Search Results for: washington metro

Qatar Supports the Washington Metro

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Capitals ice hockey team, which plays its home games in downtown Washington, is in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The games go long enough that spectators can’t reliably take DC’s Metro rail transit home, as the trains stop running at 11:30 pm on Monday through Thursday.

This wasn’t a problem in the first two games of a best four-out-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, as those games were played in Tampa. In the third game, Metro persuaded Exelon, which owns the local electric company, to donate $100,000 to keep the trains running for an extra hour.

For last night’s game 6, Metro somehow twisted Uber’s figurative arm into contributing $100,000 to keeping the trains running. It seems strange that Uber would give money to its competitor unless it hopes to get some political favors in exchange. Continue reading →

Washington Metro, Meet the Titanic

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Plagued by years of deferred maintenance, the Washington Metro system will have to undergo severe cuts in service if new funding isn’t found. General manager Paul Wiedefeld is asking Maryland, Virginia, and DC to increase their F.Y. 2019 contributions to Metro by $165 million, which is more than 10 percent of what they are giving in 2018. But Wiedefeld’s hopes for a “dedicated fund,” meaning a sales tax paid by all the regions’ residents, have been dashed by Maryland’s governor, who says there is no chance of that happening before 2019.

Ridership reports indicate that rush-hour ridership has recovered since Metro ended the “safe tracks” maintenance program that delayed many trains, but off-peak ridership has not. Moreover, the rush-hour recovery has been to 2015 levels, which themselves were 4 percent lower than the system’s peak in 2008. Weekday ridership in FY 2017 was 18 percent less than in 2008.

Since a large part of this decline is due to competition from Uber, Lyft, and similar services, some are beginning to doubt whether a full recovery will ever be possible. Metro board member David Horner notes that financial reports to the board repeatedly use the phrase “unsustainable operating model,” and he suggests that the rail system may be obsolete. Wiedefeld’s efforts remind Horner of “the expression about deck chairs on the Titanic.” Continue reading →

Washington Metro Promises to Disrupt Commutes for Months

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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On the heels of a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report that found that Washington Metro “has failed to learn safety lessons” from previous accidents, Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld will announce a plan today that promises to disrupt service for months in an effort to get the lines safely running again. While ordinary maintenance can take place during the few hours the system isn’t running every night, Wiedefeld says that past officials have let the system decline so much that individual rail lines will have to be taken off line for days or weeks at a time to get them back into shape.

The Washington Post blames the problems on “generations of executives and government-appointed Metro board members, along with Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending.” That’s partially true, but there are really two problems with Metro, and different parties are to blame for each.

First is the problem with deferred maintenance. The Metro board recognized that maintenance costs would have to increase as long ago as 2002, when they developed a plan to spend $10 billion to $12 billion rehabilitating the system. This plan was ignored by the “Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending” and who decided to fund the Silver and Purple lines instead of repairing what they already had.

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The Washington Metro Strategy

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Metrorail system is completely shut down for a safety inspection today after having suffered another fire on Monday. As Metro’s new general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, wants people to know, “Safety is our highest priority.”

The Washington Post says that this decision confirms that Metro is “a national embarrassment.” In fact, the shutdown appears to be a classic Washington Monument strategy, in which bureaucrats try to make budget shortfalls as painful as possible in order to get more money out of Congress or other legislators. Instead of shutting the entire system down, Metro could have done the necessary inspections between midnight and 5 am, when the trains aren’t running. If the full inspections will take the 29 hours the trains won’t be running Wednesday and Thursday morning, then doing them at night would take just six days.

There is no doubt that fires are serious; one in January, 2015 killed someone and hospitalized scores of others. But the fact that these two fires were more than fourteen months apart suggests that there isn’t a major risk of another one in the next few days.

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Washington Metro Surrenders

By | | Transportation
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New York City was harder hit by snowstorm Jonas than Washington, getting 27 inches of snow compared with 18 or 19 inches in Washington. Yet New York’s subways kept running and commuter trains and buses operated for as long as they could, while Washington Metro shut down its system before the storm got serious.


This is what it takes to shut down Metro subways. Flickr photo taken Sunday morning after the storm by Ted Eyten.

Sunday morning, New York sprang back to life while Washington remained shut down. By this morning, the vast majority of the New York system, including most commuter-rail lines, almost the entire subway system, and some buses will be operating. Washington, meanwhile, will operate the subway portions of its rail lines and just 22 out of 325 bus lines.

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The Continuing Meltdown of Washington Metro

By | | Transportation
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The day after a derailment shut down the downtown Washington portions of the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines, a power outage shut down portions of the Silver and Orange lines in Fairfax County, Virginia. Without offering any solutions (other than spend more money), the Washington Post has helpfully listed some of Metro’s biggest meltdowns of the past few years.

These are only the biggest ones the Post happens to remember. According to table 16 of the data tables in the National Transit Database, Metro suffered more than 1,200 “major mechanical failures” in 2013, which is 16 failures per million passenger-car miles. That’s nearly twice the rate of other heavy-rail lines in the country; Atlanta and Baltimore are worse, while New York City lines are much better (yet still have many problems and San Francisco’s BART is much better.

According to one insider, most of the failures are train breakdowns, power supply problems, and cracked rails. The breakdowns are mainly in the 1000 series cars that date back to the 1970s, the 4000 series cars from the 1990s, and the 5000 series cars from the early 2000s. The 5000 series is so bad that the agency would like to get an exemption from the Federal Transit Administration to scrap them before they reach their full, 25-year lifespans, but it has no cars to replace them with. Washington Metro has purchased 7000-series cars, but doesn’t expect to have them all in service before 2020. The power-supply problems include smoke from burning insulators and power failures such as the one in Fairfax County. Metro is spending less than a billion dollars a year on capital replacement, which is probably less than half as much as it needs to spend to put its system in a state of good repair. Continue reading →

Washington Metro Takes Action!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In an article worthy of The Onion, the Washington Post proclaims that “Dupont Circle escalator incident prompts Metro to take action.” The incident in question was the breakdown of the giant, 130-foot escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro station, which forced patrons to walk or, in some cases, crawl over handrails to adjacent escalators. The escalator problems were compounded by inadequacies in Metro’s radio network that prevented employees from communicating with one another about the breakdown.

Video by Twitter user @giveit2lloyd; view the original here.

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So what great action is Metro taking to deal with the escalators it has failed to keep in a state of good repair? It is providing bullhorns to station employees so they can do better crowd control and communicate with one another the next time the escalators break down. That’s proactive!

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Washington Metro Pulls Washington Monument

By | | News commentary
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Washington Metro expects to have a $154 million deficit next year. It hopes to cover half of that by cutting 313 jobs and “trimming other administrative expenses.” The rest will have to come from service cuts, so it is proposing to shut down the subways at 10 o’clock at night.

As someone named h gracy says in the comments on the Washington Post story, this is a classic Washington Monument strategy. As previously noted here, that strategy was named when the Park Service, facing budget cuts in 1968, closed the elevator to the Washington Monument and directed irate tourists to make the complaints to their local members of Congress.
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So, effectively, what Metro is saying is, “Give us more money or we will cut off your nightlife at 10 pm.” No doubt congressional staffers will respond to that!

DC Metro Hires New General Manager

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (Metro) next general manager and CEO, Randy Clarke, brings an interesting resume to the job. The troubled agency is suffering from serious safety issues, including frequent derailments and the failure of hundreds of train operators to renew their certification, not to mention transit ridership lagging behind the rest of the industry and serious financial woes. The problems are so bad that the agency’s current CEO, Paul Wiedefeld, just resigned early.

Washington Metro’s 7000-series of rail cars, which makes up 60 percent of its fleet, have all been taken out of service due to frequent derailments, a problem that won’t be fixed for at least several more months. Photo by Ben Schumin.

At first glance, Clarke is the perfect person to replace Wiedefeld. From 2010 to 2016, he worked on safety and operations at Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The American Public Transportation Association apparently thought he did such a good job that it hired him as its vice president in charge of safety, operations, and technical services, a post he held for two years. Then he became CEO of Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. Continue reading →

DC Metro Should Just Shut Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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With transit ridership off by 84 percent in July, what better time than now to simply stop running the expensive and failed DC Metro rail system? Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it, as driving was back to at least 80 percent of its pre-pandemic levels in July.

Based on a budget update provided to the Metro board, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may have to shut down, as it expects to run out of money around next January. WMATA says it needs at least $212 million to operate through June, 2021 (the end of its fiscal year), plus more, of course, for the following year.

To deal with this, WMATA is proposing to reduce rail and bus frequencies, cut back late-night service, cancel 39 bus routes, and defer some capital improvement projects to a later date. But even these cuts won’t completely close the gap between shrinking revenues and costs. Moreover, due to the need for public hearings and other requirements, WMATA won’t even be able to implement any changes until December, so it will continue to hemorrhage money for few riders for several more months. Continue reading →