“No Passengers”
by Judd WileyJuly 8th, 2008, 10:38 am
If you ride the DC Metro frequently, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
That empty, sometimes darkened Metro train, marked “No Passengers,” rolling slowly through station after station without picking anyone up. A staple of rush hour, its presence is always announced with a series of loud horn blasts.
There’s nothing more frustrating than standing 10 people thick on an overcrowded Metro platform at 6:00 PM, waiting for your ride home, only to watch a seemingly functional Metro train slowly roll through the station, blasting its horn.
Can someone please explain to me why these “No Passengers” Metro trains can’t carry passengers?
Unless the train is about to explode, implode, or melt away, unless every door is malfunctioning, unless every light is broken, or unless every car is filled with radical Jihadists, I see no reason why these trains can’t turn on their lights, open their doors, and let us on.
And I’ll say something else. This better not be about union workplace regulations, “reaching the 8 hour mark,” or entering the “off duty zone” halfway down the line.
UPDATE: July 14, 2008, 7:30 PM (Lewis)
One of our readers suggested we contact Metro to ask why they run the empty trains. Here is the response. (FYI - I am “Mr. Derskin”)
Dear Ms. Derskin:
Thank you for taking the time to email your inquiry to Metro’s Blue-Orange Line Team. We welcome and appreciate the opportunity to hear from our ridership. Regarding your observation of empty trains, they are vacant because the trains have been deployed to a specific station to allow customers to board. It is very common to see empty trains at end stations. I hope you find this response helpful.
Sincerely,
Marjorie Strother
Customer Service Representative
Blue-Orange Line Team
Case number 419521To speak to a Blue-Orange Line Customer Service Representative for Comments, Complaints, Suggestions, or Concerns, please call 301 562-4606 weekdays between the hours of 8:00 am - 5:00pm or email us at blue-orangeline @wmata.com.
Please call 202-637-7000 for trip schedules, fare information, general information and customer assistance between the hours of 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
This is completely not the reason I would see an empty train at Rosslyn in the morning during the morning rush. That isn’t an “end station”. I think they are probably dispatched to alleviate mechanical difficulties somewhere, but I reiterate that this is idiotic because they should be inspecting and repairing trains before they send them out in the first place.
Posted in Government Workers, Mass Transit, Subways |
Right on. Please take a chisel and etch this question into the top of John Catoe’s desk. The public deserves an answer to this. If the system has only one line going backward and forward, that rules out express service but it should also rule out empty trains. After all Metro exists to move people, not trains.
Have either of you asked WMATA, or are you just going to rant on an anti-transit blog?
csvc@wmata.com
Have either of you asked WMATA about this, or are you just going to rant about it on your blog?
csvc@wmata.com
Michael -
As you can probably tell, we like to rant. But you have a good point. I’ll ask them and see what the answer is.
Stay tuned to see what they say.
If it’s rush hour and all trains are at capacity you need to do it that way.
If you’re 10 deep and no train has shown up for a long time it’s because at a station ahead of you a train has gone out of service and had to dump all its passengers on a platform. All trains on the line hold. A “No Passenger” train is sent to the front to pick up the discharged passengers from the disabled train. Once that goes through all the other trains start up again. To do otherwise means those discharged passengers from the disabled train would have to see 20 other capacity rush trains pass them by. They’d be stranded there for an hour.
Pretty simple if you bother to think about it.
Brendan,
I’ve been riding the Metro to work for 3 years, and I’m 10 deep almost every day of the week. If you’re right, then there’s a train out of service at the station ahead of me almost every day during rush hour.
I know the scenario you’re talking about, and have experienced it several times. Believe me when I say that the scenario that Judd describes, and the one that you refer to, are 2 entirely different scenarios.
Brendan -
I could believe this explanation if it weren’t for the fact that I always see the empty train pass at the same time every morning in the same station. That indicates that this isn’t the result of a train malfunction.
If this is a malfunction, this is also completely idiotic - fix the trains, and do some inspections on them while we’re at it so that we can depend on them to be servicable before we send them down the tracks.
I have also been on a train that broke down and had to unload - there was no empty train rushing to the rescue, and the scenario you just painted is exactly what happened. I had to wait for three more trains before I could get on one.
