Three months ago, Washington MetroRail’s Blue and Orange lines shut down when parts fell off the braking gear of one of the railcars, damaging another car. Hundreds of riders had to evacuate and train service was delayed for hours.
The disk brake that fell off the Metro railcar in December.
Metro initially blamed the malfunction on “premature wear,” but another railcar’s brakes fell apart in a similar manner just a month later.
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Now it turns out that Metro knew about the potential hazard with the brakes six years ago, but didn’t have the money to fix the 190 railcars that used that type of brake gear. So, it more-or-less just forgot about it. These sorts of problems start to crop up when rail lines are about 30 years old and transit agencies haven’t budgeted for periodic rehabilitation–which they never seem to do.
Where will the next serious rail accident take place? Chicago‘s CTA and all of Boston‘s rail lines suffer from seriously deferred maintenance. The original San Diego Trolley turned 30 last year. Parts of Atlanta‘s rail system are nearly 33 years old, and Miami‘s is 28-years old. It’s only a matter of time–and probably not much time–before one of these has a major accident.
Meanwhile, the latest poll finds that 53 percent of Honolulu voters support the anti-rail candidate because they want to save Honolulu transit from building an expensive rail line that the city can’t afford to maintain. No doubt rail interests, including unions, construction companies, and railcar manufacturers, will donate millions to the pro-rail incumbent. The election will take place in August.
Where will the next serious rail accident take place?
Suuuuuurely we aren’t trying to imply that bad ol’ rrrrrrRRRail!! is gonna kill ya and you should take the auto so you can be tooootally safe and not be dead, right?
Right?
DS
Dan, rail (and in particular Metrorail in Washington) has long been marketed (especially to the federal government and local elected officials) as an absolutely safe, convenient, fast, warm (in winter) and cool (in summer) mode of transportation.
That is (unfortunately) not always the case.
Seems like a fault of management and maintenance, not in the mode itself. Not sure why anyone feels the need to conflate to besmirch the entire mode as a whole.
DS
But Dan, cars are the safest mode per passenger mile. Of course if you use any other measurement they’re not, but all metrics that make the personal auto look less favorable are worthless. 😉
My brother was in a car accident yesterday, thankfully he’s ok, though his car more than just dented.
In the UK, rail is safer than road transport if you just consider the trains, but not if you consider suicides and deaths from trespass on the rails.
The Antiplanner wrote:
So, it more-or-less just forgot about it. These sorts of problems start to crop up when rail lines are about 30 years old and transit agencies haven’t budgeted for periodic rehabilitation–which they never seem to do.
Well, to some extent.
But the transit authority still found money to give its employees a generous pay increase last fall.
Now to persons outside of the WMATA “culture,” it would seem that brakes on railcars would merit higher priority than employee pay raises. And to its credit, management fought this (arbitrator-awarded) raise but lost. But employee benefits and compensation come before everything else (including safety) to an awful lot of people associated with this operation.
Just last year there were reports that a portion of an escalator at the Foggy Bottom Metro station “collapsed”. If they cant maintain the systems stations what hope do they have for the trains. Nevermind polls state Metro is in one of the nation’s worst-managed transit agencies. The Chicago Transit Authority is on the verge of collapse, estimates say it needs 16 billion smackeroos to replace tracks or repair trains. New York’s MTA is in trouble, they’re short 17 billion needed to fix the subways. Washington Metro needs 12 billion to keep it running plus 4-6 billion to finish the Silver Line.
Lazy, those are questions that transit advocates (and the unions that represent hourly employees of those and other transit agencies) don’t want to talk about.
Though transit advocates don’t defend greedy unions and bad management.
But WHAT ABOUT THE SLUG LINES??? What is the status of the maintenance schedule/fleet inventory of the slugs???
Oh yeah, it’s private initiative, so it doesn’t cost us taxpayers anything.
Which will last longer you think? the Slug lines are the WMATA??
Slugs where the concept works (such as Virginia’s I-95 and I-395 (Shirley Highway) HOV corridor) are a great way for people to commute. No transit union, no cracked rails, mechanical breakdowns are rare. But the rest of the HOV corridors near Washington, D.C. don’t have the same winning attributes that the Shirley Highway HOV lanes do.
“Now it turns out that Metro knew about the potential hazard with the brakes six years ago, but didn’t have the money to fix the 190 railcars that used that type of brake gear. So, it more-or-less just forgot about it.”
