Hooray for riders. (Photo: flickr/beadmobile)

To hear WMATA leaders talk, 2011 is the year of the Metro customer. The classic maxim of business is customer first. Yes, it's a good one, and it does matter. Comfort counts for a lot, especially when you're talking an industry whose mission is enclosing you in a box with strangers for hours every week deep under the surface of the Earth. But rest assured, everyone. Metro wants these subterranean trips to be as comfortable as possible, and today the general manager and CEO has vocalized the institution's need to be there for its customers — and in ways fitting with the times and modern technology.

At today's 1 p.m. WMATA board meeting, Metro general manager Richard Sarles said he plans to take a "holistic look" at the institution's customer service this fall. The Metro customer is a priority, he emphasized, in many different ways already apparent throughout 2011 and in many of the projects that will be rolled out in the coming months. Today's meeting included many other sad details (as Tommy Wells departed, for instance) but the singular focus from the general manager was on how Metro has been reframing its efforts to serve its customers. Sarles' mid-year progress report marks six months since he rose to his current position.

Sarles listed off some of the big improvements slated for Metro — some already known but many with new details — in his talk earlier this afternoon:

•  The Farragut West and Farragut North stations are extremely close to one another yet they're on different Metro lines and it's not easy to travel from one to another. Metro plans to open a "virtual tunnel" connecting the stations for passengers this coming fall. Sarles said that Metro hopes to open this soon, pending some testing and other finalizing details. "We expect to launch the virtual tunnel in the September-October time frame," Sarles said. The big benefit of such a virtual tunnel is that riders won't have to pay an additional fare to go from one station to another.

• Sarles brought up Metro's plan to launch Internet-rechargeable SmarTrip cards and alluded to the trial in progress now. He said that Metro hopes to bring that service online by the end of next month. See a screenshot of what the online page looks like here.

• Metro's hip to social media in case you didn't know, Sarles assures us. No surprise there, and the general manager is right to laud this development. The regular updates from the @metroopensdoors Twitter account provided a reassuring amount of communication from Metro, as noted in yesterday's hot car piece. Between Facebook and Twitter, Metro now has more than 14,000 followers, Sarles remarked — more than double what Metro could claim at the start of 2011. These efforts will only increase, I imagine, once Metro's new social media guru arrives in a month or so. Sarles also applauded the shift in advertising through the Metro Forward program to focus on "news customers can use."

• Safety! Forget your commuting fears with the knowledge that Metro has cut down on serious crimes by more than a third, Sarles said, and robberies are down 30%.

• Oh, and that maintenance thing ... Yeah. Sarles paid lip service to how much work Metro's been doing to revamp the rails and keep the system going. He mentioned fasteners and the efforts surrounding escalator maintenance. Cool stuff, and necessary words after all the frazzled emotions surrounding Foggy Bottom escalators and line delays. "The progress is visible and measurable," Sarles said. He also alluded to Metro's rollout of a track-work schedule for the next year and the way they're tapping buses to reduce customer difficulties during major station work.

• Later this year, expect a mystery shopper program ... how mysterious?

Here's to you, Metro customer. Does all this sound all right?