If they just ran enough trains in the first place, you wouldn’t have people packed on board like sardines and it would be easier for them to flow off of a broken train onto other cars on following trains.
I have written to Metro to inquire about the empty trains, but I’m not convinced your explanation is correct, and if it is, I submit that I think that’s an idiotic way to run the system.
Sorry for the dupe comment above.
It takes me about a week to get an answer back when I send a question to customer service, and sometimes the answer just dodges the question. It depends on how high up in the organization your question gets. The answer I expect you to get at first is:
“This is necessary to provide the best quality service to our customers. Thanks and have a great day.”
Which I would find annoying and completely inadequate, and I would bump the question back and CC the board.
I know that they do run a non-revenue train to collect farebox revenue (the “money train”), but I don’t think they would do that during rush hour.
Two possible reasons:
A)
They consider one direction very, very important during a certain time of day, and regularly fill trains to capacity moving in that direction, while the opposite direction remains mostly empty (except for you). So, they push through trains densely packed at minimum headway in that direction (which also slows them down), and tries to speed trains back in the opposite direction in order to get back on the “busy track”. Stopping at each stop does consume a minute or two, and the more trains they can get on “the busy track”, the better.
Note: This should occur more often in cases where the route of the line is assymetric (suburban-urban) rather than symmetric (suburban-urban-suburban).
Note2: It’s my understanding that this isn’t possible on much of the Metro, because a passing track doesn’t exist.
B) Different rail yards have different capacities at different times of day, and different lines reach their peak traffic likewise. So a car might be transferred from Line A (office workers primarily) in morning rush to Line B (tourists) for afternoon rush to line A again for evening rush, to line C (nightclubs/concerts/restaurants/ballgames) after evening rush. Also, they may be transferring lines to get to a daily maintenance check on the line that actually has the space for a functional rail yard.
There are all sorts of related reasons. The trains are not running just to spite you and your commute.
What’s the time and location you see a train pass every morning?
If you’re talking about the orange line, the number of trains is already at or near capacity during rush hour. In fact, they recently had people come in from other systems to comment on operations, and one of the comments was that they actually need to decrease the frequency on the orange line slightly (to three minutes, I believe) in order to make the “merge” at Rosslyn smoother. Otherwise, a slight delay between the orange and blue lines (something stuck in a door, operator has to reposition a train, anything) causes a ripple effect because the trains have to wait for each other in the tunnel.
The only way(s) to alleviate the crowding on the orange line would be to
go to all eight-car trains, which they’re doing;
shift some of the tunnel traffic from blue to orange by diverting the blue line trains to Greenbelt, which they’re discussing;
reconfigure the train cars to eliminate seating, which they’ve partially rejected;
and as a last resort, implement a localized “peak of the peak” surcharge for the worst hour to see if they can get people to shift their travel a short amount of time, which WMATA staff proposed briefly, although the surcharge was not narrowly tailored enough and was shot down almost immediately by Catoe.
The ultimate fix is to construct a second tunnel in DC to separate the orange and blue lines, but that would cost billions.
Jeff -
I see this happen when the empty trains are moving in the same direction as traffic on both of the lines - blue and orange. I often see this in the morning, just before the morning rush begins to get into full swing, but it makes no sense because most people are coming in from further out on the orange line, so I don’t know where this train could be going.
Michael -
To answer you question more fully, I see it at Rosslyn, and I will admit that I don’t see it ever morning - because I’m not always there at exactly the same time.
But I have noticed it frequently enough that I made a note of it, and when I see it, it always seems to happen within the same ten minute window.
FYI - I still haven’t received an official answer from Metro yet.
Micheal -
I got the response from Metro. I will update the post with the answer.
Hey look, the answer is kinda like what I said they’d say:
Me: ““This is necessary to provide the best quality service to our customers. Thanks and have a great day.””
Marjorie Strother, WMATA: “they are vacant because the trains have been deployed to a specific station to allow customers to board. It is very common to see empty trains at end stations. I hope you find this response helpful.”
Yeah, I figured it would be. I still think it’s a cop out for Metro to answer this way. I’m fairly certain it’s a broken train somewhere, which is what they should just come out and tell you.
I’m going to start correlating these trains with service advisories on the monitors for “trains experiencing mechanical difficulties” and see how often I see one moving down the same line that has a problem.