Wasting Time on the DC Metro

I spent a long time on the DC Metro last weekend, traveling between Alexandria, VA and downtown Washington, DC. I've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence of people loving the DC Metro. I have to admit it is incredibly extensive and clean, but I've always found it to be slow as molasses, complicated to learn, and my new belief is that it encourages the horrendous sprawl around DC. The Alexandria station I visited had clearly never heard the term "Transit Oriented Development." It was a glorified parking lot. In short, the Metro is not very tourist-friendly in spite of DC being one of the top ten family destinations in the country. Heck, they don't even have google maps integration.

While I was spending my 35 minutes traveling into the city on what is essentially a commuter rail, I read the paper - where the city dwellers were bashing the state of the light rail. In Washington, DC, there is a lack of dedicated funding to fix the metro. The recent tragic crash occurred on a train that was behind in brake maintenance. Thanks to the back-handed maneuverings of Dan Onorato, at least Pittsburgh does have a dedicated tax to the funding of public transportation. Of course, that tax only contributes to capital improvements instead of regular maintenance.

Moral of the story? You don't have to have good public transportation for people to use it. You just need to build it. Construction didn't begin on the DC Metro until 1969. That's only 40 years ago even though their population has been relatively flat over that time.

Lesson for Pittsburgh? Plan it and do it. And we already have a step up on DC because we have dedicated funding in place. Let's quit wasting time and whining about how we'll never catch up to the big cities. Because we can.