I know what you mean; as incandescently furious as I am about a lot of aspects of how our agency admin & the Mayor have handled this process, they have done a couple of things right--shifting our hours toward off-peak for transit and being pretty reasonable about accomodating people's transfer requests so that they can work closer to home. And yet, this still happened.

I've actually ridden Metro a couple of times, always in off-peak hours and it didn't _seem_ bad--I never had more than 4 other people in my train car at a time. You can bet I'm more nervous about it now, though!

I actually bought an electric bike about a month ago and have been commuting on that mostly, it feels good for my mental and physical health, as well as keeping me off the train, but I know that's not an option for a lot of folks. And I don't think I could have got from zero to bike commuter without the electric boost--not with the hills in our area!