Mapping Who Will Be Hurt by D.C. Metro's Late-Night Cuts
Vee Tucker, a bartender and banquet server in Washington, D.C., doesn’t know how she’s going to get home from work anymore. Starting this summer, the train she takes home to suburban Maryland, along with all other D.C. Metrorail lines, will be closed by the time she has cleaned up after her patrons, just before midnight.
Two weeks ago, while working an event, Tucker experienced what her future without rail service may be like. “People at this holiday party wanted to stay longer, so by the time we finished, it was 12:30 and the train had left,” Tucker says. “I don’t have a car. I can’t afford the $30 Uber to Landover [Maryland], so I thought I was going to have to sit in the banquet hall till the train came again at 7 a.m.”
Fortunately for Tucker, a coworker volunteered to pay for a Lyft—an option she knows is not sustainable long-term. She dismisses the idea of taking the bus, saying it would take two and a half hours and several bus transfers, during which she would have to stand outside by herself in parts of town she feels are unsafe.
Born and raised in Northwest D.C., Tucker, like many residents of neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, left the District because it was unaffordable. Now, she says, she may not even be able to travel to jobs in the very neighborhoods she was priced out of. “I’ll have to pay for Lyft or Uber or give up work—and I can’t afford either.”
Service workers are likely to face some of the worst effects of the Metro Board’s decision last Thursday to slash late-night rail service system-wide for two years in order to tackle the rail system’s immense maintenance backlog.
Under the new schedule, rail service will be cut off at 11:30 p.m. from Monday to Thursday nights, 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights, and 11 p.m. Sunday nights— a significant cutback from the traditional weekday midnight closings and 3 a.m. weekend closings that were in place until a maintenance push began in June.
To visualize the challenges these workers will face, CityLab mapped out WMATA data on after-midnight ridership, alongside Census data on the geographic distribution of D.C. area service workers who use public transportation. In the first map below, you can see where most people are boarding Metro during late-night hours, based on WMATA’s weekly weekend ridership averages from September 2010 to February 2016. The bigger, darker dots indicate where more commuters are leaving from after midnight. Zoom in around the map to see more stations and click on each stop to see weekly averages of late-night riders entering these stations.