At 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, when Metro officials made the unprecedented announcement that Metrorail would be completely shut down Wednesday, Hyatt Regency Bethesda Managing Director Selim Soliman had a full hotel and most of his early-morning employees had finished their shifts and left for the day.
“That puts us in a precarious position,” Soliman told Bethesda Beat Tuesday. “We’re busy and we have to help our evening associates get in. We’re going to try to help each other out.”
For Soliman and many others in Montgomery County, including business owners and commuters, Wednesday’s Metrorail shutdown to allow for emergency cable inspections forced changes to regular routines and some hand-wringing about the state of Metro.
The Office of Personnel Management’s decision to allow unscheduled leave and unscheduled telework for area federal workers helped many. But for businesses such as the Hyatt Regency Bethesda, which sits on top of Bethesda’s Metro station, the closure of Metrorail had plenty of implications for guests and employees.
Soliman said he and his staff spent much of Tuesday evening calling employees and organizing carpools. Lee Barnes, CEO of Barwood Taxi Service, said his company had to arrange rides for much of its staff to reach the company’s headquarters off Nicholson Lane in Kensington.
“We have seen a spike,” Barnes said about the number of Wednesday requests for taxi service in the county. “Also, traffic is heavier than normal in spots, which delays response times.”
At Bethesda-based real estate marketing firm Streetsense, Eric Burka, managing principal, said his company gave employees the option to work from home.
Most of the firm’s 100 Bethesda-based employees commute to the company’s Bethesda Metro Center office via Metrorail.
The Bethesda station had 10,608 average weekday daily boardings in 2013, according to Metro data. Of the 12 Metro stations in Montgomery County along both legs of the Red Line, the stations in Silver Spring and Shady Grove were the most popular with just more than 13,000 average weekday daily boardings at each.
Montgomery County officials said there are about 85,000 daily boardings at Metrorail stations in the county.
“The Red Line is the backbone of the county and people depend on it,” County Council member Roger Berliner said Tuesday. “So this underscores how central Metro is to our county and to our entire region.”
“I used to think Metro was really safe. There have just been more and more incidents,” said Fig Ruggieri, a Silver Spring resident who works in D.C. at the U.S. Tax Court and who drives to and from work on most days.
She planned to leave her home Wednesday a bit earlier than her typical 7 a.m. departure time, anticipating traffic congestion.
“It’s a shame because I think Metro has the ability to be really great,” Ruggieri said. “If more people lose confidence, the less ridership they have, the more the price goes up and the more people don’t ride it. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Mae Jones, a Silver Spring resident who works at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, regularly rides the Red Line to work from the Silver Spring station to the Judiciary Square station.
She said she will telework Wednesday and has long been concerned with Metro’s safety problems, particularly the smoke incident last year near the L’Enfant Plaza station that lead to the death of a passenger. On Monday, a similar incident near the McPherson Square station involving “jumper cables” lead to Metro GM and CEO Paul Wiedefeld’s decision to shut down the entire 91-station system for emergency inspections.
“Actually, [the shutdown] reassures me,” Jones said. “It seemed like in the past, everything went on as usual. That, to me, is not reassuring. Incidents are going to happen and it’s how you handle them is what resonates with me. This is very comprehensive and time-consuming, but I think it’s responsible.”
April Greener, who lives in the Aspen Hill area and on most work days boards the Red Line at the Glenmont station, said her confidence in Metro service was declining long before Wednesday’s shut-down. The staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sometimes drives her son to his daycare in Silver Spring and then boards the Red Line at the Silver Spring station, knowing how difficult it is to find parking on Capitol Hill.
She planned to work from home Wednesday.
“Hopefully, they can address the problem, they can find and fix it so we don’t have this sort of daily struggle about whether to worry about it,” Greener said. “It’s also concerning that somehow they did not fix it already with all the closures we’ve had.”
