Transportation
A Striking Pattern to D.C.'s Metrorail Ridership on Inauguration Day
This is what it looks like when hundreds of thousands of people stand still at the exact same time.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority ran rush hour-level train service for 17 straight hours on Monday to get revelers (and the odd dissenter) in and out of downtown D.C. for Barack Obama's second inauguration. By the agency's preliminary tally, 800,000 passengers moved through the Metrorail system that day, from 4 a.m. Monday through 2 a.m. early the next morning. And that total doesn't count public bus passengers or the swarms of people who came to town in charter buses.
The agency's planning blog has since posted this remarkable graph of the day's ridership: