it perfect? No, but neither is DC traffic…

Probably more than 10 years ago now, I created a personal web app that pulled the "headway" listings for the various stations. The idea was you could be outside the station and know when to go to the station or know if you had to rush down the stairs to catch a train. During hon-peak hours, the interval times could be 15 - 30 minutes, so timing was everything. Back then (and maybe now) Metro would not report a time greater than 20 minutes, but you could check stations up the line to see if a train was coming to your station. The system worked okay unless single tracking was involved, in which the data is not reliable.