PIDS screen at Pentagon City on July 4, 2006 showing a special service Metro ran from 1999-2008 on the Fourth of July by Ben Schumin licensed under Creative Commons.

In the FY2024 rail service plan, WMATA is proposing to start doing something it has not done in a generation: turn all Yellow Line trains back at the Mount Vernon Square station and send them back to Huntington, made possible by Metro running more trains system-wide. From public comments, it has become clear that this proposal is widely viewed by the public as a regression and service cut to people who live on the northern half of the Green Line.

Screenshot of tweet 

But I have good news: if you keep reading, you’ll learn about how the proposed service plan will more than double the number of trains on the Green Line itself, keeping service quality intact for northern Green Line riders and extending the benefits of frequent rail service to our neighbors on the southern end of the Green Line for the first time.

It’s been 18 years - a generation - since every Yellow Line train turned back

I first moved to a neighborhood served by the Green Line in the summer of 2006. That was a historic year for Green Line service - in December of 2006, Yellow Line trains, which had always turned back at Mount Vernon Square, began running up to Fort Totten during off-peak periods. This was an enormous service improvement for people living at the Green Line stations in between Mount Vernon and Fort Totten - residents of Shaw, U Street, Columbia Heights, Petworth, and Fort Totten started getting trains every 6 minutes in the off-peak instead of trains every 12 minutes. This is a concept known in transit system design as interlining: by braiding together Green and Yellow Line service between Mount Vernon and Fort Totten, service to these core areas was doubled!

This was incredible for residents of those neighborhoods. Not for me: I moved from Shaw to Southwest in August of 2006, on the southern half of the Green Line. I was still waiting 20 minutes for a train to get home late at night.

Southern Avenue at the platform level facing east. Southern Avenue is one of the stations that will have increased headways by Kristen Jeffers licensed under Creative Commons.

More interlining, more better

In 2013, I moved from Southwest to Prince George’s County, to a neighborhood near the West Hyattsville station. This was just after another milestone year on the Green Line. During the peak, some Yellow Line trains started running all the way to Greenbelt instead of turning back at Fort Totten, cutting peak headways at northern Green Line stations from 6 minutes to 4.5 minutes. This was good, but in 2019 things got even better: every Yellow Line train, at all hours, started running to Greenbelt. Even late at night, headways were down to 10 minutes! Manna from heaven…but I missed the whole thing. I had moved to Brooklyn in 2017.

The COVID-19 and 7K derailment disruptions

I moved back to DC in the fall of 2019, and two years later I was appointed to the WMATA board by the Council of the District of Columbia, in December of 2021 (in which capacity I continue to serve). In those two years, everything changed for Metro. At the beginning of March 2020, the staff were collecting routine comments on the FY2021 budget and planning for cherry blossoms. By the end of the month Metro was closing entire stations and suspending lots of service. Seven Metro employees died from COVID-19. And then in October 2021, a Blue Line train derailed and almost 60% of the Metrorail vehicle fleet was suspended from service.

Metrorail service became a ghost of itself with so few railcars available. In the past three years, riders on every line have seen 10, 12, 15, and even 20 minute headways at times. Only the interlined segments of the service have been spared these waits. Those segments, including the northern halves of the Green and Yellow lines, have had twice as much service as the single-line segments.

Everybody gets a train: the proposed FY24 service plan

With the root cause of the derailment identified, Metro is moving at last to restore service - and do even more. The proposed FY2024 service plan for the Green and Yellow Lines is shown below:

Yes, this service proposal involves turning all Yellow Line trains back at Mount Vernon Square. That allows Metro to improve headways on the Yellow Line using fewer railcars, but it means that the interlined stations will now be only in the deepest core of the system: just L’Enfant Plaza, Archives, Gallery Place, and Mount Vernon.

This is what transit equity looks like

What this proposal offers Green Line riders is unprecedented in Metro history: trains every 6 minutes, all day, dropping to 7.5 minutes only late at night. This is the kind of service that riders on the northern half of the Green Line have enjoyed and expected, even all through covid, since 2006, when the first off-peak Yellow Line train went further north. But now, everyone on the full length of the Yellow and Green Lines gets frequent service. From Southwest to Branch Avenue, let the rejoicing begin. To summarize the service history I narrated above, I’ve made a simplified visual that shows the off-peak headways of different segments of the Green Line over time, and the historic convergence proposed for FY24.

Recent and proposed headways on the Metrorail Green Line, 2006 - 2024. Image by the author. 

During the service disruptions of the past three years, riders all over the system have endured terrible headways: sometimes 15, 20 minutes, or worse. It’s been tooth-grindingly awful, it’s pushed people off rail and into cars, and the truth is people have very rightly complained. But there is one group of riders who weren’t strangers to those kinds of headways, who in fact have lived with them all along. That’s everyone south of L’Enfant Plaza on the Green Line. It is not a coincidence that this is where the region’s low-income and Black populations are most concentrated.

The FY2024 Metro budget brings an end to this racial and economic inequity in Metrorail service. For the first time ever, the Green Line and the Red Line will have the same level of service (and if you really dig into the details, the Green Line service will actually be better than the Red Line late at night).

The downside of this proposal is that almost everyone who wants to go somewhere on the Yellow Line will have to transfer there from another line. Metro can reduce the pain of transfers by maintaining good service frequencies on all lines, and by paying particular attention to maintenance and order at transfer stations. Metro’s core value proposition is that it connects the whole region - part of fulfilling that potential means balancing the service needs of different pieces of the system. The proposed FY24 budget is a major step forward in doing just that.


Editor’s Note: This piece reflects the personal view of the author, and should not be read as a statement of the position of the WMATA board. GGWash periodically publishes opinions and other pieces from officials around the region to support transparency and communication about public services. The author represents the District of Columbia on the WMATA Board of Directors and is the Chair of the Greater Greater Washington Board of Directors; as per our editorial policy, board members have no input on the editorial process beyond that which is afforded to members of the public.

Tracy Hadden Loh is Chair of GGWash’s Board of Directors and she represents the District of Columbia on the WMATA Board of Directors. She loves cities, infrastructure, and long walks on the beach looking for shark teeth. She is a Fellow at the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She previously served two years representing Ward 1 on the Mount Rainier City Council in Prince George's County, MD.