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Metro News

Metro Transit Police arrest alleged “cell phone flasher”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An accused “cell phone flasher” has been arrested by Metro Transit Police in connection with several recent incidents on the Metrorail system.

Metro Transit Police today announced new charges against Steven Andrew Slaughter, 22, of Washington, DC, for alleged lewd acts and an assault that occurred in January.

Starting in mid-January, Metro Transit Police detectives became aware of a series of incidents in which a male subject would approach female passengers on the Metrorail system and show them a lewd photograph of himself on his cell phone screen.  In some cases, the suspect would approach victims claiming that he was raising money for a youth organization.

Slaughter was identified using Metro’s high-definition video surveillance footage, as well as witness statements and reports.

At the time of the incidents, between January 14 and 23, Slaughter was on pre-trial release for a several cases in DC Superior Court, including a charge of lewd, indecent or obscene act for masturbating aboard a Red Line train, and a second charge of simple assault from an alleged incident at Woodley Park Station in which he lifted a woman’s skirt.

The judge in the prior cases ordered Slaughter to stay off Metro, except for travel to court or case-related activity.

On January 24, Slaughter pled guilty to the earlier charges.  On February 7, he was sentenced to one year of supervised probation.

In the recent cases, Slaughter is charged with two counts of contempt because the alleged incidents took place while the “stay away” order was in effect.  In addition, he is charged with one new count of simple assault for allegedly spitting on a Good Samaritan who attempted to intervene when a victim was being harassed aboard a Red Line train.

“This case shows a clear pattern of disturbing and unacceptable behavior,” said Metro Transit Police Chief Ron Pavlik.  “Sexual harassment, inappropriate touching and lewd behavior have absolutely no place on Metro, and we will use all tools at our disposal to arrest those who commit such acts.”

Metro Transit Police offers several ways for riders to report harassment or sexually inappropriate activity.  An online web form – wmata.com/harassment – sends important information to Metro Transit Police detectives.  In addition, riders can contact Metro Transit Police 24 hours a day via text message to MyMTPD (696873) or by calling (202) 962-2121.  Victims can remain anonymous if they wish.

In addition, Transit Police remind all passengers that solicitation of donations is illegal on Metro.  Most reputable organizations, such as the Boys and Girls Club, do not use so-called “on-foot” peddlers.

Slaughter is being held pending a detention hearing scheduled for Friday, February 14 at 9 a.m.

 

Alt Transportation

Far Beyond Rush Hour: The Incredible Rise of Off-Peak Public Transportation

Far Beyond Rush Hour: The Incredible Rise of Off-Peak Public Transportation

Take a look at the above photo of a New York City subway platform and guess what day and time it was taken. If your snap glance absorbed only the crowd, you probably guessed a weekday rush hour. But look more closely. You don’t see grey-haired men in flannel suits with solemn faces, you see All The Young Dudes in jeans just kind of slouching there, dude-like. You don’t see businesswomen striding for the stairs, you see ponytails and a lime green T-shirt that wouldn’t fly even on the most casual of Fridays.

This is not the picture of a platform at morning or evening rush on a weekday in Manhattan. It’s the picture of a platform at half past one. In the morning. On a weekend. In Brooklyn. It’s also a sign of things to come.

The growth of midday, evening, and weekend transit use is not unique to this particular stop on the New York City subway. More critically, the rise of off-peak ridership is not unique to New York City or to subway systems, either. Metropolitan areas across the United States — whether their primary mass transit system is a metro rail or a commuter train or a bus network — are recognizing that city residents can’t get by on great rush-hour service alone. They need frequent, reliable transit all hours of the day and long into the night.

“The growth in transit ridership is happening in the off-peak hours,” says transportation planner David King of Columbia University. “It’s strange. You get on a train at five o’clock in morning and it’s jammed.”

Take the New York City subway in a broader sense. Since 2007, ridership on the weekends has grown at a much greater rate than ridership on the weekdays. During the period from 2007 to 2012, weekday ridership grew at just under 7 percent. During that same stretch, weekend ridership grew at just over 10 percent. A planning director at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the New York Times in 2011 that to find a similar explosion in weekend subway use you’d have to go back to a time when people worked six days a week.

“The New York City subway has seen tremendous growth on the weekends over the years,” says MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan. “Weekend growth has outpaced regular growth.”

