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.
Meanwhile, Metro’s $3 billion Silver Line is only carrying 70 percent of its projected riders, and two-thirds of those are people who would have ridden Metro anyway. That means the line is netting only about 6,000 new roundtrips per weekday. Think we could have just paid those people half a million dollars each to reduce their auto trips by two a day?
The Silver Line is credited with “changing the face of Northern Virginia,” but this is a case of planners using a rail line as an excuse to rezone an area to allow developers to increase density. The owners of Tysons Corner wanted to increase population and job densities, but the county told them that local transportation facilities were inadequate to support that increase. The density has increased, but most people living and working there continue to drive, leading to “mediocre ridership numbers.”
Not to count all the cosmetic maintenance and cosmetic improvements that are needed. The meltdown continues and local leaders insist on spreading this malaise with Sliver Line expansion and Purple line expansions. Thanks for all the material for my next letter to political leaders.
Northern Virginia is probably exhibit A for how not to build an urban environment. It’s a place of crippling traffic congestion and laughably bad pedestrian accommodations. The Silver Line is a nice effort, but in Tyson’s corner, at least, it makes people walk through a vast no-man’s land to get between the station anywhere worth visiting. It’s no wonder most people still drive. I’m not sure NoVA can be saved.
OFP2003 wrote:
Not to count all the cosmetic maintenance and cosmetic improvements that are needed. The meltdown continues and local leaders insist on spreading this malaise with Sliver Line expansion and Purple line expansions. Thanks for all the material for my next letter to political leaders.
Not disputing any of the above, but want to point out (for those that are scoring at home) that the proposed Purple Line (I heard the Antiplanner speak forcefully against the Purple Line project back in the winter) will not be a Metro line, but is envisioned to be run by a private firm under contract to the Maryland Transit Administration, not WMATA (the agency that runs Metro).
“Think we could have just paid those people half a million dollars each to reduce their auto trips by two a day?”
If you could have guaranteed that a large chunk of that money would have gone to political campaigns and to union leaders pockets, the half million a year idea would have been passed–without the mess of building an unneeded rail line..
Washington Post: Cause of last week’s Metro derailment had been detected in early July
The track defect that caused last week’s Metro derailment was detected more than a month ago, but it was not repaired, the agency’s top executive said Wednesday.
In addition, the flaw’s detection should have triggered the immediate shutdown of the section of rail involved, but the agency continued to run trains through it until the derailment.
“Let me not mince words: This is unacceptable,” Metro’s interim general manager, Jack Requa, said at a news conference. “It is unacceptable to me, and it should be unacceptable to everyone within the chain of command all the way down to the track laborers and track inspectors who are out on the front lines. We found this and should have addressed it earlier.”
After learning that the rail involved in the Aug. 6 incident should have been fixed after the July inspection, Requa said that he immediately ordered emergency inspections across the system and targeted, enhanced inspections in the immediate area of the derailment to ensure the safety of train operations.
The incident Aug. 6 shut down rail service on parts of three lines for nine hours, leaving thousands of commuters fuming as they scrambled for alternative transportation. The Smithsonian and Federal Triangle Metro stations were closed as crews worked to remove the train and investigators worked to determine a cause.