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railroads at a rate four times the national average.

Nationally, riders took 9.4 billion trips on mass transit last year, up 3.5 percent from 1999, according to data released by the American Public Transportation Association yesterday. In contrast, highway use was relatively stagnant, increasing by 0.047 percent to 2.7 trillion miles, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

"These figures show that a decades-old trend of declining transit and increasing driving has been reversed," said Roy Kienitz, executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which represents community, planning and public-interest groups.

Locally, ridership on subway, buses and commuter rail grew by 13.2 percent, according to the association.

"Washingtonians habitually have looked for ways to lessen their stress. It's a high-stress area," said Wendy Lemieux, spokeswoman for Virginia Railway Express, which saw nearly a 20 percent jump in ridership last year and now carries 10,500 commuters a day on its two lines linking Northern Virginia and the District. "The reason people ride VRE is simple," Lemieux said. "They want an extra hour to sit, relax, read, sleep. And they don't want to sit in traffic."

Kienitz said the popularity of Washington's buses and trains signals a shift in focus. "Something that is clearly going on in this region is a move back towards the center -- in terms of housing, in terms of jobs," he said. "Congestion is just bad here, and people are sick of it. . . . If you walk around downtown D.C., you see all the construction cranes. Vacancy rates for commercial property are going down. What's happening in Washington is an exaggeration of what's going on nationally."

October's extension of Metrochek, a federal transit subsidy, to all federal workers in the region made riding the rails and buses less expensive, and apparently more attractive.

Joanne Harley, an Upper Marlboro resident who works at the Library of Congress, traded her car for the subway after years of battling traffic and paying $11 a day to park downtown. "I love the Metro," she said while waiting for a train at L'Enfant Plaza one recent afternoon. "I wouldn't trade it. It's so easy."

"We've got one of the strongest marketplaces in the country for transit use," Metro General Manager Richard A. White said. "At Metro, we've been seeing almost 8 percent annual growth rates for the last three years, which is remarkable. We're all wondering if and when this bubble is going to burst, but it hasn't shown any signs of that."

Nationally, transit use has grown faster than driving for three years -- an achievement that sparked celebration yesterday in the transit industry. There have been other periods when transit use outpaced automobile use -- the 1974 oil crisis and the recession of the early 1980s, among them -- but those episodes were short-lived.

Transit boosters say the three-year trend marks a significant shift in the way Americans choose to get around.

"While it may be too soon to say that Americans' love affair with the automobile is over, another suitor has clearly entered the picture," Kienitz said.

However, William D. Fay, of the American Highway Users Alliance, said that new suitor isn't about to topple the car's place in Americans' hearts any time soon. Transit ridership, Fay noted, still pales in comparison to the number of people who travel by private vehicle.

"Over one trillion trips are taken by car and truck every year," said Fay, whose group lobbies for road and bridge projects. "We're happy about transit increasing its ridership after decades of dramatic declines, but we're talking about an increase of something that is still pretty small. Most travel in the U.S. is still taking place over highways."

Even so, local transit agencies have been buckling under the strain of packed rail cars and overloaded buses.

Metrorail, which grew 7.7 percent in 2000, cannot buy subway cars fast enough to carry all the passengers streaming through its turnstiles each day. Daily ridership on the subway system this month is averaging 658,000 a day.

Metrobus, meanwhile, increased its ridership 8.44 percent in 2000 and is now carrying 523,000 people a day, making it the fastest growing of the nation's largest bus systems, according to the public transportation association. Part of that growth was driven by fare simplification, which lowered costs for many passengers, officials said.

Virginia Railway grew by 19.63 percent, becoming the third-fastest-growing commuter rail system in the country, while the MARC lines serving Maryland and the District saw a 7.52 percent increase in ridership last year.

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