Friends raced to check out every Metro station in one day. Would they make it?

Washington Post

2 days ago

Lots of people — okay, at least seven people — have visited every Metro stop in a single day. It's even in the Guinness Book of World Records. But as far as they know, John Veltum and his friends are the first to try actually swiping in and out of all 98 stations.
Why? To see if they could. Why now?
'We know that Metro is extending their hours,' Veltum said. Starting Sunday, June 22, the system will open at 6 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and close at 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. With that kind of time, they figured anyone could do it. For now, it still felt like a challenge: 'We were really under the impression we were racing against the end of the service day.'
Trains have always attracted competitive riders — the first New York City subway run was in 1940. But Metro speedrunning has really taken off in the past couple of years as the system has gotten both more reliable and more savvy about social media.
Veltum and his friends are Metro fans, but really they're the kind of people who want to turn anything into a game. They've also build a raft of garbage and sailed it across the Potomac. They weren't planning to submit for a Guinness — 'it's kind of sold-out,' Veltum said — but they did hope people would follow along.
Would they beat the clock? On X and Instagram, followers debated the cost (a day pass is $13.50) and the bathroom access ('technically open to the public').
Louie Melluish and Will Sheriff built a model that told them the most efficient route. Running a simulation a million times, they were given an average completion time of just under 20 hours and a 72 percent chance of making it. They liked those odds.
Megan Magette monitored the MetroPulse app for delays. And they used a guide they found on Reddit to position themselves closest to the escalators at every stop.
They left Shady Grove in Maryland at 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, with a plan to get to Ashburn in Virginia before midnight. The goal was to hit the downtown stations during rush hour to take advantage of the highest possible frequencies in the most crowded stations. (Knocking people over was not in the spirit of the race.) At emptier stations that get fewer frequencies, they would aim to get on and off the same train to avoid wasting minutes.
After finishing the Red Line at Glenmont, they doubled back and covered the Green Line from Greenbelt to L'Enfant Plaza, then the eastern legs of Blue, Orange and Silver. (There was a pit stop at U Street, where a friend brought them bananas and water.) To avoid a single-tracking delay — and make sure they didn't miss Arlington Cemetery, which closes before the rest of the system — they did the southern ends of Yellow and Blue before going back to Green. The final leg would head west toward Fairfax and Ashburn.
Early on, they realized they might have overestimated the difficulty of the task.
'We'd been very pessimistic on our assumptions of when the next train would come,' Veltum said. The model also assumed they would never make it back on the same train they got off after going in and out of the station, but they did so a dozen times.
That's where the guide came in. It's the work of Ethan Ableman, 30, a lifelong Metro rider, who put it on Reddit about two years ago. The idea came, unfortunately, from signage on newer New York subway cars. Following Ableman's advice on where to stand, they were always in the car closest to the exit.
'I wouldn't have taken this on except for the fact that I realized that there's this little measuring stick that is in the D.C. Metro, which is the platform edge lights,' he said. 'Every single station has exactly the same' (digression: almost the same) 'layout of the edge lights.' No tape measure necessary. The guide took him about six months to put together, with the help of Google Slides. Although he emphasizes that it is not an official WMATA guide, he did use their Helvetica font.
Has he thought about doing a Metro speed-run? No.
'I am very much a transit nerd, but I'm more interested in the operations and the structure of the system,' Ableman said. 'People have different types of nerdy stuff.'
So, back to our original crew. They made it to Ashburn at 8:30 p.m., with three and a half hours to spare. They had crisscrossed the region in 15 hours 35 minutes. The surprise favorite: Hyattsville Crossing (formerly known as Prince George's Plaza), an open station crowned by a distinctive Brutalist parking garage.
They got a group shot in the otherwise deserted station thanks to a stranger who had been following along on social media and decided to greet them at the finish line.
He wasn't the only one. Seeing they wanted to go to Denny's after the ride, an 'angel' named Anna showed up and offered them a ride.
Yes, by car. After 98 stops, and twice as many closing doors, Veltum explained, 'the ding gets a little traumatic.'