After fiddling with my spreadsheet full of tracking the individual metro railcars I’ve ridden, I’ve got a few more charts to show my year-plus worth of Metro trips.

Part of the reason I didn’t have these charts before is that dealing with time as a field in Excel/Google sheets is kinda a pain. It’s not always a clear number, but I was nevertheless able to sort it out.

So, some charts:

Trip Distribution: What does my overall trip distribution look like? Surprise, surprise! It’s peak-heavy.

The red lines indicate the break points for WMATA’s fare changes. A few obvious trends emerge:

• Most of my rides are during the peak, right around peak commuting times.
• Most of my off-peak riders are mid-day, using Metro to attend out of office work meetings, etc.
• My PM commute is bi-modal, often due to two separate trips as I usually do day-care pickup.
• Very few evening trips (again, likely thanks to that day-care pickup)

Railcar Distribution: One of the other observations was the unequal distribution of railcars across the system, particularly for the 3000 series.

I made these distribution charts for each rail car series. For example, here is the 6000 series:

You can see I’ve ridden cars across the entire 6000 series fleet. I’ve ridden in two of those cars five times each. As of the creation of this chart, I’ve ridden in 97 of the 192 cars in the 6000 series.

The distribution of my rides in the 7000 series is different:

The pattern is different, due to the continual expansion of the 7000 series fleet. The lower number cars are older and have this been around longer, and with more chances for me to ride them. And the distribution reflects that (note that this chart goes up to the eventual size of the 7000 fleet, which is not yet in full service).

But if you look at the 3000 series, the pattern is different:

As you can see, I haven’t ridden many cars above number ~3150. The reason is that I seldom ride the Red Line, and most of those cars appear to be isolated on the Red Line:

(Apologies for the automatically adjusting vertical scale) Obviously, this is not a huge sample, but the only Red Line 3000-series trips I’ve taken are on the older half of the fleet.

The Red Line is the most isolated line on the system. Also, I ride it the least (and therefore am unlikely to pick up small changes to the fleet management practices).

The next big fleet milestone will be the arrival of the full set of 7000 series railcars, along with the retirement of the 5000 series. That will probably trigger the last round of shifting yard assignments for a given fleet until the arrival of the proposed 8000 series.