Tag Archives: Metro Stations

Five Favorites, The District, The Features, WMATA
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Five Favorites: Metro Stations

Photo courtesy of
‘Woodley Station’
courtesy of ‘Tyrannous’

Hi, and welcome to a new feature called Five Favorites.  Our reader Jay suggested ranking favorite places in DC, and I’m going to start with five favorite Metro stations.  These are stations that are the best examples of vibrant, walkable, urban, mixed-use places in the District.  These are the Metro stations that you could emerge from at any time, and there’d always be plenty of people around.  This list is a mix of subjective factors and measurable data, so feel free to disagree and tell me which of your favorites I missed.

Number 5: Woodley Park/Adams Morgan. Ok, we all know that it’s annoying to have to walk across the bridge to get from the Metro station to the heart of Adams Morgan, but still– this Metro station is always full of people emerging from the ridiculously long escalators.  The Connecticut Avenue strip where you emerge from the Metro station is full of some great restaurants, and the 10-minute walk across the bridge to 18th Street puts you in the middle of it all.

The Adams Morgan neighborhood itself is a diverse, multi-cultural neighborhood with restaurants, bars, shops, and corner stores, and cute rowhouses and apartments mixed in.  While this stop just barely made it into the top five because of the distance to Adams Morgan itself, the vibrant, constantly-moving atmosphere of the area and the busy-ness of the Metro itself (residents and commuters in the mornings, people out on dates in the evenings, college students in the late evenings) make it one of the best mixed-use Metro stations in the city.  Walk Score: 95.  The Woodley Park Metro station has an average daily ridership of 8,000.
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The Daily Feed, WMATA
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Finally, Some Metro Stations Get Underground Service!

Photo courtesy of
‘Berry’
courtesy of ‘lorigoldberg’

Oh happy day!  News comes from Metro today that they have begun installing wireless service in 20 Metro stations that will allow customers to access the internet and make calls with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile services as of October 16. This has been a long time coming, and while it’s not the full, system-wide service that has been promised (that won’t be complete until 2012), it is certainly a good start.

This will be the end of Verizon-only service in Metro, with the four providers joining together to build, operate, and maintain the new wireless network.  The firms will also build a second wireless network that will eventually support The Metro Channel, a planned service of system information, news, and advertising in stations, trains, and buses.

So, the good news: more opportunities to check e-mail or make a call if you’re stuck waiting in one of the 20 lucky stations. The bad news: now the rest of us have to listen to more inane conversations while we’re waiting.  Luckily, with three years until the network is complete with service in tunnels, we’ll still have relative quiet on trains (except for those pesky Verizon customers).

The Daily Feed, WMATA
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Park View Station My Ass

New WMATA station names

New WMATA station names

Greater Greater Washington has an interesting idea gone all wrong. They’ve thought to rename Metro stations to be shorter and more logical. On the whole, I’d love the concept, as names like “U Street/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo” are a run-on joke. But GGW better watch what it suggests.

To think that the Metro station at Georgia Avenue and New Hampshire should be called Park View instead of Georgia Avenue or Petworth is crazy talk. No, its fighting words. GGW can get all quick-hit somewhere else, cuz we’re not giving up our station to unknown Park View.