DC Metro Rail: Is More Money the Answer?

Remember how the Washington Metro Rail system shut down for an entire weekday on March 16 so the agency could inspect all of the rail insulators, and replace any that were worn out? This was supposed to be needed to prevent fires such as the one whose smoke killed a passenger in 2015.

It didn’t work. On May 5, passengers at the Federal Center Southwest station were treated to a huge fireball of sparks when another insulator caught fire. Moreover, says the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Metro officials responded poorly to the fire, continuing to run trains on that track until a second fire started several hours later.

On May 6–coincidentally, the day after the latest fire–Metro announced its maintenance plan that calls for shutting down some segments for as long as seven days and single-tracking many more lines for weeks at a time, which will slow service on those routes. That’s not good enough for the FTA, which ordered the agency to rearrange the schedule to work on lines that the feds think are at the highest risk sooner than Metro planned.

In response to the fire, FTA also insisted that Metro slowing down trains on certain of the riskier segments. Slower trains draw electricity and thus reduce the risk of insulator fires. Metro has also responded to FTA demands to close the entire system at midnight instead of operating until 1 am, as it does most days, or 3 am, as it does Friday and Saturday nights.

Incidentally, some people think that “Federal infighting is at the root of some of Metro’s problems.” A writer for the Prospect notes that the FTA claims authority over the agency but that the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) would be better because, unlike the FTA, the FRA has the power to impose fines. This is absurd. While fines may act as a deterrent to private operators who would have to pay those fines out of their own pockets, they would have little effect on public agencies who would simply pay them out of tax dollars. The FTA has the power to withhold federal funds from Metro, which is a much bigger gun.

Via shutdowns, slowdowns, and lectures, Metro is making its case to anyone who will listen (and many who won’t) that it needs more money. Current board chair Jack Evans demanded that Congress contribute $300 million a year to the rail system. Congress always saw itself as providing the capital funds and expected regional governments to temper their requests for such funds based on their abilities to provide the operations and maintenance funds to keep the systems running. That obviously didn’t work, but Republicans leaders are unenthused about spending more federal dollars on the DC system.

Another idea is a regional sales tax or other regional tax dedicated to Metro. Metro officials have long complained that many other transit agencies enjoy a dedicated tax, while Metro has to rely on annual appropriations from DC, Maryland, Virginia, and local governments. A non-scientific internet poll asking people what kind of tax they would prefer found that (when I last looked) a majority want either no tax or developer impact fees; in other words, most want someone else to pay for it. (Note that higher fares was not an option.)

To soften people up for such a tax, Metro’s general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, noted that many low-income families depend on Metro transit. However, he admitted just 11 percent of the agency’s low-income customers ride the trains; most use buses, whose fares are lower and which better serve low-income neighborhoods, mainly because Metro planners designed the rail system to serve mainly higher-income people who could afford the system’s higher fares.
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The need for money for maintenance is hardly new. Outgoing board member (and former Deputy Secretary of Transportation) Mort Downy observed recently at his last board meeting that the rail systems has “negative resilience“, meaning “It tends to snap back to where it was without completing what needs to be done.” Downy noted that agency plans as early as 1982 warned of the need for maintenance work that was never done; after each accident or incident, the agency just went back to doing what it was doing before.

But is more money really the answer? Parkinson’s second law says that “expenditures rise to meet income.” A dedicated tax won’t necessarily translate into increased spending on maintenance.

For example, politicians depend on new construction and other highly visible spending, which is why they’ve ignored the Metro’s maintenance needs for so long. If Metro persuaded voters to dedicate a tax to its use, what is to prevent DC and other state and local governments to use that as an excuse to cut back on their own contributions to Metro?

DC’s H Street streetcar is carrying less than 2,300 passengers a day, which transit advocates claim is “not bad” for a streetcar, but that’s a really low bar. Such ridership is really bad for a project that cost well over $200 million.

Despite this, DC is already talking about building another streetcar line, this one to Georgetown, that is likely to cost a few hundred million dollars. It’s easy to imagine DC deciding to help pay for this by cutting (or simply not increasing as fast as inflation) its contribution to Metro.

Another place increased taxes could go other than maintenance is transit workers. As I read Metro’s 2015 financial statement, it has $872 million in unfunded pension liabilities (p. 44) and nearly $1.5 billion in unfunded health-care liabilities (p. 66), for a total of more than $2.3 billion. The unions that managed to get Metro to agree to such unfunded obligations will no doubt see a dedicated tax fund as a source of even further pay and benefit increases.

In fact, the last thing Metro needs now is more money. Most people in the industry respect general manager Wiedefeld, who is attempting to cut waste and inefficiencies. But that will be impossible if new slush funds appear to support the agency’s current voracious appetite for funds.

Unfortunately, too many politicians are willing to believe that Metro Rail is somehow “the critical lifeblood that runs the region.” It’s not blood. It’s not even lymph. It’s simply one of the more expensive ways of transporting people, taking less than 10 percent of the region’s workers to work and carrying less than 2.5 percent of all motorized travel. Highways are not only less expensive, they move freight as well as the vast majority of passenger travel. Until politicians understand that Metro Rail is primarily a giant money pit, they won’t be able to fix its problems.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

5 Responses to DC Metro Rail: Is More Money the Answer?

  1. OFP2003 says:

    I was meditating on the old Soviet claims that they treat their people well because there were chandeliers in the Moscow subway stations. This was while I was walking on a WMATA station platform watching for loose tiles on the floor and avoiding the water dripping from the leaking shelter overhead.

  2. OFP2003 says:

    You should also track how “well” people are carried. Not only addressing the easy to track and regularly collected metrics of how many passengers were carried how far, how many people died due to train crashes; but also measuring how “pleasant” the ride was. For example, how many people got to sit (vs having to stand), how many trains had a bad stench, how many lights were burned out in the stations making a dark environment, how much crime was reported, how many beggars per station. I know (and you’ve established it in the past) that making bus-riding a more pleasant experience (through design) increases ridership. How much do you have to increase the “pleasure” of riding the subway to make riders forget all the woes?

  3. prk166 says:

    @Antiplanner, did you see that Milwaukee has already filed – or maybe they said they will soon be filing – their official application for TIGER grants for an extension to their yet to be completed trolley line? It looks like DC is taking a page out of MKE Tram’s playbook.

  4. prk166 says:

    “I was meditating on the old Soviet claims that they treat their people well because there were chandeliers in the Moscow subway stations” ~OFP2003

    When I was last there, those stations, at least in the biggest cities, were still very nice. This despite the collapse of the Soviet Union along with an economic collapse.

    This should put into perspective the MISMANAGEMENT of WMTA. Set aside discussions of ROI. In the grand scheme of things there is plenty of money available to ensure things would never get to where they are now.

    WMTA is completely broken. It’s Venezuela 5 years ago. Short of major reforms, the reforms will be forced on the agency after a couple hundred people die.

  5. LazyReader says:

    More money seems to be the answer for every problem.
    Climate Change – Throw Money at it towards dubious, questionable technologies
    K-12 education – spending in the last 30 years has tripled, test scores stagnant
    Housing/Urban development – spend billions on subsidized housing, watch it turn to a slum
    Poverty – give people who don’t work food and checks

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