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.
Basically, the document is a plea for more federal subsidies, as the local governments that support WMATA are out of money themselves. But another report should give Congress a reason to think twice about such a bailout. An audit of WMATA’s rail operations center by the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission concludes that WMATA’s trains are just as dangerous as they were a few years ago, when an accident killed nine people and later smoke in the tunnels killed one more.
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As if that’s not bad enough, the operations center is “a toxic culture workplace” that “includes racial and sexual comments, harassment, and other unprofessional behavior such as attempts to manipulate safety event investigations that create unacceptable safety risks.”
Metro has been criticized for lacking a safety culture since the 2009 accident that killed nine people. The agency has gone through a string of CEOs since 1990, only one of which lasted longer than 5 years. The current CEO, Paul Wiedefeld — whose tenure will reach five years this November, if he makes it that long — promised to fix the agency’s safety problems when he took over in 2015, but has clearly failed.
Meanwhile, a recent Metro survey found that most of its former riders have no plans to ride the trains again until and unless an effective vaccine is found for COVID-19. So why bother running the trains at all? The safest thing WMATA can do is shut them down.
Hard to see how metro can stay afloat with the huge sunk costs it has. It’s a fragile set up. Any drop in volume for it can be fatal.
I notice you didn’t suggest shutting down toll roads and turning them into more lucrative parking lots when their usage was down. That would have made about as much sense.
The system is “running out of money” because Congress is starving it, and local politicians ran a campaign against a small increase in local taxes to fund the system. This is an essential service – please cite some hard data to back up “Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it”, since that is a speculative opinion, not a fact.
You might as well de-fund fire departments during periods when there is a drop in fires.
If traffic is back to 80% of its typical use, those toll roads are probably getting considerably more use than DC Metro. They are also much cheaper to operate.
Why shouldn’t Congress stop funding an extremely costly to run service that isn’t being used? Especially with more and more people working at home, the whole reason for Metro to exist seems to be questionable.
Metro is bleeding money because nearly no one is using it.
If nearly no one is using, by it’s nature it’s the opposite of “essential”