Mile
Zero

The late Mitch Hedberg used to have a joke: "I love escalators," he said, "because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs."

With apologies to Mr. Hedberg, above is a picture of some broken escalators. DC has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it is a good idea to repair all its escalators at the same time--ALL the escalators, over the entire system. Also, it rained today, and you know what that means: all trains are 45 minutes late and stuffed until the doors can't close. If the engineers of the DC Metro had worked on public transit in, say, Seattle or London, commuters would be starving to death underground on a daily basis, unable to escape due to stationary trains and blocked exits.

The problem with the Metro, I often say, is that its deficiencies are completely invisible to anyone who does not commute to the city every day, and apparently those people just don't count. When tourists visit the city, they usually don't travel at rush hour, so they don't see the way the system breaks under load. Instead, they have a much more comfortable experience: big, padded seats, leisurely escalators, and spacious stations. They don't see how those oversized seats take up room needed for standing passengers, or how the escalators under repair force everyone into a stairway that's too small for two-way traffic. To a tourist, compared to something like the NYC subway, Metro must seem like a dream come true.

Just don't try to use it for anything important. Good thing there's nothing like that in our nation's capital.

Updated: Oh, even better--Metro will begin a bag inspection program. WMATA's new motto is apparently "bringing all the joy of slow, cramped, expensive air travel to your daily commute."