Unacceptable

Two weeks ago, I went (i.e., drove) to a friend's party. It took me twenty minutes from my house. That's about how much time it took me to walk there last night from my office. It took about four times that long to get home on the metro. Which is unacceptable. I can't ask for trains every few minutes late on a Friday night (hell, the Metro can barely provide that level of service during rush hour); the reason I left the gathering before 10pm was because I delusionally thought I could avoid the less regular service that comes after 10pm. On a Friday night. In the nation's capital.

First of all, there was nary an indication of when the next Franconia-bound train would arrive. I checked my phone--and that more user-friendly app is bugged-out so I had to contend with the useless DC Rider, which doesn't do trip planning (go figure), so I then had to go to the unoptimized-as-ever WMATA site. Which told me that the next Franconia train would be in more than thirty minutes. Are you f*ing kidding me? They weren't even single-tracking on that line. Is that even allowed? It appeared I could get home faster by getting to L'Enfant--I could be there in just over ten minutes, and there'd be a yellow line train not long after that. So I did, but there wasn't. Again, I waited over half an hour for a yellow line train, with no information--not on the platform, not elsewhere in the station, and not on the interwebs--about when the trains might be coming.

And that's just my situation. So I spent an extra hour waiting for trains that I could have spent with my friends. But how many people in those stations just wanted to get home from work? These aren't even the buses that the Post reported on a couple of weeks ago; this is the Metro, which is supposed to be more reliable. So much for that.