 This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream. Get access to my streaming video service Nebula when you sign up for CuriosityStream using the link in the description, and stay tuned to learn more. North America is generally not known for its metro systems. They're often not that big, not in very good shape, and a lot of times both, or also just called subways. But despite this, there are some truly epic metros, with stunning designs and incredible scale, and one of those is the Washington Metro in Washington, DC. While crashes, operational issues, and the double whammy of COVID and major rolling stock problems have seriously hurt ridership, which was around 750,000 today in the late 2010s, I still think the capital's metro system has a bright future. Not only does the system benefit from being in one of the fastest growing regions in the United States, but it also has good intercity rail links to a number of other cities with comparatively good transit, unlike a lot of other North American cities. At the same time, Metro was both a young system, opening less than 50 years ago, and one with very impressive infrastructure, with over 200 kilometers of track, nearly 100 fully accessible stations, as well as three city center tunnels. In the future, with reformed operations and fixes to some of the system's issues, it could probably move several million people per day with its current tunnels and stations. Washington, DC has super interesting political and physical geography. The city region lies across two states, Maryland and Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia itself, which is covered really well in this half as interesting video. DC itself is located at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, around 300 kilometers or 200 miles southwest of New York City, and roughly 50 kilometers or 30 miles west of Chesapeake Bay. Within the central city are all kinds of famous political sites, like the Capitol and the White House. You've also got the National Mall, the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, and far, far more. There are also major sites which are not right in the city center, reinforcing DC's status as one of the most polycentric cities in North America. Arlington and Alexandria and Virginia are major nodes with massive transit oriented development, and the same is true of Silver Spring and Bethesda in Maryland. There's also the famous Pentagon, and further out along a freeway interchange is the famous Tyson's Corner, an edge city you'll probably be familiar with if you've ever spent much time studying urban geography. Getting people into and around the U.S. Capitol are a number of major transportation hubs, including Washington Union Station, the southern end of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor that features electrified intercity rail servers to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Union Station also has tunnels under it that could someday enable a modern long distance through running regional rail system. Connecting Washington to cities further afield are its two major airports, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport just across the Potomac from Central Washington and Dulles, which is about 37 kilometers or 22 miles west of the city center. Reagan mainly serves shorter-haul flights, while Long Hall and international flights go to Dulles. Diving underground into Metro, one of the most iconic parts of the system is the grand, brutalist architecture of the stations, which makes them some of my favorite in the world, and no doubt influenced by systems like the Montreal Metro, which opened about a decade earlier. These are enhanced by the intricate lighting design of center track uplighters, as well as unique lights at the platform edges, which blink as a train is approaching. These were actually originally also included in the Taipei Metro. The signage and wayfinding on the system are quite bold and were designed by Massimo Vignelli, who is also famous for his significant work done for the New York City subway. The technology of the system was also incredibly modern at the time it opened, with an ATC signaling system enabling automatic train operation, a monitored form of automated driving, although it was unfortunately disabled into 2000s after a crash, which turned out to be unrelated. This has hurt system performance, think speed, frequency, and smoothness ever since. The trains the system is built for are part of why I say the system has such good bones. The network supports trains up to eight cars long, and each roughly three by 23 meters, about as large a subway car as you can get. The total floor area of the trains is basically identical to those used on the Elizabeth line, and a full eight car train is nearly 200 meters long, with three doors per car, just as with the line in London. As you'd probably expect, the trains run on standard gauge tracks and get power from a 750 volt DC third rail. They also have a very recognizable hexagonal front profile, which sort of reminds me of BART, and much like BART, the system operates at higher than typical metro speeds of up to around 100 kilometers per hour, versus the typical 80, and originally had trains with a very commuter oriented seating layout. Much like the New York City Subway's latest cars, the Problem Plague 7000 series metro trains are manufactured by Kawasaki and feature similar useful digital wayfinding. Looking at the system itself, one of the most impressive aspects is that as I mentioned earlier, it has three city center tunnels that allow the lines from the suburbs to converge on the core of DC. One tunnel travels east through the center from Farragut North, south across under G Street, to Judiciary Square, and back north to Union Station. Another travels east west from Foggy Bottom, George Washington University, to MacPherson Square, then south to the National Mall, and across east to Lawn Fawn Plaza and Capitol Hill. And the last, which travels entirely north-south, from Lawn Fawn Plaza through downtown at Gallery Place to neighborhoods like Shaw, U Street, Columbia Heights, and Petworth. Through the first tunnel runs the Red Line, which starts on both ends in Montgomery County, Maryland, and travels south through Bethesda in the west and Silver Spring in the east to Central Washington DC, passing north beyond the Capitol Beltway Ring Road on both sides. A large portion of the Red Line runs on the surface, including next to Mainline Rail at the northwest extent of the line and from Union Station to Silver Spring, while other portions, including downtown and the northeast portion of the line are underground. The northeast being very deep