u/dclocal12

I put together a detailed post last month on Metrobus fare evasion, going through WMATA's metrics to understand how we got to the current situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/WMATA/comments/1uyzisf/bus_fare_evasion_and_enforcement_what_the_numbers/

A key takeaway was that WMATA's major initiative on bus fare evasion was having some effect. Bus fare payment for June 2026 was ~37%, a level that WMATA hadn't had since January 2023. Still a national outlier in fare evasion, but real progress.

Unfortunately, that progress has stalled after just a month. WMATA released their bus ridership data for July 2026, and the fare payment rate is stuck at ~36%. That's not anywhere near the sustained progress that's needed.

There‘s been a very noticeable uptick in out of service buses running along Wisconsin Avenue, apparently to/from the Western Bus Garage. Meanwhile, headways on Wisconsin remain a challenge for WMATA.

Here’s a modest proposal: let passengers hop on. Running these buses as a limited Wisconsin Avenue service (say, between Friendship Heights and Woodley) could significantly improve headways along the corridor, with little impact on operations.

What do folks think?

Edit: look, argue against this on Wisconsin Avenue all you want, but the concept isn't categorically outlandish. There are plenty of transit agencies worldwide that run service when pulling out of or into a depot, run routes where a depot is a terminus, or have a policy of allowing passengers on depot runs. There are tradeoffs between deadheading and running service to/from a depot.

What an own goal by WMATA's leadership. They introduced this performative and ineffectual policy to placate conservative critics. Now it's getting thrown back at them by WaPo, recycling transit union talking points.

There have been more and more requests for photos of names on the USAA National Military Monument. Could there be a subreddit rule on this to limit the clutter? Maybe something like a single thread for people who want to ask? Thanks.

(I'm not taking a position here on whether this is a meaningful monument or a PR stunt for USAA, just the many requests for photos. Thanks to all who served.)

WMATA released an update to the Metro Pulse app this morning (2.0.4). I've been very critical of the app before, and it doesn't get a lot of love on here, so I want to flag that there are a few real improvements.

• The app loads much faster than before. I measured launching from a cold start into the Favorites tab with fully visible and populated data at 1.45 seconds. That's roughly a 2x speedup since the 2.0 launch (2.88 seconds), though still much slower than Metro ETA (1.12 seconds).
• The Favorites tab is now a dashboard view of lines, stops, and places. It no longer has a map that clutters the display and is duplicative of the Explore tab.
• The navigation bar at the bottom has been restyled with a design that's more cohesive. It's not how I would have designed the app (a native bar would've been preferable), but it's a reasonable choice and an improvement (on an iPhone, it still looks ridiculous on an iPad).

So that's the good news. Unfortunately, the app still has lots of UI pop-in, jank, and inconsistency. Profile syncing is still broken. There are also new bugs, like how rail routes sometimes only display one direction (did nobody test this?!).

Overall, it's still a mediocre app, and the performance by WMATA's contractor (CAI) remains utterly unacceptable. But there is some progress.

This afternoon, Trump announced his grand vision for a redeveloped Dulles airport. The centerpiece is... a giant parking garage, running along the entire front of the iconic Eero Saarinen terminal. Seriously.

https://preview.redd.it/2f9pzowpd8gh1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b10da8de9174626eeff9fb18367da592f6cb40b1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0-6jdZ_q6g

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/28/trump-set-unveil-dulles-makeover-after-months-personal-edits/

https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-125476

I was trying to hold out hope that there might be some good that could come of this, since Dulles does need a lot of work. Alas, the hope was in vain.

A few hints that u/stratapan is about to announce a carbon steel clad griddle...

A couple of weeks ago, on a post about griddled french toast, someone asked about a Strata griddle. The response: "Working on it!"

Last week, on a post about Strata's wok: "Pro is not coming out this year...but, since you're asking, we will be announcing something else in 1-2 weeks"

This week, an Instagram post of french toast: "An even cook every time. Gotta love that aluminum core 😉" (I might be overreading this one, since there's a pan in the picture.)

A long stretch of Wisconsin Avenue is closed because of the Graham funeral. This was previously announced by MPD. But communication from WMATA about bus rerouting or headways? Nothing beyond a generic detour notice, posted late, which doesn’t even show up in Metro Pulse. And buried in a bunch of other alerts. Working real-time ETAs? Completely nonexistent. Yet another bus service disaster on Wisconsin Avenue, one of DC’s busiest transit routes.

In late May, WMATA announced that it was making a major push in bus fare enforcement and rider education. I will readily admit I was skeptical that the campaign, "Fares Pay for Service," would accomplish much. That seemed to be a common perspective.

https://www.wmata.com/news/metro-launches--fares-pay-for-service--campaign-to-support-safe-.html

After taking a close look at WMATA's fare compliance and enforcement statistics, I'm happy to report that I was wrong. The bus fare enforcement campaign is starting to work. There's still a very long way to go, and success is far from certain, but WMATA has genuinely turned a corner.

https://preview.redd.it/su4nef54msdh1.png?width=1659&format=png&auto=webp&s=c2297a08e4a95ccb789b84c668debe9d03732923

https://preview.redd.it/q8jie8p5gsdh1.png?width=2488&format=png&auto=webp&s=673ae1678dda9bb00423f60714d11547b0dd1dfc

Let's start with how fare compliance became such a problem for Metrobus. In the late 2010s, fare payment was at roughly 70-75% of riders. Not great, and slowly trending downward, but within the normal range for a major U.S. bus system. Then three things happened, which cratered bus fare payment.

