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.
Second is the problem with the agency’s safety culture, or lack of one. According to the NTSB report, in violation of its own procedures, Metro used loaded passenger trains to search for the sources of smoke in the tunnels. Metro at first denied doing so, then said it wouldn’t do it any more. But Metro’s past actions sent a signal to employees that passenger safety isn’t important.
Lesser secretion of PDE5 means more blood order cialis online flow to the penile and the sponge like substance in the body. Start taking the herbal products now. deeprootsmag.org levitra online purchase Since their inception into major events like the 50 over World Cups in or the T-20 generic india levitra World Cups they have made every opportunity count on the world stage. Anger, unhappiness, fights, lack of trust, viagra free sample all these factors influence the erectile dysfunction. The safety problem can be blamed on the executives and board. So it’s no surprise that Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx has replaced three board members with people who, he hopes, will place a higher priority on safety than the board members he fired.
Transit unions, meanwhile, deny that they are responsible for any of the problems. Yet demands for high pay, sorting of employees into different categories that sometimes rival one another, and other union-led practices probably contributed to both the safety problems and the funding shortages. Four track workers were killed by trains in 2005 and another in 2009, suggesting that train operators were careless with the lives of fellow employees, which probably discouraged track workers from effectively doing their jobs.
Ultimately, both the safety and maintenance problems can be traced to the fundamental flaws of socialized transportation. Where systems funded out of user fees would build no more than people are willing to pay for, political decisions led Washington and other regions to build hundreds of miles of expensive rail lines they can’t afford to maintain.
Where managers of systems funded out of user fees tend to do a better job at maintenance, political decisions failed to provide Metro with the money it needed to keep trains operating. Where user-fee driven systems learn quickly to motivate their employees to work safely and efficiently, political decisions put people on the Metro board who were more in love with their transit fantasies than the reality of managing more than 10,000 employees.
General manager Wiedefeld may be able to correct some of the maintenance problems by disrupting service over the next year, but it is unlikely that he will have the funds to fix all of them. Even if he had all the money he needed, it will take more than money to create a system that is more responsive to user needs than to contractors, unions, and politicians.
Several stations closed last night due to a fire (the word “fire” is no longer used to describe these events, I say: “Where there’s smoke…”). More breakdowns this morning. How o How I wish elected officials could be held accountable “after-the-fact”. You serve a 4 year term and make bad decisions that arise 15 years later. Where’s the accountability? Sort of like Obama pushing back the “Obamacare” severe premium increases until after the election.
I guess ultimately, it has to be the political party to pay the price for the mis-management of the individuals. Venezuela, I hope it is more complex than the conservative/libertarian party line explanations.
10,000 employee’s jeez. Bus transit doesn’t need that. They just need one driver per bus (plus a few substitutes for sickees) A couple of mechanics and a manager. That’s about it.
Is there a better example of government failure than a metro rail system that is expanding at the same time its older tracks are falling apart? And with DC, the problems were so widely known that ignorance is no excuse.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Ultimately, both the safety and maintenance problems can be traced to the fundamental flaws of socialized transportation. Where systems funded out of user fees would build no more than people are willing to pay for, political decisions led Washington and other regions to build hundreds of miles of expensive rail lines they can’t afford to maintain.
There’s also the matter of why the Washington Metrorail system was built in the first place. It was long assumed by Metrorail promoters that this rail system was good enough to replace a comprehensive network of urban freeways that had been proposed by federal planners in the 1950’s and early 1960’s (the District of Columbia had no municipal elected officials until 1974 – the first D.C. elected officials (including future Mayor-for-Life Marion Shepilov Barry, Jr. who always promoted Metrorail but never bothered to use it himself) of the 20th Century were seated in 1975 for the first time, and opposing those freeways was winning politics). Much of that proposed D.C. freeway system was, for better or worse, never built because Metrorail was deemed an superior mode of transportation by many elected officials (in particular in D.C., but also its suburbs), civic activists and environmentalists.
I never heard any discussion then about how the system was going to be repaired and maintained in the long(er) term, and any serious discussions of same were routinely ignored or even beaten-back by advocates for and promoters of Metrorail.
Washington Post: Metro will shut down sections of lines for year-long subway repair work.
After decades of maintenance neglect, Metro next month will begin a massive subway rebuilding effort that will inconvenience virtually everyone who uses the system, with portions of most rail lines shut down for up to a month at a time and reductions in train service throughout the year-long project, officials said Friday.
The service disruptions will have ripple effects across the region as local governments and employers will be asked to make adjustments — whether it be changing HOV-lane restrictions to ease the anticipated increase in road traffic or allowing employees to work from home or modify their schedules.
“It’s what needs to be done,” General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld declared in an interview before he began outlining his ambitious plan at a late-morning news conference.
“It’s going to impact people’s lives; it’s going to impact businesses, all of that,” he said of the infrastructure overhaul, which is expected to cause more commuting headaches for longer periods than any previous track work in the subway’s 40-year history.
People and do go to jail for this sort of institutional negligence. Why isn’t anyone in metro Washington talking about investigating the possibility of criminal charges?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/us/donald-blankenship-sentenced-to-a-year-in-prison-in-mine-safety-case.html
Donald Blankenship is an evil, greedy businessman. You don’t really mean to compare him to the many selfless, sacrificing public servants who want nothing more than to collect their oversized retirement benefits, do you?
Fund some of the repair costs from the pensions of the managers who had a hand in all this happening.
Oh, sorry: public pensions are sacred.