Riders on Metro’s Silver Line and other lines serving Fairfax County could see a number of service improvements coming down the track.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s board of directors got a first look at the transit agency’s fiscal year 2026 budget conditions and, if funding allows, potential service improvements at a meeting of its finance and capital committee last Thursday (Nov. 21).
According to WMATA staff, a proposal to add peak-time train service to the well-used Silver Line would cost an estimated $500,000 annually and shoehorn in two more trains during morning and evening rush hours between the Wiehle-Reston East and Stadium-Armory stations.
If ridership conditions warranted, there could be more use of eight-car trains versus six-car trains on the Silver Line, Metro Chief of Planning and Performance Tom Webster said.
While the fiscal 2026 budget year doesn’t kick in until July 2025, more immediate help for riders on both the Silver and Orange lines, and others throughout the system, is on the way.
They include a return, after 15 years, of more automation in train operations. Use of the automation was suspended after a 2009 crash that killed nine people, even though a track defect, not the automation system, was found to be the cause.
Fully-automated braking, acceleration and door operations historically have proved more speedy than when those operations are delegated to drivers. The return of automatic train operations will also benefit WMATA’s bottom line, Webster said.
“By speeding up trains on each of the lines, we can operate the same service frequency with fewer trains,” he said.
Examples given at the meeting:
- Under manual operation, it typically takes 92 minutes for a Silver Line train to travel from one end of the line to the other. Fully-automatic operation could shave 7.3 minutes off that total.
- On the Orange Line, automated operation could save 5.8 minutes from the current 61-minute end-to-end travel time.
Similar time savings would occur on the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow lines. It’s another effort to wring “a tad little more efficiency” throughout the bus and rail network, according to Metro General Manager Randy Clarke.
“Is there any more juice left to squeeze?” he said, describing the guiding mantra behind the increased automation plan.
While full consideration of the 2026 budget is still months away, the Nov. 21 presentation offered some information about projections for ridership and costs.
Right now, Metro staff are estimating $534 million in revenues for fiscal 2026, up from $488 million in the current fiscal year. Expenses are estimated at $2.53 billion, up from $2.46 billion in the current budget.
Adding in some ancillary factors, the net subsidy required from all sources, including local, state and federal governments, to run the transit agency in the next fiscal year will be $1.9 billion, up from $1.75 billion today. Fairfax County and other Northern Virginia localities are among the governments that provide taxpayer funds to support Metro’s operations.
Ridership on transit systems locally and nationally was decimated by the pandemic, but has rebounded to varying degrees.
For WMATA, Metrobus service is now at or above pre-Covid levels, as is weekend Metrorail service, but weekday passenger counts on rail continue to lag.
Pronouncing himself “cautiously optimistic” about both ridership and finances, Clarke said the goal was to be conservative in estimates.
Tracy Hadden Loh, a D.C. member of the WMATA board, said she appreciated “erring on the side of underestimating what ridership might be.”
“We can’t use past performance in order to predict the future [post-Covid]. We don’t have a methodologically sound way,” Loh said. “Being conservative makes more sense.”
Staff concurred.
“There’s a wide range of possible outcomes” on the ridership trajectory, Webster said.
For the fiscal 2026 budget, staff also floated a proposal that some riders will cheer: a 6 a.m. start time for train service on weekends, an hour earlier than the current operating start.
