It sounds like the Dump the Pump Day promotion may have had an impact on commuting behavior Thursday. Combined with the fact that there was a Nationals game at RFK Stadium, Thursday ridership was the seventh highest ever on Metro. Dump the Pump was an effort to get drivers to leave the car at home and try transit. I’d be interested to see what the numbers were for the local transit services like Ride On in Montgomery County and DART in Alexandria as well. The interesting thing in looking at the top 10 highest ridership days at Metro is that seven of them occurred this year and, with a few exceptions like the Immigration Rights Rally on April 10 and the first day of the Cherry Blossoms Festival on March 31, none of these high rider days had a hook except for a Nationals game. Of course the biggest hook of all could be the simple fact that gas prices have gone through the roof and commuters are looking for options. I would also imagine that the tie-in with the Nationals is good fodder for the District politicians who made the case that getting the team would increase revenue in the city by bringing morepeople in.
A good start for the Wilson Bridge
Congratulations on the earlier completion of the opening of the new lanes on the Outer Loop at the Wilson Bridge. Last week it didn’t look like the construction was going to go too well but things did get done and half of those new lanes are in play now. It wouldn’t do any good to have all of them open because that would do little but create a bottleneck on the Maryland end. Having driven on the bridge, I can tell you that it is truly a thing of beauty and I look forward to the day when the whole thing is open for business.
Want to know your driving time for Point A to Point B?
Want to know how long it will take to get from Point A to Point B in real time? If you’re eastbound on Route 70 and if Point B is I-695, then you could be in luck. Maryland officials, who seem to really be at the forefront of new technology (they were the first to test the use of cell phone signals to measure traffic volumes), are conducting a pilot study on eastbound 70 between Route 27 and I-695. Sensors in the roadway measure traffic volumes and speeds and estimate the time it will take to get from each portable display sign to the interchange at I-695. Reliable drive times have been the holy grail of traffic information since most drivers tend to think in terms of time rather than distance but they have been very difficult to estimate. This project is being jointly funded by Maryland’s State Highway Administration and the Federal Highway Administration and will run through the end of July. The data will then be analyzed and I would imagine a wider roll-out might occur in the near future.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to [email protected].
