Metro’s Safe Track Returns to Site of First Surge

Steve Burns
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Meet the new surge, same as the old surge.

Metro’s region-wide tour of commuting inconveniences makes a return visit to the Orange and Silver lines between East Falls Church and Ballston starting this morning through the end of the month, the same stretch of track the program started on in early June. Metro says work on the inbound track was completed then. Now, work will focus on the outbound track. It again means single tracking between the two stations and 18-minute waits for trains west of Ballston on both lines.

Transportation planners hope lessons were learned following the first surge, which had the worst traffic impacts of the four surges so far according to a new study. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s Transportation Planning Board study looked at traffic data during all four surges, compared with a “normal” day one year ago.

“There’s a pretty clear winner when you look at all four surges together on one graph,” Transportation Planner Ben Hampton told WMAL. “That’s Surge One.”

By “winner,” Hampton means drivers were at a loss: Travel times on I-66 and the Dulles Toll Road, he said, got 50-100% worse during Surge One. He also said traffic was routinely worse than usual in Downtown D.C., with travel times increased around 30-50%.

“I think you do see a focused traffic impact when there are just a small number of road routes in the same corridor as the Metro line,” Hampton said. He was hopeful that some circumstances may make Surge 5 less of a problem than Surge 1, even though it affects the same commuters.

“We’ve looked at summer traffic patterns in the past, and consistently every year we see drops of travel delay on area freeways of about 15-20%,” Hampton said. Plus, more people may be aware now than in early June.

“We have seen an overall downward trend in the impacts of Safe Track surges on traffic,” Hampton said. “That could just be differences in the surges themselves and the corridors they affected. But it does seem like we’re seeing at least some adjustment of travel from people hearing about other people’s experiences and hearing more about Safe Track.”