Now head to the Midwest and take the bus system in Minneapolis-St. Paul. There, too, off-peak service demand has outpaced rush-hour growth along some bus corridors. In response, the Metro Transit agency in the Twin Cities expanded evening and weekend service last summer. Some off-peak frequencies have tripled — down to a bus every 20 minutes instead of one every hour. That puts service ahead of where it was even before the Great Recession. In other words, this isn’t just the economy recovering, it’s ridership surging.

“There’s many routes where the off-peak ridership is growing faster than the peak ridership,” says John Levin, director of service development at Metro Transit. “We’re always going and finding where we can free up resources and where we need to add resources, and it tended to be that we’ve seen the most need during the off-peak, in terms of the overall scale.”

And go to Los Angeles, where even commuter rail — the transport mode created specifically for rush-hour riders — has seen an off-peak and weekend bump in some metro areas. Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten says weekend ridership in May 2013 hit 21,315, a jump of nearly 30 percent on the year before. He says that while weekday ridership is steady, weekend growth has been in the double digits. In response to this off-peak demand, Metrolink began promoting weekend rides and recently doubled some Sunday service.

“Certainly commuter-based travel is always going to be a core component of overall ridership, but people who have recreational trips … they’re taking advantage of the system on the weekends,” says Lustgarten. “Generally speaking, people are looking for alternative means of getting around town.”

Looking for it on a weekend. In spring and summer. In Los Angeles.

•       •       •       •       •
Transit experts have been making the case for off-peak service expansion for years. It’s oftencost-efficient. (Many drivers needed for rush hour get paid to sit around during the midday hours.) It’s always great for society. (Lower-income people use off-peak transit at much higher rates than wealthy people; a 2003 study found that 60 percent of off-peak riders made under $40,000 a year.) And there’s enormous growth potential. (Two-thirds of transit trips are notwork commutes, as the Commuting in America, 2013 chart below shows, making them strong candidates to occur outside rush hour.)

“There’s long been a recognition here that frequency improvements — especially off-peak frequency improvement — more than pay for themselves in terms of ridership,” says Metro Transit’s Levin. “When we doubled the frequency on one of our core routes a few years ago, we more than doubled the ridership.”

Best of all, the benefits of full-day service create a cycle that perpetuates more transit use across the board. That’s the main takeaway of a recent off-peak service analysis made on the Pascack Valley line of New Jersey Transit commuter rail. The agency introduced non-rush hour trains on that line in October 2007 — seven inbound and six outbound where there’d been no off-peak service before. In June 2010, Devajyoti Deka of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center began conducting surveys and on-board focus groups with off-peak and peak riders alike, to see how the service change had influenced their behavior.

Without question, the addition of off-peak service on the Pascack Valley line took cars off the road. In a recent issue of Transportation, Deka and coauthor Thomas Marchwinski of NJT report savings of at least 12 million vehicle miles a year. More fascinating was the way off-peak trains affected rush-hour ridership. Roughly 5 percent of surveyed riders started using more peak trains once the off-peak service was introduced. And of all the passengers who said they’d go back to driving if off-peak service were cancelled, three in five were peak riders.

Deka believes that there’s a psychological element to off-peak service that transit agencies fail to appreciate. If people know a train can take you back anytime you need, they’re more willing to take the train in during rush hour in the morning. “They have this thing in the back of their mind that if they have to come back early they can come back early, or if they have to stay late they can stay late,” says Deka. “So there is this indirect benefit which you will not notice in ridership data.”

(As for that ridership data, Pascack Valley weekend ridership was up more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2013 over the year before, while weekday was up 8 percent [PDF]. That trend held true across the whole NJT system: weekends up 12 percent, weekdays 3 percent.)

Considering the rationale for off-peak service has been around for years, the big question is why transit agencies are only now seeing enough fresh demand to do something about it. Some agencies point to changing travel habits among Millennials. Some experts see a broader but related shift in American auto dependency, with an increasing number of urban households living car-free. That’s true even in places without great transit systems — Detroit experienced a 5 percent increase in car-free households from 2007 to 2012 — suggesting economic roots.

