No-Lunch4249 t1_jeb17xc wrote on March 30, 2023 at 6:35 PM

Bring back one-way fare gates in the busiest and most tourist heavy stations: Union Station, Metro Center, Gallery Place, Smithsonian, etc.

It works in a mostly empty station but somewhere there’s a lot of foot traffic happening, allowing two way traffic causes more problems than it solves

sprint113 t1_jebasv5 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 7:36 PM

Pentagon is already back to one-way gates. I wonder if it's because it gets a lot of bi-directional traffic due to being both a major employment center (people exiting in the morning) as well as a transit hub (people entering in the morning).

Having two-way gates can better handle surges in passenger traffic, i.e. when a train unloads at a station

DCmetrosexual1 t1_jebfvtm wrote on March 30, 2023 at 8:08 PM

They already do this at a lot of stations. Gallery Place comes to mind.

No-Lunch4249 t1_jebghst wrote on March 30, 2023 at 8:12 PM

I’ve never noticed at Gallery place but when I’m there it’s usually later at night, like 8pm or later so maybe it’s back to 2 way at that time

YeahIMine t1_jeb41ir wrote on March 30, 2023 at 6:53 PM

This could easily be solved just by setting up stanchions.

No-Lunch4249 t1_jeb4in6 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 6:56 PM

Don’t even need to do that, the gates clearly have the capability because there’s a go/no-go indicator. It’s incredibly easy to fix but for some reason WMATA wants it this way

YeahIMine t1_jeb5nmm wrote on March 30, 2023 at 7:03 PM

They could get smarter about when to activate one-ways automatically. Elevators even know what floor they should be on depending on time of day. Small problem is that when folks are swarming the gates at busy stations, they can't see the red through the crowd, so will keep crowding. Just a guess. It may also cause accessibility issues for folks with visibility issues who'd get confused about which gates will be active apparently randomly.