1. The Covid pandemic started to hit, and fare compliance (at least arguably) dipped a smidge to ~65%.
2. WMATA made the bus network fare free from March 2020 to January 2021, sending fare payment (intentionally) to 0%. Reasonable minds can disagree about whether WMATA was right to make Metrobus free, or free for so long, but this much is certain: 10 months of free bus service radically changed payment patterns, and they never recovered. Immediately after fare reinstatement, payment was at just 50-55%, a huge drop from the pre-pandemic numbers.
3. WMATA did essentially no fare enforcement from 2020 to 2022, and it did limited fare enforcement in 2023. The bus payment rate continued drifting significantly downward, ultimately reaching 25-30% for the past couple of years. Given the lack of a specific impetus, this is almost certainly attributable to the lack of enforcement, combined with changing norms. Riders saw other riders not paying and became accustomed to not paying.

So that's how WMATA dug itself into a very deep hole with bus fare payment: the pandemic did a little, but mostly it was eliminating fares for a long time, followed by not enforcing the resumption of fares and then tolerating low payment rates for years.

WMATA significantly ramped up its overall fare enforcement in 2024, hitting a record high. Then it hit a record again in 2025, and we're on track for another new record in 2026. While it's somewhat difficult to disentangle rail and bus fare enforcement in WMATA's statistics, that multiyear effort appears to have been overwhelmingly rail fare enforcement. (Which, alongside the new fare gates, has been a huge success at limiting rail fare evasion.)

That brings us to now. WMATA bus fare enforcement has very visibly increased. MTPD doesn't consistently report bus-specific fare enforcement numbers, unfortunately. But this much is certain: Bus law enforcement incidents, which includes fare enforcement, spiked 2x from June 2025 to June 2026. The bus fare payment rate for June 2026, the first full month after WMATA launched its campaign, is 37%. That's a month-to-month jump of ~10% and a level of bus fare payment that WMATA hasn't had since January 2023.

To emphasize, this is still a very deep hole for WMATA. The bus fare payment rate is still extraordinarily low, both in comparison to the 2010s and other major urban bus networks. It took years to make this mess, and it's going to take a long time to get out of it. I also remain skeptical that the current level of bus fare enforcement will be enough, and it's unclear how long WMATA will keep up its campaign. But at least so far, this is a real effort with real preliminary results.

Based on the election returns, it looks like JLG will presumptively be the next Mayor of DC. She’s promised to be much more pro-transit than Bowser.

So… what do you think the next Mayor should do to improve public transit in DC? Quick-build bus lanes for all major routes comes to mind.

An update to the Metro Pulse app shipped today, claiming "Improved performance" in the release notes. While there's been some evident tinkering with the app's loading behavior (which looks a bit different), and it is noticeably faster than the last version, I'm sorry to report that it's still slow and buggy overall.

Loading the updated favorites dashboard took 2.34 seconds, down from 2.88 seconds in the last version, but still much slower than Metro ETA, Transit, and Metro Hero. The favorites also still don't work right, and the map still has loads of stutter and pop-in, among other remaining issues.

Lots more detail here, for those curious:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WMATA/comments/1tyq3tj/benchmarking_metro_apps_yes_metro_pulse_is_that/

https://www.reddit.com/r/WMATA/comments/1tsprl9/metro_pulse_20_is_live/

Inspired by the discussion about Metro ETA, the new Metro dashboard app that's generated so much interest, I thought it might be helpful to benchmark the various popular Metro apps.

I measured each app on my iPhone 17 Pro, using screen recordings for precision. The time is how long it took starting from when I tapped the app icon. I did a force quit of each app before the measurement and waited several minutes, both for a consistent baseline (needing to load the app and Metro data fresh) and since typically (at least for me) when I launch one of these apps it's been awhile. I also set Metro Pulse to open to the favorites tab since that's realistic for a frequent rider.

Here's what I found.

• Metro ETA
  • 0.90 seconds - dashboard with current information starts sliding into view
  • 1.12 seconds - dashboard is fully in view
  • 1.69 seconds - map zoom animation is complete
• Transit
  • 0.89 seconds - loading screen faded out, street map layer starts rendering
  • 1.11 seconds - street map layer fully rendered, dashboard with current information starts sliding into view
  • 1.49 seconds - rail/bus map layer fully rendered, dashboard is fully in view
• Metro Pulse
  • 2.23 seconds - opening animation completes, showing a blank page
  • 2.79 seconds - rail map layer renders, but is centered at Metro Center, which is nowhere near me
  • 2.83 seconds - dashboard with current information starts sliding into view, but the favorites are wrong and useless (seemingly a profile data sync error)
  • 2.88 seconds - dashboard is fully in view
  • 2.96 seconds - street map layer starts rendering
  • 3.01 seconds - map recenters about two blocks south of where it was, still nowhere near me
  • 3.35 seconds - street map layer finishes rendering

A pretty embarrassing showing for WMATA. Metro Pulse is very clearly slow and buggy.

