Grosvenor-Strathmore Metro Station

This station has all the cool & helpful amateurs & crew… any given day of the week. Even on the weekends & at night… unlike the majority of the stations. I get the fact the thousands of riders pass through, yet their job description is to assist & not be rude or annoyed with us passengers.
T. Miller Bey, the Station Manager who use to be posted at Rockville, now floats to close down the stations, but works at GS Wednesdays/​Thursdays. Doesn’t matter the influx of travelers & their requests, he is always a professional & very outgoing hand of assistance.
& if you are lucky enough to strike up a quick convo with him, he is very insightful… has a great demeanor. One of the very few interactions I have endured if something goes wrong with my Smartrip Card, as he takes pride in assisting & or providing access when it’s a Metro purchasing/​reading error.
It’s always a great plus when you spend money to travel & you exceptional great customer service (which is rare) along the way. Not if we could stop one-​tracking all the time, there would be so much rail-​harmony to go around.

Nice little stop if I happen to take the train with this as a final stop. I just take it since sometimes in mid ride, the final stop changes and continues on to shady grove. Again the recent slow speed zones adds a few minutes to the commute, so it may be an inconvenience to those in a hurry.

This outdoor station is on the Red Line. It is fairly clean majority of the time. Station manager (8am-​12pm) is attentive, alert and usually helpful. There is an outdoor short term parking lot, outdoor long term/​daily parking lot and an indoor long term/​daily parking garage (5 levels). Parking can get a little ridiculous as it shares its parking lot with the Strathmore as the name suggests. By about 9:30am, almost all the spaces are filled up, so you gotta go to the roof of the garage. Every morning there is also this gentleman who is very courteous, handing out the Washington Express. He gets mad when you don’t take one. Lol J/​K
One thing that boggles my mind is the handicapped parking. There are two handicapped parking spaces in the short term parking (essentially free parking, meter-​less) that people constantly use as long term/​daily parking. So basically, every morning these people fight for those two spots because you would save yourself $ 5.10 in parking fees for the day. There should be some sort of time limit for the short term handicapped parking spaces. That, or make them pay to park as well. You have to pay for parking in long term/​daily handicapped spaces, why not short term. It ain’t right.

This is a good metro stop on the Red Line. It has plenty of parking to it gets filed up quickly.
The station is clean and well maintained, save the few loose floor tiles on the platform.
The good thing with this station is that quote a few trains during evening rush hour towards Shady Grove actually end at Grosvenor, so parking here during the day makes that much more sense!

My preferred metro station to park at. Yes, there are times where parking is tough but if it’s after hours you can park close to the tracks.

A nice enough outdoor station where I wasted 15 minutes when the Red Line train to Shady Grove suddenly went «out of service» and dumped everyone from comfortable seats onto the platform to wait for another crowded train. Yuck.
The station itself is decent enough and because it’s slightly below ground level, even though it is completely outside, it would be out of the rain.
As mentioned, Grosvenor-​Strathmore is on the Red Line. It has a center island platform (so that you don’t have to go up and over and down to turn around). It is between White Flint (towards Shady Grove) and Medical Center (towards downtown).

I like this metro station. Its clean and has a pleasant ambiance near the Strathmore. Also when traveling to dc the metro goes over 495 and has a nice aerial view.

