Okay, you’re probably still frazzled and weary from last night. But at least you’re safe!
In a nutshell, a man crashed a rental car onto the train tracks. He was badly injured (but still managed to get to a nearby building, where he was picked up by police). The tracks were in bad shape, and it took a long time to extricate the car from the tracks.
Area commuters know that a problem on one side of the rail system affects the whole shebang most heinously. Not only were the trains substantially delayed, traffic on the roads was more of a nightmare than usual!
If you were on the line where the accident occurred, you had to get off the train at the previous station (they closed the station nearest the accident) and then take a free shuttle bus to the next open station. As you might expect, this caused a lot of confusion, as hundreds and hundreds of people at a time swarmed into the loading area, looking for their bus.
Anyway, it was yucky, but I got to my car around 6 pm, a 2.5-hour commute that normally takes about 1 hour.
Anyone else here have trouble yesterday afternoon?
Fortunately, I had a picnic close to home yesterday at lunch time. Therefore, I left downtown at noon and took the rest of the day off. Even though I am on the other side of the red line, the WMATA email alerts were saying I would have had a 30-minute delay if I left at my normal time.
I left shortly before I received my first email alert (I got it when I got home). In fact, I was on a train about 20 mins. after the accident occurred and was therefore in the thick of it.
Those email alerts are good but mine come late. Last night, I was online and cleared my inbox. 5 minutes later (or so), I check again and there was a new one - supposedly sent 40 minutes earlier.
Would it have changed your decision to leave had you received the email right before leaving?
Not likely. I don’t have alternate means to get to my destination, which is Glenmont. I could take a cab or a bus, of course, but I’m not sure I would have done so even if I’d know there would be a delay.
I don’t fault them for the delay, but I don’t think they were very organized when dealing with the delay.
dantheman, you don’t fault them for the train delay or email delay? Of course, I think they handled the train/track issue wonderfully (no problems for me this morning) and I don’t fault them for getting emails out late (i.e. sending it out 30 minutes after they knew the info) but I do fault them if their server delays the transmission of the email.
Jeff Olsen, from what I can tell, 395 is backed up all of the time, right?
That happened right behind my building, and I mean right behind it. I left at 3 though and just missed it. I did however see all the emergency people coming down the highway and down Geogia Ave.
Holy shit, I just walked down there to look at it. He jumpped over a 8-9’ tall fence, that’s pretty far from the road! I still don’t see how he got the speed up, but I guess it’s a big enough road.
How could I fault them for the train delay? They didn’t crash the car on the tracks.
Their email delay is just wonky, and I don’t pay it too much attention. I’ve gotten emails from them that say “delay has been cleared” and then get the delay email after that. Weird.
Metro, as usual, seems to have no plan for when Things Go Wrong, so when they do, disaster occurs.
Of course. But I wondered if you meant you blame them for the length of the delay (i.e. car crashed, find the people, take them away, tow the car, start the trains - total time 30 minutes. So why did it take them hours?).
Yes, I’ve gotten those mis-ordered emails too. I always think “Uh, there’s a delay???”.
However, I don’t see how they could have ever planned for this delay at this spot.
I’m not sure why it took them so long to remove the vehicle. Perhaps it was difficult to get a crane in thre.
The thing is, no one can plan for things to go wrong, but they need to have a plan IF things go wrong. Their plan involved running shuttle buses from Takoma to Forest Glen and Silver Spring, and that’s good in theory. But they did a half-assed job of implementing it. There was a LOT of confusion on the part of commuters trying to find which bus would take them where. None of the buses could be bothered to put their destinations on their signs - in fact, they read “not in service”!
Not to mention the way that the traffic in some areas around the stations was directed. It was all very hodge-podge, as if people didn’t know what they were doing but were winging it.
The same thing happened when we got all that snow. No one at Metro figured they needed to keep their cars warm (or at least not all of them). They also did a poor job of removing the snow - which they should have been doing as the stuff fell, thereby causing less work for themselves later.
I don’t think they did a terrible job, but I didn’t have to go all the way on the Red Line yesterday, and I was riding it pretty close to when this happened, so I think I missed the worst of it.
What ticked me off is that this morning there was a 12-15 minute delay on the Yellow Line, which totally screwed me over. I didn’t see any obvious problems on my trip, and there were plenty of trains.
That’s the thing that really ticks me off. Waiting on a platform for 30 minutes and watching no less than 6 trains come in and leave again without any passengers.
True, backups on 395 are nothing unusual. Having an upside down SUV, boat, and trailer blocking all southbound lanes at the start of rush hour is most certainly not usual and the fact that the incident happened just west of the Pentagon made things worse. Fortunately for me, by the time I had left work everything started moving again. Even so, Army-Navy Drive between Crystal City and Pentagon City still reminded me of July 4 after the fireworks.
You would have been fine in Takoma Park itself. You would have taken the train all the way to the Takoma station. If you lived north of Takoma, though, you were in doo-doo.