The updated Metro Pulse mobile app is now live (as WMATA promised for today), and you can get it by force updating the app on your phone (or just waiting for auto-update). I wasn’t in the beta test, so I hadn’t tried it out before. These impressions are from the iPhone version because that’s what I have.

The good:

• The UI has had a complete reskin to match WMATA’s brown unified style. It mostly looks good and is consistent. There are a few iffy choices (especially bright purple for menu selections), but on the whole, a big step forward. The old app, by comparison, was mostly generic blue and white.
• The location system (your location, search location, and stop locations) has been reworked and actually makes sense now. In the older version of the app, there was a weird interplay between locations that made map navigation counterintuitive and a struggle. The map also often defaulted to Metro Center.
• The favorites system has also been reworked and makes much more sense now. You can favorite lines or stops, and you can easily rearrange the favorites list. The old version of the app had a half-baked favorites system that was annoying to manage and didn’t reliably work.
• You can set the app to open to a specific tab. For most folks, setting it to favorites will make sense.
• The app help menu and offline maps menu have refreshed assets. The prior app had dodgy screenshots in the app help menu and less helpful offline maps.

Room for improvement in the app:

• Bus stops, buses, and trains remain slow to render and pop into the map with a lag. Relatedly, the map can stutter when panning. This is definitely the same Metro Pulse app under the hood, with a lot of room for performance improvement.
• The map still loads at Metro Center sometimes, then it snaps to your location after a moment. Again, same app under the hood.
• The logic for matching your location to a favorited bus or rail line isn’t quite right. Sometimes the favorite menu doesn‘t show the closest rail stop on the line, for example. And if you’re roughly equidistant between two northbound and southbound pairs of bus stops, the favorite menu isn’t smart enough to recognize that, and it’ll split the pairs showing northbound from one place and southbound from another.
• The main navigation bar at the bottom isn’t native, and it shows. It doesn’t match the iOS style and can conflict with swiping up to switch apps.
• There isn’t a way to fully dismiss the drawer when looking at a map.
• The app launch graphic is an unnecessary delay and doesn't correctly render as full screen (there are visible gaps at the borders).
• It’s possible to spin the map with a two-finger gesture, but there is no button to reorient the map. The recentering button doesn’t reorient the map.
• There isn’t an evident way to favorite a line from a bus stop or train station. You have to search for the line by name.
• The rail stations don’t show entrances or exits and inconsistently show elevators.

Missed opportunities:

• There’s no meaningful iOS integration beyond the app itself. A widget for upcoming arrivals at favorited stops would be valuable. Same for a watch display of that information.
• There isn’t SmarTrip integration beyond an embedded web browser. WMATA says this is coming later.
• Performance data has been pretty much removed from the app. That’s mostly fine, since the app should be focused on riding and there’s a website for tracking performance. The performance data in the last version of the app was also mostly useless and presented poorly. That said, bringing back some live indicators (even optional) about speed and headway adherence would be valuable. That’s the data that made MetroHero so popular for frequent riders.

Big picture, this is a comprehensive and meaningful improvement. The app is much nicer to use, and WMATA deserves the victory lap they’re taking with it.

At the same time, I’m still left scratching my head about the app development process... why did it take so long to address so many basic issues, and why are some still unaddressed? Why wait for a major 2.0 release and then drop it at midnight on a Sunday? Why is the UI completely proprietary rather than native? This still feels like government software development that’s been contracted out and finally hit a minimum viable release target, rather than an app owned by WMATA that’s making continuous progress. It’s a good app, but it can and should be a great app.

Edit: Tried the app out on iPad, too. Oof. The navigation bar is comically oversized, there are overlay bugs with the navigation bar and the drawer in the explore and favorites tabs, font sizes are inconsistent, keyboard and mouse navigation are inconsistent, the app icon and in-app icons don’t always render cleanly (maybe they aren’t vector graphics or rendered to the right resolutions?), and the layouts break in some window sizes. The app is usable, but it’s obvious that this wasn’t a priority, and all the downsides of (unnecessarily) using a proprietary UI framework are on full display.

Edit 2: The favorites list is bugged. The list keeps adding new entries and rearranging entries. I suspect this is broken syncing, based on data from the last version of the app. It’s really frustrating to see how much individual developers can build when the official WMATA app has so many basic problems.

Edit 3: The morning after app rollout, live rail and bus tracking is broken. That makes the app unusable. Come on WMATA, this isn’t acceptable. Hire some competent developers.