Metro's "Service Nearby" tool

Last summer a friend of mine moved to a new apartment in Alexandria, an area of town he was not particularly familiar with.  He got in touch with me about trying to find a good way to commute by transit to his job in DC.  He knew that I was pretty savvy at figuring out the transportation system.

I pointed him to Metro's "Service Nearby" tool as a first step in figuring out his various options.  The tool identifies all the transit stops within 1 mile.  One can then use that information to look at schedules or use the Trip Planner to determine various ways to go where you want to go.  The trip planner does not always provide the complete list of options (and often not even the best options), so using "Service Nearby" can be really helpful.



Metro doesn't market this tool very well, however.  You can find it under the "Rider Tools" tab as shown here:


Then you enter in the location you want to find service near on the next screen:

The tool will then list all the services within a mile of that location.  Some are not as useful as others, because it will list every bus stop along the same bus line, so there is redundancy.  Nonetheless, you can use this information to help figure out how to get to a variety of locations and to other transportation, such as Metrorail stations.  Here's an example.  The complete results went on much longer than this screen shot.  As you can see, this only shows locations within 0.12 miles: