Morning Notes

Metro Service Changes Start This Weekend — “Starting Sunday, Metro says riders will notice big changes when it comes to price and how often buses and trains come. The changes are part of an effort by Metro to lure back riders, something it has struggled to do during the pandemic. General manager Paul Wiedefeld tells 7News bus ridership is only about 55% what it was pre-pandemic, and rail is just 25% of what it once was.” [ABC7 News]

Fairfax County Firefighters Assist with Ida Response — A 16-person water rescue team with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department’s Virginia Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue Team was activated by FEMA yesterday (Thursday) in response to the impact of Hurricane Ida remnants in the Northeast. The task force recently returned from Haiti after the island was devastated by an earthquake. [VATF1/Twitter]

Virginia No Longer Worst State for Workers — “Conditions for workers in Virginia have improved considerably since Democrats took control of the commonwealth’s General Assembly in 2019, according to a new assessment by anti-poverty organization Oxfam America. Oxfam ranked Virginia the ‘worst state for workers’ in 2018 and 2019…but [it] leapt to #23 in the organization’s 2021 rankings, released Wednesday.” [DCist]

Lights Festival Coming to Roer’s Zoofari — “Beginning on October 15, Roer’s Zoofari will host a very different collection of animals from its typical apes and reptiles line-up. Come embrace our post-reality reality with unicorns and dinosaurs at LuminoCity Festival, a paid-admission, outdoor display of light art. The concept is simple: thousands of giant, light-up figures and environments that you walk around and look at, at night.” [Northern Virginia Magazine]

Photo via vantagehill/Flickr