We visited every Metro station in a day and heard from riders along the way

At 5:53 am on a cold morning about five months ago (cold for DC, that is), my friends and I entered the Virginia Square–GMU Metro station. Why on Earth would three teenagers voluntarily wake up before sunrise to ride the Metro? Because we were attempting to break a world record: the DC Metro Speedrun.

Maybe you have heard of speedruns, maybe you haven’t. They’re popular in games, like Super Mario 64 or Minecraft. The idea is usually to finish an entire game from start to finish in the shortest time possible. People become experts at their chosen games, learning every trick in the book to shorten their times by just seconds.

In this case, our job is to visit every station in the Metro system—all 98 of them—in the shortest time possible, attempting to beat the record set by three University of Chicago students back in August.

Speedruns have become an increasingly popular way for transit enthusiasts (especially a lot of young people like high schoolers, I’ve noticed) to explore, celebrate, and bring attention to their city’s transit system. In keeping with this tradition, I wanted to do something more with my speedrun—to use the opportunity to explore a deeply important topic from the perspectives of three teenagers and a bunch of everyday riders.

You may have seen dire headlines a while back about how WMATA (the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) faced a $750 million per year budget shortfall, and how this could devastate the system. Wyatt Gordon wrote a more in-depth explanation of the fiscal crisis and its consequences, but the gist of it is that while this gap had been filled by federal relief funding during the pandemic, that funding will ended on July 1, 2024, the first day of WMATA’s 2025 fiscal year. At the time of our speedrun, WMATA had not yet secured enough funding for the next fiscal year, and it was looking uncertain that the funding would ever be secured at all.

How did WMATA plan to compensate for this funding shortfall? The only way they could: drastically cutting service to bring down costs. Frequencies would instantly go from an all-time high to only every 30 minutes (even in rush hour), stations would close, and late-night service would be eliminated entirely.

Given the clear severity of this proposition, a lot of news coverage (appropriately) cropped up, investigating how it would impact people’s commutes to work and the economy. But there were gaps in the mainstream coverage: I didn’t see an exploration of how this crisis might disproportionately impact certain riders and I felt there was a failure to explore the long-term implications of a region suddenly lacking an effective mass rapid transit solution.

My friends and I, being teenagers, rely on public transportation frequently to do daily activities. While we would not be considered public transit commuters, we might be impacted just as hard as the congressional staffers and consultant firm contractors who first come to mind with the word “commuter.” I knew there were so many other people outside the traditional idea of a “Metro commuter” who also had a stake in this issue. I wanted to know how service would impact different types of riders in unique ways, and what riders (and our region at large) would lose on a human level.

In the full podcast episode I produced for the Arlington Amp, I explore these questions in more depth. I interview riders on all six lines (in the middle of a nerve-wracking speedrun, don’t forget) and explore how this diverse group of people would be impacted in unique and personal ways. I wanted this story to illuminate the huge variety of riders’ experiences and their personal stakes—the side of the story that numbers alone can’t tell. I mix together hair-raising audio from the speedrun itself, interviews with riders, and voiceover that gives important context and helps to tie everything together. You’ll meet my friends and 11 other interesting riders who each teach us something different about the potential impact of losing the Metro.

Lastly: While local and state governments have since come up with a plan to mitigate WMATA’s near-term funding issues, involving a 12.5% fare increase and hundreds of millions of dollars in increased direct funding, this is likely not the last we will hear of a funding crisis because WMATA still has serious structural issues. It may feel like we can breathe a sigh of relief now that the worst of the potential effects have been averted for the next funding cycles, but WMATA’s lack of dedicated funding sources means its future is at the mercy of DC, Maryland, and Virginia and practically guarantees similar funding crises to recur, especially next year when the most recent funding deal expires.

We need to stay vigilant about understanding the devastating consequences of losing our region’s core mass transit service—not just to preserve WMATA through its next funding round, but ideally to address its long-term structural issues and invest into public transportation more consistently and sustainably.

As to whether we beat the world record? You’ll have to listen to our podcast to find that out…