Immigration might play a role in off-peak demand, too. Last year, Governing reported that immigration had surpassed domestic population growth in 135 U.S. metro areas, according to Census data. Such demographic shifts could have a big influence on the nation’s transport network, because low-income immigrants are much more likely to commute off-peak than their American-born counterparts (see evening rates below), says planning professor Michael Smart of Rutgers, who studies immigrant transportation patterns. They’re also more likely to use transit for the types of non-work trips that often occur off-peak; for instance, says Smart, they’re five times more likely to take transit to get groceries.

“It’s definitely true that immigrants are more likely to be using transit to get to work in odd hours,” he says. “But even more than that, they’re much more likely than the U.S. born — particularly low-income or low-skilled foreign-born people — to use transit for things that are not about a job.”

Then there are changing work patterns themselves. The rise of telecommuting means people traveling at non-traditional times for both labor and leisure. Such shifts, in turn, mean service workers must travel at off times to get to their jobs. The result, says David King, the Columbia planner, is a bifurcation of the labor market in which neither high-skill nor low-skill workers are tethered to a 9-to-5 workday — or a 9-to-5 transit system — as strongly as they used to be.

“That will dramatically change how we travel,” says King. “What that means for future investment priorities is also important.”

•       •       •       •       •
Bay Area Rapid Transit is already weighing what off-peak demand might mean for tomorrow’s transit investments. BART has long been considered a hybrid commuter rail and metro core system: serving downtown San Francisco but also the suburban Bay area. The plans for 2025 and beyond, dubbed “Metro Vision,” call for tipping this balance toward the core end [PDF]. That means trains running every 15 minutes or better middays, late nights, and weekends — true “show up and go” service.

“That gets us less out of the commuter rail mindset and more to the metro mindset of frequent service for 18 hours a day, rather than just frequent service during the peak,” says Tom Radulovich, head of the BART board of directors. “Metro Vision, just the name of the project implies that at least the BART planners think we’re more of a metro than commuter rail. And this is what metros do — run frequent off-peak service.”

The ridership trends certainly point in that direction. Off-peak ridership on BART has grown steadily since mid-2011, often outpacing rush-hour rates. In October 2012, for instance, peak ridership grew 10 percent on the year before while weekday off-peak grew 14 percent, Saturday grew 21 percent, and Sunday grew 13 percent. The agency made off-peak expansions several years ago only to cut them during the recession, but it’s started making them again on what Radulovich calls the “shoulders of the peak.” Those first few trains after rush-hour service ended were just too crowded.

Radulovich sees a number of reasons for the rise in off-peak demand. Tech companies keeping unusual hours. Service workers returning to the job market on swing shifts. A declining rate of car-ownership among riders. Perhaps above all, a rise in residential and business development in and around BART stations — and not just those located downtown. Altogether it amounts to a culture of residents less reliant on the automobile for whatever trip purpose, at whatever trip time.

“I think those folks are going to want BART to run more frequently and be more convenient at more hours of the day,” he says. “They’re going to be interested in off-peak trips, they’re going to be interested in Saturday and Sunday frequency, they’re going to be interested in evening frequency, they’re going to be interested in late-night service, in a way that our traditional park and ride suburban constituency is not.”

Of course, if it were easy to build a full-scale all-day transit system, more cities would have done it. The challenges generally break down into money and politics (what doesn’t?). On the economic side, there’s a reluctance to shift resources away from rush-hour because that’s where ridership, and thus revenue, is more certain. Off-peak service means new operating costs, in the form of drivers and maintenance, and perhaps even new capital expenses. Since most fleet maintenance is done on weekends and nights — in a word, off-peak — some systems will need more vehicles to expand service into those periods.

At the cultural end, the low-income riders who stand to benefit most from increased off-peak service often have the weakest political voice. Some politicians carry a vehicle bias: they will see empty midday buses and trains and blast off-peak expansion as wasteful, even as they endorse highway lanes full of single-occupancy cars. Others have a rush-hour mindset: they come to work at that time, so everyone else must, too. These counterarguments aren’t always off-base. Most people do drive most places, and the biggest commute shares do occur at the peaks [PDF].

“The peak tendency has been amazingly consistent,” says Steven Polzin of the University of South Florida, co-author of the Commuting in America, 2013 series on commute trends. “One of the intriguing things is there’s been a decline of the ‘peak of the peak’ commuting, but not a lot.”

