Washington DC Sparkles Once Again; Sacramento is a Perpetual Disaster

I was just in Washington D.C. over the Labor Day holiday. I didn’t just fly in to Dulles International Airport and wait for an Uber, I took the Metrorail train from Dulles into Alexandria, VA.

It was fabulous. It was clean, open, well lighted, and the Metro staff was friendly – particularly when I asked for directions where to change trains. Passengers were also friendly. And riding into the Alexandria Metro station was a breeze. The King St. Old Town station even has what Virginians call “Kiss-and-ride,” a drop-off, pick-up area for cars and rideshare services.

“Metrorail provides safe, clean, reliable transit service for more than 600,000 customers a day throughout the Washington, DC area.” I learned that the DC Metrorail is the only rail line in the country that consistently serves more than 10% of the area residents. “The system is the second busiest in the United States, serving 98 stations in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The Metrorail system has six color-coded rail lines: Red, Orange, Silver, Blue, Yellow, and Green. The layout of the system makes it possible to travel between any two stations with no more than a single transfer.”

I was visiting family. We went to the farmers market held downtown at Alexandria City Hall. We took in a Washington Nationals baseball game – they lost to the Tampa Bay Rays. Nationals Park baseball stadium sits on the Anacostia River in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C. We parked a distance from the ballpark. The streets were clear, there were no homeless encampments, and no passed-out bodies on sidewalks, or drug addled vagrants harassing people trying to get somewhere.

There was no vomit or evidence of human excrement on the sidewalks I walked on. There were no drug addicted vagrants hanging out in front of businesses.

The D.C. police were friendly.

And the National Guardsmen walking around the streets were friendly and very pleasant. Visitors were even taking photos with them.

We walked everywhere, got coffee and food, we went to parks, and to the waterfront park, where at last we encountered one clearly mentally ill homeless vagrant.

Sacramento has a lot to learn, starting with rail service to the airport. (Don’t get me started on California’s High Speed Rail corrupt catastrophe – another article for another day.)

In 1987, Sacramento Regional Transit launched the 18.3-mile Light Rail, connecting northeastern and eastern corridors with downtown. The light rail train system mostly destroyed the bus service, which used to take you nearly anywhere you needed to go in Sacramento County. Instead, the bus service became the feeder for Light Rail which crosses over and disrupts major thoroughfares causing long traffic jams.

SacRT has been promising train service to the airport since… well… years.

Light rail service has been extended 8 times since its inception, including the 2012 Green Line to the River District, supposedly eventually extending the Green Line to the Airport. Regional Transit calls it “A Vision for the Future.”

It’s been 13 years for this vision for the future.

Sacramento Light Rail has 43 miles of light rail, and 53 light rail stations. DC Metro serves 600,000 customers a day, serving 98 stations in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. My route from Dulles International passed the Pentagon.

Sacramento Light Rail claims “an average of 22,100 weekday daily boardings as of the second quarter of 2025.” What about “passengers”? Most of those 22,100 daily boardings are twice-daily commuters – a trick RT has used for years to boost rider numbers. So, if it is 11,050 passengers, that may explain the empty Light Rail trains I see every day.

Washington D.C. has 689,545 residents and encompasses 68.35 square miles.

Sacramento County has 1,584,104 residents and encompasses 994 square miles.

Should Sacramento politicians ever get their feculence together, we should have twice the beautiful, functional train transit DC has.

Sacramento still has homeless encampments lining our city streets, spilling over into intersections, in city parks, and along our rivers. And Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent $38 Billion on homelessness. Shouldn’t all of California’s drug-addicted homeless vagrants be living in luxury condos by now for that price?