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Metro is lapping up tax dollars to keep its aging equipment running.

And the rail lines don't reach where most movement now takes place: suburb to suburb. Transit managers have grand visions for Metro's next 25 years: They want to connect major suburbs with rail and to use the more flexible bus system to follow the market, joining suburbs, carrying the spillover from rail lines, stepping in to fill gaps.

They dream of a transit system that forges the region's destiny for the next quarter-century as it did for the past.

Molding the Region

The transit system has sprouted restaurant rows in Bethesda and Ballston, shops and offices in Pentagon City and around Union Station, affordable housing in Virginia Square, economic revival on U Street. Metro means cheap mobility for college students.

It has helped diversify the inner suburbs, encouraging immigrants from Bolivia and Peru to settle in Arlington. It made it possible for many of the 300,000 federal employees to buy single-family homes in close-in communities and work in downtown Washington. It even gave a name to the neighborhood of Friendship Heights, which most called Chevy Chase in the days before the subway station.

Metro has tied together a region fractured by state lines, race and class.

"You've got people of different races, different classes, different job descriptions, from city and from suburb, old and young, able and disabled," said Zachary Schrag, a graduate student at Columbia University who is writing his dissertation about the Metro. "And they actually treat each other pretty civilly most of the time."

Moving People

Alan Sussman studies Torah on the Red Line. Frank Lloyd takes his twin girls for all-day rides as a cheap diversion. Oren Hirsch, 14, always tries to claim the seat directly behind the operator so he can peer through the smoked-glass window and watch the controls and the track bed rushing under the train.

Metro is carrying about 600,000 passengers a day on its trains and 500,000 on buses, making it the nation's second-busiest transit system behind New York's. That's a ranking that none of the original planners dreamed of when they were designing the system in the late 1960s.

"I'm a believer, and it has even outstripped my expectations," said Cleatus Barnett, 73, who was appointed to the Metro board of directors in 1971 and is its longest continually serving member.

The subway takes more than 270,000 cars off the road each day, Metro officials say. Those cars would have used more than 12 million gallons of gasoline a year and needed 30 additional highway lanes and 1,800 acres of parking.

Mary Margaret Whipple, a state senator from Arlington and a past member of the Metro board, puts it this way, "One hundred thousand people a day go underneath Arlington on the Metro system instead of through Arlington in their cars."

As highway traffic gets worse, subway ridership has soared. Ridership records are shattered regularly, thanks in part to a robust economy, strong tourism, a new transit subsidy extended to federal workers and fares that haven't increased since 1995.

An Early Vision

Before it opened, Metro had trouble recruiting workers, who were wary about toiling in the dark underground. "All people knew about subways was New York," said Christopher Scripp, a Cleveland Park Station manager, who was a Metrobus driver when he became one of the first subway employees.

The architect, Harry M. Weese, had been sent on a tour of European subways with instructions to combine the world's best designs into a new American monument.

Weese dreamed big, and a legion of engineers followed his concept to launch a transit system that would eventually cost $9.4 billion and stretch 103 miles across two rivers, two states and the District.

With their coffered concrete arches and floating mezzanines lighted dramatically from below, the stations were celebrated by everyone from architecture critics to construction workers.

Design Problems

But planners can see only so far into the future. What they failed to recognize as a service area - the edge cities outside the orbit of downtown Washington - has left Metro with the challenge of trying to be useful to people who don't live or work where the subway lines run.

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