The nice thing about the subway in New York is that it is sub-surface, made from cut-and-cover method a hundred years ago. That system, despite the inconvenience of “being messy” on the street during construction (same as San Francisco, et al), means that riders today can “drop down (or up,in the case of elevated)” one flight of stairs directly to the trains. New York’s old clunky system with it’s express tracks really works great for a lunch-hour pop “from Wall Street to Bloomie’s in 7 minutes”, as the advert used to say. In D.C, you have spent those 7 minutes just getting to the platform.
The cut and cover design makes it very hard to deal with now as any expansion would lead to the destruction of many buildings or the rerouting of 100s of years of utilities and pipes. A huge advantage of a deep dig that was not mentioned in this video is the ability to avoid everything we have already built under the surface of our cities
Wheaton station has one set of escalators between its fare collection mezzanine just below the surface and the platforms, The Woodly Park - Zoo station has three sets of escalators, one set of escalators between the surface and the level just below the surface, a second set of long escalators between the level just below the surface and the fare collection mezzanine above the platform and the third shortest set escalators between mezzanine and the platform.The sum of the combined length of the three set of escalators in the Woodly Park -Zoo station is greater then the length of the one set of escalators in the Wheaton station.
