wait what? DC has one of the worst public transit systems of a major city in the world. portions of it are constantly shut down for maintenance. there was a week this summer with 2-3 fires in the system.
I've been to most of the big cities in the U.S. and despite having some problems the D.C. (the city proper) system is easily the 2nd best public transport. It's no NYC, but it's not bad. By wider extension, the links into the Maryland and Virginia systems are also pretty good. Looking at the map it's not even clear to me why it's ranked below LA or SF. It provides lots of coverage and covers a vast area.
Then I realized they were measuring time as part of their ranking and yeah, I guess I can see that. The D.C. metro area is larger than all of L.A. county and it can take forever to get around it.
Washington DC has some deep issues with a legacy of discrimination and urban decay that created a highly disadvantage population in the cities poor neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, they've tried to use government employment to fix these issues by turning certain agencies, especially the metro, into jobs programs for poorly educated and socialized locals.
This is the primary problem with the DC metro. It's staffed by a croneyist union who holds none of the employees accountable, and who simply pass any and all wage increases onto riders without even trying to attempt to find cost reductions via efficiency. It's an awful, awful system.
Not compared to much of anywhere else. If you live outside the beltway (and BTW, Dulles Airport is WAY outside the beltway) then our public transit system is useless. Even inside the beltway, it's slow, expensive, and unreliable.
(Note: I am a huge fan of public transit, so that's not a general bash. DC's sucks unless both ends of your trip are within walking distance of a subway station.)
There are a lot of comments here about why public transit in the DC area doesn't work, but nobody that I've seen has put their finger on it.
The biggest issue is that the area covers two states, at least ten counties depending on what you count as the “DC area”, plus the District of Columbia, which isn't a state, doesn't have control over its own budget, and has no representation in Congress. Oh, and in Virginia cities are not part of counties so for instance Arlington is it’s own political entity. Plus DC doesn't have control over a large part of its own tax base because the biggest landholder in the city is the federal government, which is exempt from local property taxes. And because unlike everywhere else in the US DC workers who live in Virginia or Maryland don't pay DC taxes, because the Virginia and Maryland Congressional delegations have warped the DC tax code such that all that money stays in their own states.
Any area-wide public transit project thus has to politically negotiate two Congressional delegations, one city that is in theory represented by the entirety of Congress, and 10+ local governments, any of which effectively has veto power over a project; and the primary beneficiary of the project, DC, is de facto not going contribute financially in proportion to how much it benefits because it’s budget won't allow it to do so.
Similarities to e.g. Hong Kong or Europe fail on those grounds. DC area public transit fails because the DC area is a living example of how federalism fails.
There's the Metro, which occasionally kills people due to terrible maintenance, but it's only really useful for DC proper. There's not many tech jobs in DC, they're all outside in northern VA or southern MD, quite some distance from downtown DC. And those places are not well-served by Metro at all; basically there's some giant park-and-ride centers where commuters can drive in, park ($$$) and ride ($$$) the subway to their job in downtown DC. This isn't useful at all to people who actually work out in the suburbs in places like Reston VA (near the airport) or Manassas VA or Laurel MD, which are popular places for tech companies.
From what I've seen on my visits to San Diego, I'd say the situations are pretty comparable actually. Terrible, terrible traffic, and terrible public transit outside the city center, and all the tech companies are nowhere near the metro center.
On top of all that, the other problem in the DC area is that almost all the tech jobs are defense-related, so if you're not interested in that industry (or in working on projects that drag on and on for years and basically never get anywhere, and definitely aren't anywhere near the cutting edge of technology), DC is not the place for you.
It's not NYC, and it's not Chicago or Philly either. DC suffers for making the Metro do double duty as a subway and commuter rail. Plus, many of the suburban stops have awful walk ability (silver line)
The DC metro is absolutely NOT one of the best, for many reasons already explained by commenters. Many, many years of inadequate maintenance have caught up, to the point that this is a site that exists: https://ismetroonfire.com/
I live a half mile from a metro stop (out in the suburbs) and I STILL would rather drive into DC whenever I need to go into the city. It's faster, more reliable, and more convenient even with the hassle of driving in DC and finding/paying for parking.
Exactly, DC is quickly becoming a public transit city.
In this case the building was more than a mile from the closest metro station. Doesn't sound like a lot, but try walking it every day in DC summer heat. Not fun.
As someone who lives in the bay area, I think the DC Metro is absolutely amazing. The idea that your public transportation is always under heavy construction is kinda nice -- at least they're actively working on it. And you know, it actually exists at all.
