A satellite photograph of the activity on the Mall right before Barack Obama's inauguration. You may need to zoom in on it when you click on it because it is so large.
For all the stories about people who were stranded, unable to get to their seats for the inaguration, there's one thing that's clearly evident about the mass chaos and huge crowds of people that came to Washington to see Barack Obama be sworn in:
Metro worked.
According to a Metro press release the transit agency gave more than 1.554 million rides on Inauguration Day - the highest one-day total ever. 1.12 million of those were by rail, far surpassing the previous record held by the Reagan funeral, and even beating the record set on January 19th - unique as the day before the inauguration AND a Federal holiday.
The fact that so many people could be moved by the transit agency is both a testament to its planning AND the ability of mass transit to, well, move mass amounts of people. With estimates ranging from 1 million to 2 million people on the Mall for the ceremonies, it's clear that Metro did its job. There would have been no way to move that many people into and out of this city in private vehicles or even tour buses. Simply no way.
Lots of people argue that mass transit is an unreasonable expense on the part of governments, that it cannot be viable on its own, and that fares never cover costs. But I believe that Tuesday's events show that mass transit is not simply one option for providing transportation but in many ways the best way to provide it. So many more people were served by the Metrorail system than could have ever been served by surface streets and concrete freeways.
It's worth noting that thousands more came by train and bus, but very few came by private vehicle. In a nation of SUV's and drivers, it's amazing that mass transit played such a huge role in this event.
Metro worked. And that's something we can all agree on.
