Three months wasn’t enough for me, I needed to spend an entire year compulsively tracking my Metro rides. I know I’m an outlier on this, but it’s been a fun way to ‘gamify’ my commute.

Some fun facts from a year on the rails:

• The newest car: 7547 (August 30, 2018)
• The oldest car: 2000 (November 9, 2017)
• Most frequent car: five trips on 5088, interestingly all of them Orange Line rides.
• 882 total unlinked trips
• 592 unique railcars; of which:
  • 373 I’ve ridden in once
  • 160 I’ve ridden in twice
  • 48 I’ve ridden in three times, etc…

Or, to put it in visual terms:

Given the ever-shifting total size of the fleet (thanks to both new car deliveries and old car retirements), my best guess is that I’ve ridden at least once in 50.8% of the WMATA fleet over the past year.

Some fun observations:

Lots of 5000 series cars are now out of service. Some reporting suggests only 62 out of the original 192 5000 series cars remain in service. I’ve recorded trips on 75 unique 5k cars, some of which are surely retired by now.

Railcar types are not evenly distributed across the network: Of my total rides (opposed to unique rail cars), 41% are on 7000 series train, an increase from my trip share after 3 months. Some of that is surely due to 5k car retirements and ongoing 7k deliveries, but some might also be due to my changing commute and because the railcars are not evenly distributed across the entire network. 

For example, a large portion of the 3000-series fleet appears to mostly stay on the Red Line. I’ve recorded lots of trips on cars in the 3000-3150 range (none of them on the Red Line), and far fewer on 3150+.

I ride the Red Line the least often, and thus don’t often encounter those cars, and given that the Red Line is the most isolated in the network, I’m not sure how frequently those cars ‘migrate’ to other rail yards.

Midway through this year, my toddler started at a new daycare located on the Green/Yellow lines. My old commute, both to/from work as well as daycare, was located entirely along the Orange/Blue/Silver trunk. And while the 7k cars are used all over the system, riding the Green Line more often sure seems to mean more rides on 6k trains (only 9.2% of my rides in December; compared to 16% now).

Adding in more Green/Yellow trips subtly changes the fleet mix. My rides on the Green Line are almost exclusively on 6k or 7k trains. The only exception (for two trips) occurred during the concurrent Major Improvement Projects on both the Red Line and the BL/OR/SV between August 11-26 2018, which surely scrambled all sorts of fleet practices.

I ride least frequently on the Red Line, but even that small sample shows a pattern of only riding 7k and 3k cars. Likewise, some of the 3000 series cars on the Red Line tend to stay there.

The vast majority of my trips are weekday trips. My weekend use has dramatically declined. Part of that is certainly my lifestyle, pushing a stroller around. But poor weekend service with extensive track work doesn’t help.

Still, fare policy impacts my rides. Since obtaining the SelectPass, I find myself far more likely to take incremental short trips. For example, a two stop rail trip just to beat the heat instead of walking? No problem.

Methodology:

I use a simple Google form to collect the data. I only collect two bits of information via the form: the car number and line color (I do also have an open-ended text field for any notes). Submitting data via the form adds a timestamp. This helps minimize the data input.

I considered adding additional data fields, such as origin/destination station, but opted not to do so. As a result, I don’t have any information on fares, delays, most frequent stations, etc. 

I collect data on unlinked trips, so any single journey with a transfer is recorded as two unlinked trips. I’ve also (occasionally) moved cars on a single trip due to a hot car, and those trips are recorded as unlinked trips.

Also, my riding habits are not random. Aside from my regular commuting routes, I’m often riding to or from daycare with my toddler. Traveling with a stroller puts open space at a premium, which means I’m more likely to pick the 7th and 8th cars on the train when riding with the stroller. This might not matter much with the older railcars, but might skew the data a bit with the 7000 series and the A/B cars.