For Inaugural, Metro Will Close PQ Station

That’s ridiculous, and almost as silly as closing the Smithsonian station on the 4th of July. The Secret Service is out of control, often to the detriment of this city. If they had their way, they’d close streets permanently in a much larger perimeter around the White House, Capitol, etc. It’s time to rein in this latter-day Praetorian guard.

Yay, Judiciary Square will stay open! I had been worried. That free parking thing is going to backfire on them, though — a lot of workers are going to be furious when they get to the lots at 6 am and find them full already with people who moved their cars off of the street to save a buck.

I think it’s time to officially call this upcoming Inaguration Day a DC holiday, close offices, and spare residents and local commuters the agony of coming into work that day.

The parking decision does coincide with Metro’s policy of free parking on most holidays and inauguration is a fed holiday in DC. Just an odd scheduling quirk that they are free all weekend, form Jan 17-20.

I believe the Archives station was closed during the last inagration as well. Its inside the secured zone.

By the way, that Starbucks at 7th and Indiana will probably make 3 or 4x the daily haul on Jan 20th. Last inauguration, it was just inside the secured area, if memory serves…

Apparently Metro is encouraging people within 2 miles to walk:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inauguration-watch/2008/11/metro_dont_ride_walk—if_your.html#comments

How many people can Metro transport in one hour?
Metro says it can move 25,000 people per hour at the baseball stadium stop. Even if you double that, 50,000 per hour, & take all five lines – red, orange, yellow, green, blue – that’s 250,000 people per hour.
This would mean that the Metro trains could move one million people in four hours. For four million people, that’d be sixteen hours.
I’m just extrapolating my numbers from the stadium example, but if anyone has any more precise data, I’d love to hear it. There should be some specific data on the number of cars, car capacity, length of time for one full route on each line, etc.
It just seems to me that there’s no way Metro can haul crowds as large as those projected for Jan 20, & if that’s true, someone should be warning people now. Or will we have the typical District – Federal mismanagement & have a couple million people stranded all night on the mall in January weather?
A good walking pace is three miles per hour. I hope people walk or ride bikes.

Freddie: This is not scientific at all, but another set of numbers to look at.

So, a full Metro car can hold 200. Say we add 25 people for a full, uncormfortable standing room only train; so 225 people. Eight cars on a full train. A train every 5 minutes, or 12 trains per hour. That’s 21,600 people trough an average station per hour. Add another train or two per hour and increase capacity, slightly. If possble, cram another dozen or so people on each train and increase capacity.

You see where this is going. Law of diminishing returns.

At least with the sports games, the trains would only be full right before and right after the game. With inauguration, were talking full capacity all day and part of the night. I may just walk from Mount Pleasant.

I am highly skeptical of the 4 million people estimates. Not saying it won’t be a huge event and maybe 1+ million, but 4 million is such a huge number it seems improbable. That is about 1 out of every 75 people in the entire country.

amen, mr. t. it’s utter bulls*&! the levels to which the securicrats are destroying our city. i’m not speaking of this one thing here specifically, but rather the fact that the secret service, et al, close off everything for dubious reasons. security, yeah. we have to be careful about the life of one person. but hell, isn’t the vitality of the city worth something too? otherwise, what’s the point of all of this?