What that means is that the early adopters of tomorrow’s all-day transit systems are likely to be big agencies in major cities. That’s not to say smaller areas lack the popular demand or the institutional desire to go off-peak. Just recently Jacksonville, North Carolina, population 70,000,expanded bus service to the shoulders of the peak so more commuters could get to and from work. It’s more to say that “somebody has to change the tradition,” as Deka puts it, “and the big agencies are in a better position, I think, to change the tradition.”

Top image: Nolan Levenson courtesy Rudin Center / NYU.

This article is part of ‘The Future of Transportation,’ an Atlantic Cities series made possible with support from The Rockefeller Foundation.

Alt Transportation, Random BS

D.C. area’s longer-than-average commutes could be taking a greater toll on women

Adeyinka Ogunlegan remembers sitting at a red light on Georgia Avenue when the text-message alert came through. Her main route home to Laurel was blocked because of emergency utility repairs.

In an instant, her run-of-the-mill commute, a drive she does daily, generally without incident, turned into a logistical nightmare.

Her son, who is now 4, was waiting to be picked up at preschool, and her daughter, now 3, from the babysitter’s. The clock was ticking, traffic was crawling, and she still had at least 20 miles to go. She knew instinctively that a trip that normally takes her about an hour would take far more time unless she came up with a plan.

“I was like: ‘Oh my God. Oh my God,’ ” she recalled. “There was no bailout. It wasn’t pretty.”

Ogunlegan took a deep breath to keep herself from panicking. As her car idled, she could feel her blood pressure escalating. She checked Google Maps in hopes of finding a way out of the traffic jam. Ahead, she spied a few cars turning off onto side streets and decided to take a chance. She managed to navigate her way through side streets (thank you, GPS) to New Hampshire Avenue and from there to the Intercounty Connector, on which — for a fee — she sped to Laurel, arriving at her son’s school with a minute to spare.

A Washington Post poll of area residents this past summer found that women and men who drive average a roughly 30-minute commute. But for about one in six women — about one-third of whom have children at home — that sometimes harrowing daily commute is getting longer. While D.C. area drivers are seeing less congestion on local roads, they still spend seven more minutes commuting each day than the average American, according to the Census Bureau.

Those lengthy rides could have implications for women’s health and stress levels, particularly because their commutes often include stops other than home and work. A growing body of research shows that when it comes to commute stress, women feel the impact more than men.

In a 2010 study, researchers in Britain found that women reported having higher stress levels related to commuting than men did — even if they had shorter commutes.

“The theory was that it was a question of flexibility in time use,” said Jennifer Roberts, a professor of economics at the University of Sheffield. For women, “there were more deadlines for where they had to be. It was not just an issue of, ‘I have to be at my desk at 9.’ It was, ‘I have to get my kids to child care. I have to pick up the dry cleaning.’ ”

Roberts and her colleagues found the impact was particularly acute for women with preschool-age children. Researchers found the psychological effect on them was four times as great as for men with children of the same age.

Add a longer commute into the equation and it could be even worse for women, Roberts said.

Rori Pollak, executive director at Little Beginnings Child Development Center, has seen more than her share of harried moms and dads flying through the doors of the Arlington County day care.

“Most are very apologetic,” she said. “The hardest part is really for the child if they’re the last one here.”

Like many day-care centers, Little Beginnings charges a fee for late pickups. Parents who are one to 15 minutes late pay $20, and the fee escalates from there. Those who have more than four late pickups within a certain time frame face possible dismissal from the center. But Pollak rarely has to enforce the rule.

Pollak said she and her staff understand the stresses and work closely with parents to ease the anxiety. For example, center officials encourage parents to have backup plans in the event of emergencies.

Independent travel behavior analyst Nancy McGuckin said women may find commuting more stressful because they tend to do more than just travel to and from work. They make additional stops — at the market, at day care, at the dry cleaner — a phenomenon known as “trip chaining.” Men, by contrast, are more likely to drive straight from work to home.

In her research, McGuckin, who has worked as a consultant to the Department of Transportation, found a difference in men and women’s attitudes about commuting.
“The commute for men is a moment of respite in the day, where they can sit and listen to the radio,” she said. “But I think, for women, it’s simply another tense, mind-racing trap because you should be somewhere or have just a few minutes to get to day care before you get charged.”

And despite women’s advances in the workplace and as wage earners, that dynamic has not necessarily changed.

