Is the DC Metro Cool?

Part one: Getting into the capital’s biggest hole

(If you thought I was going to write a post about the DC metro system with a “hole pun” you must have lost your fucking mind.)

A city’s public transportation is usually pretty indicative of its overall character. New York, for instance, is the capital of the world’s advertising industry, so what would a visit to the subway be without defaced posters of the Real Housewives with penises drawn into their mouths? Or take Paris: it's a city for lovers, and its metro is rife with teenagers trying to fuck each other between stops. Even Philadelphia’s crime ridden subway is a good example of how the City of Brotherly Love inexplicably manages to have both an exceedingly high murder rate and a lovely and totally walkable downtown.

Of course these characterizations merely scratch the surface of those cities’ venerable and urine soaked underground transit systems. So this is the first in a three part series about Washington’s very own subway system: the metro. Today, I’ll be focusing on getting inside this beast (tehehe).

The Washington DC Metro is the second most expensive construction project in American history, and for a good reason: Washington DC’s swampy geology means that they had to dig extremely deep to get to the bedrock. The DuPont station metro stop for instance goes down 172 feet from street level, making it the deepest and steepest metro escalator in American, and for the gays who congregate around DuPont Circle every weekend it becomes a death trap when mixed with stylish but ridiculous Prada loafers and seven vodka-soda-hold-the-sodas.

So, after a harrowing dissent into Hades, there are one of two options. First you could be in one of the city’s all white or all minority residential stations, in which case there won’t be any tourists and you can walk right to the gates. However, if you’re on the Mall at, say, the Smithsonian stop, you have to elbow your way through a baffled group of Midwestern tourists who need six xanax to deal with the stresses of basic urban public transportation.

Once you’ve hurled little McKenzie and her obese grandma out of the way, it’s now time to pay for your trip. The way most Washingtonians pay for the subway is with the SmarTrip, a brilliant little metro debit card that you wave in front of censors to open up the orange gates separating you from the platform. You can easily recharge your SmarTrip and it gets billed for every use: your balance can even go into negative dollars, which just shows you how much people love deficit spending in Washington DC! (Hahaha oh my god I am too funny. I gotta submit that to Jay Leno. It’s just the edgy humor his show is known for!)

The final obstacles in getting to the platform are the moving orange gates, which they have managed to place directly at testicle height and because been hit by a subway gate in Paris, I am terrified of them. I recently realized that the reason no one in DC is actually from DC must surely stem from the fact that no one here can have kids because of the hundreds of unreported metro ball-crushings that happen every day.

So all in all the system they have set up to get into the metro, with it's steep futuristic escalators, easy to use SmarTrip, and the superiority you feel around bloated and terrified Southern tourists makes it a perfectly reasonable experience.