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Updated, 5:30 p.m., June 27: Sorry, riders--the holiday weekend is not entirely as wonderful as initially suspected. Metro announced today that it's conducting maintenance work on the Red, Orange, and Blue lines starting Friday at 10 p.m. and continuing through Saturday. No maintenance is happening on Sunday or Monday, at least. Here's Metro's press release on the news, with more details. The usual maddening phrase applies to both Friday night and Saturday--plan ahead for "20 minutes of additional travel time". Naturally, as usual, Metro's Trip Planner will not take the weekend maintenance into account.

Original post: Happy birthday, America! In honor of Fourth of July, WMATA has graciously decided to expand its hours as well as provide a few extra services to ease your traveling pain. No scheduled track work is taking place on Monday, July 4, and, in light of all the fireworks on the National Mall, Metro expects half a million people to ride the rails.

As Metro announced:

• Metrorail will open at 7 a.m. and close at midnight.

• The Smithsonian station will be closed for most of the day. It will re-open for entry only upon conclusion of the fireworks.

• To provide adequate capacity, Metro will deploy a combination of six and eight-car trains on all rail lines.

• For safety reasons, escalators at many downtown Metro stations will be turned off to help meter the flow of customers.

• Beginning at 3 p.m., every other Orange Line train traveling in the direction of New Carrollton will terminate at Stadium-Armory and return to Vienna-Fairfax/GMU.

• After 6 p.m., all Yellow Line trains will operate between Huntington and Mt. Vernon Sq/7th St-Convention Center stations.

• At 6 p.m., trains will depart every eight minutes from the end of each rail line and trains will depart every four minutes from Shady Grove and Vienna/Fairfax-GMU stations.

• After 6 p.m., all trains will operate every four minutes in the downtown portion of Washington.

• Non-peak fares will be in effect all day.

• Parking will be free at all Metrorail stations.

• Bicycles will not be permitted within the Metrorail system.

And that's not all.

WMATA will also offer expanded customer service, with 80 administrative staff helping throughout the day, and expanded security, with Metro Transit Police to be "visible" throughout the day. The press release also advises using a one-day pass or uploading money onto your SmarTrip card ahead of time to avoid the hassle of the ticket machines during peak hours.

Smithsonian is the only Metro station expected to be down on July 4, thanks to fireworks, and several of the Metrobus routes (running on a Saturday schedule) will be detoured if they were going anywhere near the mall. This is a helpful departure from what's happened on recent holidays, which WMATA has recently targeted as prime times to do some of the needed maintenance work on the aging transit system. Remember Memorial Day weekend?

As if that Metro news wasn't great enough, WMATA also announced it's expanding the amount of Next Bus data that's available to app developers. This expanded data should allow better real-time smartphone apps predicting bus arrivals and departures.

Plan accordingly, D.C. travelers, and watch the illegal fireworks.