(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Ben Schumin)

Feel that cold, D.C.? You'll be feeling it even more this long weekend as you trudge extra distances outside due to three closed Metro stations on the Green Line.

WMATA announced earlier that on this coming three-day Columbus Day weekend, from Friday at 10 p.m. until Metro opens again on Tuesday morning, that three major Green and Yellow Line stations will be closed — Columbia Heights, U Street, and Shaw-Howard. They'll be closed so Metro can install Guarded #8 switches outside the U Street station, hopefully among other improvements. Luckily, my own station of Georgia Ave-Petworth remains open ... but Columbia Heights? U Street? Those are key places I'd love to go on the weekend and now can't quite as easily if I'm coming home from work. Buses will, as usual with WMATA closures, help close the gap between stations.

But as DCist's Aaron Morrissey observed, this closure is a little different from what we've been seeing on other more suburban Metro lines. A lot of these people on the Green and Yellow Lines don't have cars and rely on the Metro to get where they need to go. These repairs need to happen, of course, for better safety, better compliance with guidelines, etc. and so on, but they're still a drag to any person who just wants to buy some mittens at Target amid the brisker temperatures we're now feeling. A lot of these weekend track announcements have become business-as-usual as the Metro Forward campaign has started, and the delayed, half-hearted weekend service is becoming little surprise to the D.C. traveler. Riders, how many "20 minutes of additional travel time" have you had to allot in the last year?

The idea of WMATA station closures may still seem distant to you now, but just you wait. The repairs are coming for your station, too.