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I think you’re just going to see a lot more enforcement, so we’re pulling even more police to be very bus specific, versus right now they’re a little bit of bus and rail combination calls for service and enforcement. We’re going to just get extra highly focused on enforcement.

You’re also going to see a lot of administrative people. I’ll be out, a lot of our management team will be out supporting our front line staff. The operators will be quoting the fare again, not to do enforcement, but just to do more fare awareness. We have a big campaign out, just kind of starting on digital and static kind of ads in the buses and trains and whatnot, about how, if you pay a fare, you keep a station or a bus clean.

If you pay a fare, you know we get to run more frequent buses, which people need, and to get around and access the opportunities of our region. So we’re just kind of going at it from all avenues, and part of this is also a little bit of media awareness of like, this is a big topic, and people have to take it serious.

Yeah, so basically going back to what they used to do here at Metro, and kind of what’s standard all over the country. So something to the version of, ‘Good morning, the fare is $2.25’ as someone, if they walk by the fare box. Or, ‘Good evening, the fare is $2.25.’

We’re looking for this human touch, some, you know, and naturally we’re human-to-human, that already does some de-escalation. It brings a little bit of, you know, empathy and collaboration that is a shared community value. And we’re just reminding people what the fare is. After that, if they don’t pay, our operators are supposed to not get involved in that at all.

We only care about the operator being safe. They have these secure compartments, and we want them to go and operate a vehicle very safely with all the passengers involved, and of course, with inside the traffic and other users of the roadway. So, we’re not looking for any operators to do enforcement, they’re specifically told not to do that.

They are all trained in de-escalation, and the job here is for them to just do basic customer service. If you went through a drive-through, someone would tell you, you know, or some restaurant, someone would say, ‘Good morning.’ Same idea, we’re just trying to bring a little friendliness, civility, and we’re hoping that is reciprocated by our customers being nicer, and also, you know, more people paying the fare.

I acknowledge that that’s what they said. I would never purposely put any of our employees at risk. I’m the one that, if someone gets assaulted, I’m calling them to check in on them. There’s nothing worse than being the head of an organization if one of your employees gets injured.

Operator assaults are way down. We’re going to continue to work on that. Again, they’ve been getting de-escalation training. We were spending, I think, almost $15 million to reinforce all of our operator compartments and shields, so someone can’t even get close to an operator.

We’re also trying to use some common sense here. If you normally have someone that gets on the bus that seems to be a security threat, is unstable and being erratic, you’re already supposed to hit a button and call for police, so I wouldn’t expect someone to engage them on a $2.25 fare if they’re already trying to get police to be engaged.

We run a very safe system. Metro is (at) the lowest crime we’ve ever had in our history of 50 years last year, and this year is already lower than last year. We have a bus police specific unit and we’re enhancing that even more. We did ask our jurisdictional partners for some more authority last year on fare enforcement with special police and civilian. We did not get that authority, but we’d like to see our jurisdictions ask for that or help us support that, so we could have even more safety, security personnel out on our buses to support our front line staff.

But you know, I respected the union’s position, but I also respect that this is kind of standard everywhere else, and there’s a reason. It’s because we want to provide great customer service, and obviously we need to collect fares to run the service the community relies on.

They better not be doing confrontation. They’re specifically told not to do confrontation. It’s literally written not to confront somebody, not to try to do enforcement. Your job is to say, ‘Hello, good evening, good afternoon, salutations,’ and remind people what the fare is. So it’s fare awareness, fare quoting, but it’s certainly not fare enforcement.

Sure, so we did a study with our district partners, and just a reminder to you and your listeners that the way Metro’s funded is across three jurisdictions: D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and we do get some capital money from the federal government, but these kind of improvements are usually sponsored by one of our regional partners. So, in this case, this would be the District.

And we did this study to basically analyze, is the current station going to work, is it not going to work, modifications we might need. There’s been this kind of vision of a new station. Again I’m not sure how that got all that much legs over the period of time, but we want to make sure we really nailed that down. Do we need it? Do we not need it? Is it even physically possible?

And really, the long-term vision of the streetcar that was down H Street and Benning Road, we need that to work much better to get people from Union Station to the RFK side, let alone across town. So, we did this study. The current station, I remind everyone, is named Stadium-Armory, so obviously it is very close to the stadium. We do not believe an extra station is not only even technically feasible, it just wouldn’t even provide that much value, and it would be an enormous amount of money, and change the entire track alignment to even get to a new station.

And we want to run what we now call the Gold Line, which is a center running, dedicated bus rapid transit line from Benning Road across to Union Station, into the campus of RFK. If we do this correctly, we’ll move crowds significantly smoother and safer and faster. We need new elevators at Stadium Armory. We have one elevator, and it’s not even on the side of the stadium, and it’s very old. So, we need to upgrade all of the elevators, which is about 10 stories deep at that station. So, very significant hole in the ground to manage those things.

We need to extend the mezzanine, so as it’s not about moving people in the trains. We’re going to have a lot of Blue, Orange, Silver service there. That’s not going to be the issue. It’s moving people from the top, we would say top side, down into the mezzanine, fare payment, and then down in the platform to get the crowds out, kind of like we managed on July Fourth.

So we need that station to function with the Commanders in the District on the surface correctly to funnel people smoothly and fast, and safely get them onto the trains and get the trains out, get the next train in there. So that’s what we’re working on.

Our biggest concern is that July 2030 will be here before we know it. So we are looking to get an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) done with the District. Quite frankly, we think it needs to be done by July to really put all of our effort to delivering these very complex projects that we have to do, by the way, running service, and we have to get them done for 2030 to make opening day work.

So, you know, ultimately it’s up to the District and the funding arrangement, but we’re working with them every day. I appreciate the mayor, council, their leadership. We hope, if that process gets concluded, then we’ll be off the races working with them on building these great new improvements, and the Commanders have been heavily involved in that as well.

The station itself is more or less the same, it’s the modifications of the station. So we need our escalators thought through differently. Our fare lines need to be different. We need to extend a mezzanine, so for any listener that’s ever been to like Foggy Bottom, where, when you come downstairs you can extend halfway across the platform. So there’s multiple ways to go from the mezzanine down.

We don’t have that, and we need that significantly at Stadium-Armory to manage the crowds, because we have a 600-foot platform, so we need to get people spread across that platform efficiently. So, when a train pulls in, we put them in cars, we close the car doors, the train’s gone. Next batch, next batch, next batch. So, you know, trying to think about 800,000 people at a time, and how do we quickly move them through there? So, that’s a good example.

The elevators I mentioned. So, it’s not necessarily the tunnel shape and structure down by the platform, it’s more of just how the surface works, and then into the station, and then from there down into the platform. And we have to figure out how to do that, by the way, while running trains every three to four minutes through that station.