Absolutely unacceptable from a transit perspective. I’m not up to speed on the preventative maintenance costs for trains, but I can tell you from experience that when these sort of things happen in bus systems, managers and/or maintenance staff loose their jobs. If you knowingly put unsafe buses on the road you’ll get fired.
I didn’t look through all the links, but I’m wondering what it costs to replace rotors on a metro train, and why over a 6 year period metro wasn’t able to secure any of the large FTA preventative maintenance grants available to transit systems. Subsidy bashing aside, there are large amounts of federal dollars dedicated to keeping transit vehicles on the up and up. Either the cost for train rotor replacement is so exorbitantly expensive, or someone was asleep at the wheel.
I enjoy collecting government euphemisms, and “premature wear” instead of “lack of maintenance” is a good one!
The approach to maintenance of the Washington Metro was revealed in its escalator debacle. Metro and the union colluded to have the most experienced escalator repairman pick the escalators they would be responsible for. Not surprisingly, they picked the newest ones without any history of problems, so they worked very little. The newbie repairman were stuck with the worst escalators and far more work than they could do in their regimented time. Thus the worst escalators got the least attention.
A very large percentage of BART’s fleet is 40+ years old and very similar mechanically to Washington Metro’s original car fleet. There have been a few minor BART car fires due to wear and tear generally many years apart, but nothing grossly stupid like brake parts falling off. I’d attribute the difference to the competence of the agency, not anything inherent in rail transit, per se. The typical BART car also runs at higher average speeds than Metro cars, so annual mileage on each vehicle is significantly higher, too.
Makes one wonder how many under-maintained, mechanically unsafe automobiles are out there; here in California automobile bodies tend to last but one can’t tell anything about how car innards have been maintained…
BART is in the process of replacing it’s rail car fleet. They’re preparing to introduce new, three-door cars. BART received proposals from some suppliers in 2010 and is expecting to award contracts and began the design process in 2011, with the first 10 pilot cars arriving for testing in 2014. The order will eventually cover the total 700 cars by 2025 somewhere on the order of a billion+ dollars.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/BARTRendering.png
BART today is a byproduct of cancelled ambitions, just because they don’t have a safety record of Metro, they want to expand to the point they’ll no doubt have similar problems in the future.
DC Metro suffers from being under no one’s oversight or funding except our incompetent Congress. Rail transit systems in other cities rarely have these sorts of problems. When they occasioanlly do, as in Chicago a few years ago, heads roll and money is spent to immediately correct the problems.
Antiplanner and allies are welcome to point to plagues of deadly accidents from deferred maintenance in other rail served cities. I can’t think of any.
LazyReader thus spake:
BART today is a byproduct of cancelled ambitions, just because they don’t have a safety record of Metro, they want to expand to the point they’ll no doubt have similar problems in the future.
You can’t infer that from anything you’ve provided. The biggest extension BART is working on is to San Jose, which is also the largest, and richest, county in the Bay Area. So BART is likely to have sufficient operating subsidies since the BART extension seems to be Santa Clara’s biggest transit priorities right now. So proper maintenance is likely if BART’s track record until now is any indication.
As for BART’s car replacement program, the estimated cost is ~$3 billion. BART believes they have sufficient annual funding to pay for a large chunk of this, claiming annual revenues are sufficient to reduce interest costs on the car program by $800 million over its life.
See http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/transportation/2012/03/bart-budget-shuffle-could-provide-800m-new-trains. You’ll note this article is from a “conservative” alternative to the San Francisco Chronicle and other “liberal” media outlets in the S.F. Bay Area.
A big problem with DC Metro, and lots of other things in the DC metro area, is that in the back of everyone’s mind is that if a big problem occurs, they can get Congress to spend other people’s money to fix it. Congress is both their biggest headache and their biggest dream sugar daddy.
Also there are two states and a totally nonfunctional District government to deal with on any region-wide matter.
A big problem with DC Metro, and lots of other things in the DC metro area, is that in the back of everyone’s mind is that if a big problem occurs, they can get Congress to spend other people’s money to fix it. Congress is both their biggest headache and their biggest dream sugar daddy.
That was where the bill for most of the billions and billions of dollars in capital cost overruns for Metrorail was sent (and paid).
Also there are two states and a totally nonfunctional District government to deal with on any region-wide matter.
And the federal government, as well as various county and municipal governments in both Maryland and Virginia are involved. Though specifically regarding Metrorail, the Maryland part of the system’s operating and capital subsidies are funded entirely by the Maryland Department of Transportation, which means that MDOT makes the decisions.
Fix it first!