underground. Wheaton Station actually has the longest escalators in the Western Hemisphere. Interestingly, Noma Gallaudet U Station was added as an infill station in the 2000s, and has an incredible amount of DoD around it, which is a pattern we're going to be returning to. Next comes the Yellow Line, which starts at its southern end in Virginia, passing north through west-central Alexandria and then along the Potomac, before diverting through Ronald Reagan Airport, diverting west to Crystal and Pentagon City and the Pentagon itself, before the line crosses the Potomac on a bridge and then dives underground in Central Washington. From here, the line runs along the north-south-downtown tunnel, connecting to the red line at Gallery Place Chinatown. The Yellow Line then continues north, diverging west to serve Columbia Heights, before diverging back east to connect to the red line at Fort Totten. Rather uniquely, like white flint on the red line, Fort Totten's green and yellow line platforms are mostly above ground, with tunnels on both sides, which is a design I've always found kind of charming. Beyond here, the Yellow Line continues northeast into Maryland, terminating at Greenbelt near the Capitol Beltway. The Green Line, or more accurately service, runs from the northern end of the Yellow Line all the way south to Lawn Fawn Plaza, where it splits from the Yellow Line to the east, traveling through the fast-growing Navy Yard area before passing under the Anacostia River. From here, the line continues southeast on an increasingly above-ground alignment into Maryland where it terminates. The Blue Line starts just east of the Capitol Beltway in Largo, before continuing west above and below ground in a sea of single-family homes, before coming above-ground to cross the Anacostia River on a bridge. Here, the line dives underground and follows the angular-planned roads of southeastern DC to the eastern edge of the final downtown tunnel, which it passes through, connecting to the yellow and green lines at Lawn Fawn Plaza and the red line at Metro Center, and then beyond, under the Potomac River to Rosslyn. From Rosslyn, the Blue Line turns southeast and runs along the Potomac past Arlington National Cemetery and to the Pentagon. The Blue Line then runs alongside the Yellow Line all the way to Western Alexandria, before diverting from it and traveling west alongside Main Line Rail and the Capitol Beltway through mostly big box and industrial-feeling areas. The line ends at Franconia Springfield after diving under the Capitol Beltway. As with the eastern end of the Blue Line, the Orange Line starts right near the Capitol Beltway, but within it. The last station on the line, New Carrollton, is actually a station on the northeast corridor, which the Orange Line travels along above ground, away from any dense development until Chevrolet Station, where the line diverts to the southwest, still above ground alongside non-electrified Main Line tracks until it reaches the Blue Line. The Orange Line travels with the Blue Line into Rosslyn, where it diverges to the west to travel through Central Arlington. Beyond Arlington, the Orange Line pops back above ground to run along a highway in the median. Coming up to the Delos Access Road, the Orange Line continues west along the previous highway alignment all the way to Vienna, but not that Vienna, where it terminates. The last line in the network, and the most recently extended, just in the last month that the publishing of this video is the Silver Line. The Silver Line runs along the Blue Line to Rosslyn and with the Orange Line to its west, before diverging north of the Delos Access Road. The line diverts back out of the Delos Access Road near Tysons to run elevated through the area, crossing the Beltway before diving back underground, surfacing at Greensboro Station and then continuing elevated to Spring Hill Station and then back into the median of the Delos Access Road, which always had space in it set aside for future rail. The section after Spring Hill is extremely weird, as the Silver Line travels nearly 10 kilometers or 6 miles between stations, extremely unusual for our Metro and possibly a record, if you think you have a longer example, leave it in the comments. This is basically through an area of forest and large lot single-family homes before the line arrives in Reston, where trains terminated up until recently. With the new extension, trains continue through Reston to Herndon and beyond onto the Delos Lands, where the line goes elevated and serves the station with a grand canopy reminiscent of the main terminal building. The line doesn't stop here, though. It turns, still elevated, and heads north, popping back into the median of the Delos Greenway and extending several more kilometers northwest to Ashburn. This puts the terminus of the Silver Line over 40 kilometers from central DC as the crow flies. Stepping back, what you can probably see now is that the DC Metro is a bit of a mess of interlining. Only the red line is fully independent and the interlining can create a lot of issues, as trains on all other lines interact with one another thanks to the interconnection between the yellow and blue lines. Despite these issues, there are a lot of learnings other systems, even outside of North America, can take from the DC Metro. For one, the system quite seamlessly crosses the entire region and three different jurisdictions as a unified system, and at the same time I was recently discussing with someone the governance, which has been surprisingly stable despite the rarious stakeholders involved in the system. I mentioned DC's polycentric nature earlier in the video, and for a North American Metro system, DC Metro really is very well connected outside of the core of the city, thanks to connections between the red, green, and yellow lines at Fort Totten and the interlining of the yellow and blue lines. The three city center alignments crossing at three distinct points, a triangle transfer, also helps spread transfer volume and coverage of the core of the urban area. That all being said, the many services operated on the network mean that despite the dense and well connected central area, the system still has 10 distinct termini, which generally spread out in every direction providing very good coverage. The system service is also not all that bad, given its extent, with most lines running every 10 minutes or better most of the time, meaning frequencies in the interlined sections of the network are quite a bit better if trains are properly spaced out. All of this service, long trains and trackage, does mean that metro has an almost shocking amount of different yards, with large yards