“Though we see some changes in the younger generation, women still do the majority of housework and child care,” said McGuckin, who has examined the effects of commuting on men and women. “Commutes women do are more often populated with stops. And they’re more likely to do pickup in the afternoon.”

Federal statistics illustrate the disparity. Among households with two working parents who commute, women make more than half — 63.3 percent— of the trips for drop-off and/or pickup.

Ogunlegan, a lawyer at a Rockville-based public-affairs firm, is one of those women. The family has one car, and her husband takes a commuter bus and Metro to his job at the Commerce Department in downtown D.C., which means she is responsible for both drop-offs and pickups.

As a result, she has carefully calibrated her 50-mile daily drive. Mornings can be hectic, but it’s the drive home that is the real stressor.

“It can be crazy,” Ogunlegan said about her commute, which includes two drop-offs, at the babysitter’s and at school, before she heads to her office. “It’s just this juggling act that you have to manage.”

She knows that if she does not leave work at 5 p.m. on the dot, she risks missing the 6:15 p.m. pickup deadline at her son’s preschool. She’s had a couple of late pickups — including one when she was in such a rush, she couldn’t remember if she had even closed her car door. Center officials were understanding, but even so, she does not like to be late. She knows her son’s teachers have children, too.

 

“You feel bad,” she said. “You just don’t want to be that parent.”

Some women said that, when they are able, they’ve tried to make adjustments to their schedules and to the places they choose to work to ensure they can be close to where their kids are. But even then, they know they are just one snowstorm or traffic tie-up away from a late pickup.

Susan Burkinshaw, a comptroller who lives in Germantown, has turned down higher-paying jobs in the District and Virginia so she can work within a 10-mile radius of her children’s schools and avoid the frantic last-minute scramble that comes with traffic delays.

For Kellie Reynolds, a mother of two from Gaithersburg, pickup always felt stressful, particularly when her children were younger.

“I never wanted to pick them up late,” said Reynolds, who works for the Federal Drug Administration. “It wasn’t the [late fee]. It was thinking about how bad the kids would feel if it was closing time and I wasn’t there.”

For years, Reynolds handled afternoon pickup and shuttled the kids to doctor appointments and practices because she had a more flexible work schedule than her husband, who worked in Frederick, Md. But after he took a job in Rockville, she became the one with the longer drive. As a result, he is able to pitch in more often, easing some of the stress.

Some women also acknowledge that they may put more pressure on themselves.

“I think it’s just the way our brains are wired. [We’re] always planning our next event — the laundry, calling about the doctor’s appointment,” said Bridget Dunn, a mother of two from Alexandria. “I don’t know that men do the same thing. We get hung up on these kinds of things because we’re sort of the conductor. I think the stress lies in that.”

Scott Clement contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/research-shows-women-have-longer-commutes-more-stress-than-men/2014/01/29/f4d198be-76f9-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html

Local News, Random BS

Weather causes road problems, school and flight delays

Light snowfall in the D.C. region overnight created challenges for commuters Wednesday morning, as some schools closed and others announced delayed openings, airlines canceled flights and police closed a usually busy ramp onto the southbound lanes of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway because of downed wires in the roadway.

U.S. Park Police said the wires toppled overnight onto the ramp that leads to the parkway from Route 193 in Greenbelt. They are not sure when the ramp will re-open, as they are waiting on a repair crew.

Police warned drivers throughout the region to use caution because some roads are slick and icy.

Metro had troubles on four of its five lines Wednesday morning due to the extreme cold weather.

VRE sent an email alert Wednesday morning to its passengers warning that power is out at its stop at the L’Enfant Station at 6th and C streets SW. VRE officials said riders should use caution when getting on and off trains because the platforms are dark.

Schools are closed in Prince William, Stafford and Culpeper counties. Schools in Fairfax, Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard, Frederick and Arlington counties, and in Alexandria, are opening two hours late.

Air travel has been affected by the latest round of snowfall. About 250 flights across the country were delayed and another 950 were canceled as a result of the winter weather, according to FlightAware.

Eighteen flights were canceled at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Another 15 were canceled at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and four were canceled at Washington Dulles International.

For more transportation-related stories, click here. For updates on the Washington weather forecast, go to the Washington post’s Capital Weather Gang.