I don’t know why I think this is interesting, but I do: the Washington Metro is temporarily moving around the subway lines due to track work this weekend at a single station. It means that some of the lines are being moved to other tracks, so stations will have new colors for the weekend. In fact, this is so unusual that Metro has created new subway maps to be placed in trains and stations for the next few days.
Having lived in DC all my life, this is earth-shaking because I have the entire Metro system locked into my head, unchanging; and suddenly the Blue line is completely divorced from the Orange line, with which it has been partnered for decades. Now the Orange line is a single color, with a forked eastern end.
Perhaps the biggest change is at Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza, which will both have the distinction of being the first stations to serve four different Metro lines at once.
Kudos to Metro for reworking the map, even for a weekend — it makes the changes clear and eliminates the confusion that would reign with station signs and announcements over the unintelligible system PAs…
Well, in implementation it wasn’t quite as slick as it sounds. The notices at Rosslyn and Farragut West during the change were these crude, hand-written signs on poster paper. (Rosslyn did have a nicer sign at the entrance to the station a few days before the event). On the trains, they did have printed versions of your altered map, about a foot square, stuck in the center of the large maps. The smaller maps were not touched so if you looked at the wrong one you were screwed.
On a related front (and I think, actually kind of cool in an apocalyptic way) are the maps that show what happens to Metro if there’s a bad snowstorm and only the underground trains run. It shows all the above-ground tracks (http://www.wmata.com/riding/snow/snowmap.cfm) dimmed out. After the last big storm they wised up and decided that next time one was coming they would store the trains in the tunnels instead of the above-ground yards so they could actually get to them.
It’s nice to see Metro leveraging their iconic map to make these changes easier to understand. Seems like Metro is becoming at least a little more customer-friendly these days…