near most of the termini. And while the Washington metro was never constructed all that affordably, including the shockingly expensive silver line that cost as much by itself as some small metro network, it certainly should be noted that the network does not feel excessively tunneled, with substantial portions of it operating on elevated guideways and at grade in other right-of-ways and suburban areas. Now, if you're familiar with population and economic geography in the US, you'll know that the Washington DC region has been booming for years. It's now larger than Philly and Atlanta, and along with that growth comes growth in the metro system, the silver line extension just being part of that. Washington DC is covered in transit-oriented mixed-use communities, and one such community, Potomac Yard, which will play host to part of Amazon's HQ2 campus, is getting a new station to service it, built alongside the original blue and yellow line rail alignment. A much larger project which is under construction and will only serve to increase the polycentrism of the DC region is the Maryland purple line, which is, as it sounds, in Maryland, and will connect four different metro branches, running east from Bethesda on the western leg of the red line, to Silver Spring on the eastern leg, and then south and east to College Park University of Maryland on the green and yellow lines, and then further south to terminate at New Carrollton on the orange line. This project has had a lot of major issues, but should be really useful once it's eventually done. That being said, as with many other projects, I think the use of light rail, even a moderately fast and low floor one, is a bit questionable, as high speeds and frequencies will be critical to the success of this line. Further off in the future, Metro is also looking at how to build more capacity through the city center, and especially across the Potomac from Rosslyn, since the triple interlining of the blue orange and silver lines limits their frequency and demand is high. A lot of different options, including a very odd looping alignment for the blue line, have been considered, though I'm quite skeptical that any of them is really the optimal use of a new tunnel, and they all seem designed to cost as much as possible while not maximizing the service and use of the existing network. An idea I sort of like is building a new station where the orange line merges with the silver and blue lines in the east, and then creating a new separate corridor west that would separate the current orange line branch and the western parts of the orange and silver lines from the blue line, through the downtown hitting some preferred nodes. I prefered this line to Metro's proposals because it allows the existing orange line branch to the east to receive more service, useful for the large amount of development starting to happen there, instead of the really odd proposed ideas including constructing another entirely new suburban alignment which would only lead to a bigger differential in core versus suburban service. It would also mean a faster cross-city trip for the orange and silver lines, and better overall connectivity, and probably lower costs. Since any new rail line will be very expensive, a new terminating platform at Roslin sorting out the signaling system to enable higher frequencies and getting some higher capacity trains that are fully walkthrough and have more doors would all make a lot of sense in the meantime. I mentioned before but the stations on Metro are architecturally impressive. Metro center in particular is a masterpiece and that's also true of a lot of the suburban stations, many of which are above ground, but unfortunately this is where the system really stumbles. Stations like Largo Town center, College Park, Huntington, Franconia, Springfield, Vienna, Ashburn, and even Wheaton with a decent amount of development surrounding it have parkades. Parkades are not a ridership strategy for mass transit because at most one parkade, if fully used, will fill two or three trains. Metro has even built parkades on the most recent extension of the silver line, but it really should be implementing frequent, i.e. every 10 minutes or better, all day, i.e. 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. a region-wide bus service, which just does not currently exist. Some limited parking to allow truly rural residents with no access to buses to get to the system is fine. Giant parkades are not fine. What's even worse though is that stations like Greenbelt and Branch Avenue use up the most valuable land directly adjacent to them with giant surface parking lots and they have bus facilities that make very little sense. Instead of having nice integrated terminals like in the city such as Toronto, these stations have sprawling bus loops with little protection from the hot or cold and very long walks as a feature of them. Lands such as this should be redeveloped into something more useful as soon as possible. Oddly, at the same time, many suburban stations also feel very architecturally indulgent with large dramatic canopies that don't cover half the platform, whereas a less exorbitant and more reasonable design could have provided shade and cover from the rain for the whole platform. What I will say is that a trip around Metro shows you the strong case for regional rail in the DC region. Many metro stations like Silver Spring, Lawn Fawn Plaza, and even Fort Totten, not to mention Union Station, could become hubs for a frequent subway like regional rail service replacing what is today the three mark lines to the north and the two VRE lines to the south. Such a service would complement Metro for even longer distance journeys, allowing it to focus more on capacity and more on local trips, and a lot of the infrastructure, short of the enhanced and better connected stations, is already there, including the hardest part to build the city center tunnel. Indeed, after Toronto, DC is probably one of the most natural places in North America to implement modern regional rail. Unfortunately though, things are trending in the opposite direction, with crazy moves such as Mark getting rid of their electric locomotive used on the penline that shares tracks with the northeast corridor to instead use diesels underwire. Nonetheless, even without mainline rail, Metro is an impressive system, from its great architecture to its huge trains, and in doing research and traveling around the system online, I was just excited to imagine the bright future this system could have ahead of it. A special thanks to Iman, Errol, John, Mark and Sam for their on-the-ground insights and footage from Washington, DC used in this video.