Grosvenor Station is an Outdoor Station that is Great to Park at because it is the terminus for half the trains whenever Metro pulls the ‘dump half the commuters off’ card. It has 2 exits, 1 towards Grosvenor Park, and 1 towards the parking area. The tunnel towards Grosvenor Park is usually wet and slippery, but has an interesting dystopian feel and is a convenient alternative to crossing Rockville Pike. There is another glass-​covered tunnel unnecessarily bridging the parking garage to the Strathmore music theater, but it is fun to walk though nonetheless if you can remember which level it’s on. If you cannot, don’t worry, just cross the street instead.
Overall, I like it because the Residents and commuters used to lock bikes up on the handrails in the tunnel beneath Rockville Pike. One day, a cop :/​glued threatening tickets on everyone’s bicycles in the tunnel, saying they’d be stolen by the police if they weren’t removed. Years later, I still haven’t managed to get the remnants of that sticker off, but I have to commend the DC Metro. A couple of months later-​although they aren’t covered like in the tunnel– bike stands were installed on the Grosvenor Park side of the station, right where they needed to be. The cops never glued any more stickers to the bikes either. I bet customers commplained, and the Metro responded. :)
Another good thing about Grosvenor is that they usually don’t steal bikes there. I’ve left my bike there for work and even overnight and never had anything stolen. I hope thieves don’t pick up on this fluke from my review, but it does seem to be the case. They also don’t notice when you bring your bike past the turnstiles during peak hours. This is a positive perk of their non-​observant nature there.
I have to say the customer service, in general, could use a… bit of improvement to say the least, but by Metro standards, well… just read ‘The Examiner’…or it’s archives, as it is no more. Sometimes the trains dump commuters off on the platform and then continue down the track or dump them off and change direction. One commuter trick of the trade I’ve found to use is that if you’re going further towards Shady Grove and they pull that darn ‘Grosvenor Final Station’ card on you all of a sudden, is to get off a station early, because Medical Center is an indoor station and you can get a better position in the train before it becomes more overcrowded. Sometimes they will not let the train go to the platform because of suicides, etc. and you’ll be stuck in the overheated cars unable to escape, but they do a good job with shuttle buses when they shut the tracks down for several weeks to «upgrade the Metrorail system» or whatever.
I have observed tourists, etc over the years asking the «Station Managers» at Grosvenor questions, and just kinda internally chuckled to myself about their naïveté, then discretely watch the ensuing farce. I do feel bad for the customers, though, I wouldn’t reat my customers like that. Once I asked a Grosvenor Station manager when the next train was coming. He said, «about 5 minutes», so I walked to the parking side to get a newspaper, only to see a train immediately arrive that was just too far away to board. Apparently, the joke was on me. Ha ha ha, he got me.
For the worst example at Grosvenor, (and stop now if you’re disgusted easily) I told a Station Manager someone was urinating on a platform column, even though they have restrooms there! Her response… to just ignore me. She did not say…, «Thank you for reporting a crime», «Sorry you saw that.», «I’ll get right on it.», etc., she just ignored someone trying to help, after looking them in the eyes and listening. I’ve seen all kinds of fluids on the Metro since then and never reported it. I’m not Chuck Palunik, so I’ll spare you readers the details. Seriously though, if you’ve had too much to drink, ask for a restroom or just don’t use a column where people lean.
In conclusion, Grosvenor is pretty good and convenient by Metro standards. Be careful about slipping in the tunnel. It can be hot or cold as expected, because it is an outdoor station. Use your smartphone for questions about DC etc, as the Station Managers do not seem to know much or care. Oh, and don’t forget to ‘Like’ or contribute to my «Metro Brutalism Admiration» page on Facebook if you want.

I’m going with 2 stars simply because Unilocal calls it the «Meh. I’ve Experienced Better» rating. It is the truth but in reality, it is a Metro station. Not much variation between the them and at times they all suck. It is what it is in my book.
My big and really only gripe about Grovesnor is the parking… if you aren’t in there by 8am, you are out of luck until 10am when the permit parking opens (which is really a stupid thing… only like 4 cars have permits everyday). Permit parking has a very aggressive MoCo Parking Enforcement Guard who threatens people with «police action» and fines for pulling into a spot at 9:57 and waiting until 10 before leaving. Even after 10, the permit parking fills up in about a half hour and you are again, SOL. No fun.

If you’re familiar with metro you know the red line seems to be one of the more troubled lines. It seems once there is one incident, there are several in a row. For the most part, it works though and as far as stations on the red line goes, I like Grosvenor. It’s convenient, not a long commute downtown, and you don’t have to wait for the Shady Grove trains leaving DC.

As stations go, this one isn’t bad. There’s a lot of parking here, and it’s near some useful roads. The Strathmore concert hall is right there. And, during rush hour, half the trains stop here rather than continuing to the outlying suburbs, making this a good destination.

My favorite metro station so far (considering I live in Virginia and have to stop by the older stops to get home). Parking is nice and plentiful. It’s a new facility and the metro is above ground at that stop so it’s a nice change from what I am used to in Virginia. By the time you are at Grosnenor — there really isn’t much of a crowd either so no pushing and shoving needed at this stop. Parking is $ 5, smartcard and credit accepted. Garage is clean and wide.

It’s only nice in the spring or fall and if it’s nice out. Winter it’s too cold. Sumer is too hot. There’s a public restroom but you need the attendant to get you there.

Clean. Nice Outside. Yaay!

Parking is plentiful, and it’s especially great for patronizing the Strathmore. What brings me to this metro station today??? Avoiding the backup caused by single-​tracking between Shady Grove and Twinbrook. It’s got great accessibility from 270.

I don’t know how one goes about «ranking» metro stops, but Grovesnor is just fine. The one advantage of living 2 stops out on the red line is when it’s busy just take Twinbrook to Grovesnor, get off, and wait for a spacious, empty train. Or if I’m too stumbling drunk I can get off here and take a cab the rest of the way.
Also: The shelter on the platform is nice and clean, which is a plus since I was drunk and threw up in it.