Having lived in SF, London, Berlin, and now DC, I can tell you that DC's is totally subpar in comparison to any I encountered in Europe. Not only in the year that I've been there have there been multiple shootings on the subway in that time but I can't remember a single instance where I didn't see someone hopping the turnstile and the trains are quite slow (in terms of number of trains per hour).
DC's been on a building spree and rents have stabilized, maybe even decreased a bit. In the greater Metro area, there are four fundamental problems: 1) new housing and jobs are placed too far away from Metro; 2) Metro is severely under-capitalized due to a lack of a dedicated funding source, so they can't undertake the projects they need to restore the level of service that was unsustainably enjoyed in the late 90s/early 00s; 3) we haven't prioritized bus service with BRT, transit ways, dedicated bus lanes, etc., to serve as a middle tier between cars and Metro; 4) DC lacks autonomy from Congress and Congress has explicitly forbade DC from enacting anything that resembles a commuter tax. If we tolled every car coming into DC (NYC and SF have tolls on their bridges and tunnels), that could be a nice funding stream for mass transit projects; but we can't simply because of Congress.
There's also an exacerbating problem, especially within DC's boundaries, that the rise of Uber and Lyft at the same time Metro has taken a nose-dive means an individual can be better off using ride-hailing instead of using mass transit, but it puts more cars on the street and makes street-level congestion horrible. Hopefully DC's DDOT will start carving out dedicated bus lanes so that many DC residents are assured better commutes through bus than through ride-hailing.
The transit is terrible in the parts of the DC area that have most of the tech jobs. The metro adjacent parts of Tysons have passable transit since the new metro line opened a couple of years ago, but all of the other parts like Reston, Herndon, Sterling, Ashburn have practically non-existent transit.
This is a perfect synopsis of why public transit in DC is so hard. Thanks for making my point.
DC, again, doesn't have the tax base one would otherwise expect, for reasons outside its control. The people who control the money that would otherwise be paid to DC do not represent DC. They represent Virginia and Maryland, and also New York and California and Alaska. New York and California and Alaska voters don't particularly want the money to go to DC. They don't see DC as an actual city where real people live, they see it only as the resented center of a distant federal government, only populated by politicians and jackets.
The fact that over a million "regular" people live in DC never enters the equation.
Meanwhile there's nobody in a position of authority representing DC. So those "real people" DC residents don't get a say.
I worked in DC while living in the suburbs of Maryland. The DC metro is far from perfect, but it's really not a terrible option. The bus system is also decent.
Obviously a strong remote program is even better, but very unlikely for government work.
Living in the DC metro area I see two big issues with Metro service: 1- there are four different jurisdictions (VA, MD, DC, and the Feds) all trying to agree on every little thing and all trying to get their piece of the pie, and 2- people have to use Metro. Traffic on I-66/495/395 is so ungodly bad that even when Metro is single-track for repairs it's still on par or even slightly faster than traffic. And that's on a good traffic day; it's worse when it's raining. Not to mention the standard issue with finding and paying out the nose for parking once you've driven into DC. Metro doesn't have a huge incentive to provide better service because even with ridership being down 5% it's probably not going to dip much further since Metro riders have no alternative.
I think DC is also semi-unique in the makeup of its commuters since inside the beltway is such a hub for employers and a large number of employees are happy to have an hour+ commute each way. The cost of real estate is so ridiculously high around here that you don't start seeing 3+ BR townhomes becoming accessible on anything other than a VP+ salary until about 15 miles out from downtown DC. If you want a freestanding home over 1000sft the affordability distance becomes 20+ miles.
From what I've seen a vast majority of people will do whatever contortions they need to in their personal lives to get and keep a government/ government contractor job because those jobs have incredible stability (contractor not as much as working directly for the government, however that depends on what contractor you work for). Once you've got the coveted federal job you're happy to live in a basement 20 miles from the city on your entry-level pay tier because if you can just grin and bear it long enough you'll be almost guaranteed employment for life. Those employees can, do, and will continue to use Metro despite every problem it has because sitting in their car on I66 for an hour is not a viable alternative.
I used to live in DC and took the DC Metro countless times. I never had or saw problems with crime, though perhaps it was because I was usually in northern Virginia and not the southeast part of DC.
However, the level of service is not great; it takes too long between trains, it's really terrible later at night, and it just doesn't go that many places, so you need a car if your source or destination isn't close to the station or possibly a bus line.
I will give them credit though: they finally extended the Silver line all the way to Dulles, so you don't need to take a taxi or special bus there now.
"strong" it is not.
carry on
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