Metro at 25: Celebrating the Past, Building the Future

By R. Wayne Thompson

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970871902
• ISBN13: 9780970871909
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Washington Metropolitan Area T
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good overview of Washington Metro

Surprisingly, even though we spend much of our lives using public transportation, there is very little written about it. Washington Metro, one of the great success stories of public transportation over the past quarter-century, is the finally the subject of an informative, well-illustrated coffee-table history book produced by WMATA, the folks who run Metro.Conceived as early as the 1950s as a partial solution to the growing traffic problems in the nation's capital region, Metro rose out of a series of studies into an active project by 1969, despite concerted opposition by powerful highway lobbyists on Capitol Hill. The book's early chapters provide an overview of the road to the initial groundbreaking ceremony in December 1969.Metro opened for the first time in 1976, but remained a work in progress for years, as the original segment slowly expanded to fulfill the original 103-mile adopted plan by 2001. The book gives a blow-by-blow account of all of the major and minor historical mileposts in the development of Metro, right down to the opening of each station.The main success story of the Metro system, of course, is the series of subway lines crisscrossing the city, carrying roughly a million riders per day. Yet the Metro system would be incomplete without the story of the Metrobuses that service the subway stations. Coming together from four separate regional carriers in 1973, the book describes how Metrobus has continued to expand and improve its operations ever since.The book also takes a behind-the-scenes look at Metro operations and maintenance and gives a hint at some of the projects on the horizon, including additional stations on the blue line, and a proposed Dulles transportation corridor.Of course, no glossy book produced at the behest of a corporate board is without its faults, and this one is no exception. The book is relatively short considering the number of pictures and the subject matter at hand. And, as with any publicity book, controversies and detailed, descriptive accounts are few and far between. The book rightfully extolls the virtues of the development which has accompanied many of the stations in D.C., Maryland and Virginia (including several eye-opening before-and-after shots). Much of the corporate history, though, reads like a Communist-party newspaper -- pictures of dignitaries and ceremonies, biographies of enlightened board members, dates of important reports and events -- without the hard-hitting reporting of an academic or journalistic product. When problems are addressed, they tend to be framed as uncontroversial or minimized. The lack of a Georgetown line or station is dismissed as unwanted by the locals in Georgetown, who oppose any further growth in that congested part of the city. Perhaps some people still do view a Georgetown Metro link as a bad idea, but frustrated commuters stuffed on the infrequent Georgetown shuttle buses every day will tell you otherwise.Another problem is that the book bare