(The Washington Post published the following article by Lyndsey Layton on October 12.)
WASHINGTON — Hop on a Metrobus to the District’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood and you’re likely to hear more Spanish than English. Ride the Green Line to Branch Avenue and you’ll find most of the Metro riders are African American.
Climb aboard the Virginia Railway Express, and who are your seatmates?
The typical VRE rider is a middle-aged white man who works for the federal government, is married, has no children living at home and earns $75,000 a year or more, according to data collected by the commuter railroad.
VRE, one of the fastest-growing commuter railroads in the country, operates 32 daily trains, one of which does not carry passengers, and they run on two branches, between Washington and Manassas and Washington and Fredericksburg.
Although VRE conducts annual passenger surveys to determine who its customers are, the resulting portrait hasn’t changed much since the railroad was founded 11 years ago. “This has been our trend from the beginning,” said Fairfax Supervisor Sharon S. Bulova (D-Braddock), who chairs the VRE operations board. Passengers make about 14,000 trips a day on VRE.
According to the most recent ridership data, collected in 2002, 63 percent of VRE riders are men. It’s a mature ridership — 53 percent are 45 or older. Seventy-seven percent earn $75,000 or more. Eight of every 10 are Caucasian, while 9 percent are African American, 3 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander, 3 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are Native American.
Although 80 percent are married, 54 percent no longer have children living at home. A majority — 56 percent — work for the federal government.
Michael Donick is the walking embodiment of these numbers. Standing on the VRE platform at Union Station as he waited for an afternoon train to Manassas one day recently, the man who bears a passing resemblance to Benjamin Franklin said he is 53, earns more than $75,000 a year, is the father of four adult children who no longer live with him and his wife and is employed by the Internal Revenue Service. (“But I’m a nice person,” he said, sheepishly.)
Donick said that every once in a while during the decade he has been riding VRE, he has been struck by the fact that many of his fellow passengers looked like him. “Especially in the morning, I’d be standing on line to get on the train and I’d realize everyone around me is male,” he said. “It’s not a very diverse crowd.”
The reason may have something to do with lifestyles of younger men and women with children at home, Bulova said.
“Women, especially those with families, and also men with children at home, would require more flexibility” than they associate with commuting by train, she said. “If you do not have children in the nest, it’s easier for you to be on a more fixed schedule. But if you have children, you may want to drive to be free to take kids to their activities or feel that you could get home in an emergency.”
Preety Aggarwal punches a hole through that theory.
Aggarwal, 30, lives near the Franconia-Springfield Station and rides the train each day to Union Station. The Amtrak employee said she rides VRE precisely because she has two toddlers. “It provides reliability,” she said as she boarded the 3:38 p.m. train to Fredericksburg one recent afternoon. “I’m a working mother, and I need to be able to pick up my kids on time. I need predictability. That’s what the train provides.”
Across the river, people who ride the MARC railroad to Washington from Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs share some characteristics with VRE riders. In their first survey of passengers, conducted in the spring, Maryland railroad officials found that MARC has an affluent ridership — 54 percent of its passengers earn $80,000 or more.
But the typical MARC rider is slightly younger than his or her VRE counterpart. Although a good number of MARC riders — 46 percent — work for the federal government, the majority work for the private sector or state or local government. Men and women are more equally represented on MARC, with 54 percent male and 46 percent female.
George Taylor, 58, a consultant to the federal government who is white, married, lives in Fredericksburg and does not have children at home, takes issue with VRE demographic data.
“I see a lot of different people on the trains to Fredericksburg,” said Taylor, whose graying hair contrasted with his dark business suit as he prepared to board an afternoon train home at Union Station. “At least half are females and at least one-third minorities, and you see some younger folks, too. I’ve seen a good sampling of people.
“It’s not all us!” he said over his shoulder as he stepped onto the waiting train.