I shouldn’t be so surprised by the lack of common sense I see (seemingly all the time).
The last leg of my three hour (each way) commute to work is what I affectionately call Dante’s Eighth Level of Hell – the DC Metro subway system.
This morning, as I was riding the orange line, just a couple of stops before the Ballston Metro station (where I exit), the train conductor announced, “Passengers, please be advised this train will not stop at Ballston. There is a train directly behind this one which will stop at Ballston.” So, I exited at the Clarendon station and wait four minutes for the train that was supposedly directly behind my now unfaithful train.
Normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem, except that the Ballston station has just that one little escalator from the platform to the mezzanine level. Ballston is among the most populated stops on Metro, and there is always a CRUSH of people leaving each train. The 2nd “up” escalator has been shuttered for “improvements” for several months. They could have torn it out and built an entirely new escalator in far less time, but I digress.
This morning, we had two train-loads of commuters exiting this one train. It took at least five minutes to get from the train platform to mezzanine.
Being a curious commuter, I asked the Metro attendant why the bastard train chose to bypass Ballston. He said the order “came from downtown, probably because the train was behind schedule.” Nuts!!! It only had four stops to go. Were those 60 seconds so important for Metro’s schedule, for the next four stops? Sheesh.
An article in the September 24th issue of the D.C. Examiner reports on how Washington, D.C. has the 2nd longest average commute time in the country (behind NYC), an average of 33.4 minutes. (Hah! I would KILL for that. Know anybody you want dead?)
One of the city’s planners commented on the fact that this statistic has held steady since they began studying this way back in 2005. And he had the audacity to justify this sin upon humanity by saying, “Commute times…have been more or less steady since the early 19th century, when commutes involved walking or horse-drawn buggies.” Is he serious? Is he citing the twice-monthly trip from the farm to the general store as justification for status quo on the crumbling transportation infrastructure?
When I made the choice to adopt a three-hour each way commute, I foolishly told myself, “Why not? A thousand people a day are doing it. It can’t be all that bad.” I had no idea that most of these 1,000 people are neurotic bordering on insanely psychopathic. I fear, am I becoming insanely psychopathic? Maybe I was already. Now I’m scared.
