Some called it the Great Society Subway, and like a metaphor for the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s grandiose plans, the Washington Metro Rail system is slowly breaking down. No less than the Washington Post calls it “a slow-rolling embarrassment whose creeping obsolescence is so pervasive, and so corrosive, that Washingtonians are increasingly abandoning it.” System ridership is down by 5 percent from a year ago even though other transit agencies in the region have seen growth.
“Last Monday morning, all five Metrorail lines were beset by mishaps, the second such one-day calamity in three weeks,” the Post editorial continued. “The comatose escalators; the crumbling ceiling at Farragut North, year after year after year; the funereal lighting; the frequent signal problems; the routine single-tracking that makes weekend Metro use torturous–all of this takes a toll on riders that Metro officials too blithely dismiss.”
Metro’s general manager gets paid $350,000 a year to watch the trains and rails rust away, and as if that isn’t enough next year Metro’s board is giving him a raise to $366,000. One excuse for such high pay for what amounts to a failure is that it wasn’t all his fault; but really, why should managers of rail transit agencies get paid so much more than managers of agencies that only run buses?
Update: Someone pointed out to the Antiplanner this 2011 Washington Examiner article saying that Metro trains schedules are so fouled up that train operators often don’t get to take their regularly scheduled breaks. So some of them simply relieve themselves in the train cars. “That’s why the trains smell like urine near where the operators are,” one worker told the Washington Examiner (which regrettably is going to on-line only next week).
Meanwhile, across the country, the San Jose Mercury-News reports that BART’s highest-paid employee last year didn’t work a single day, at least not for BART. That employee was Dorothy Dugger, the agency’s former general manager who got fired in 2011 for letting that rail system deteriorate and defending a transit security officer who shot and killed a man in handcuffs. Dugger elected to collect pay for 3,100 of accumulated vacation time, and BART paid her for those hours at her final pay rate, not at the rates she was paid when she didn’t take the vacations.
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All of this was on top of the $920,000 severance pay BART had to give her as part of a settlement because it botched the effort to fire her by violating California’s open meetings law. BART’s current general manager, who gets paid only $316,000 a year, will no doubt demand a pay raise to be comparable to the pay earned by Washington Metro’s manager.
“BART is widely known for offering some of the most lucrative government benefits and sweeteners in California,” says the Mercury-News. “Employees contribute nothing to pension costs, the agency provides rare deferred compensation accounts as an extra retirement fund and most employees contribute only $92 a month to medical insurance costs no matter how many dependents they have on a policy.”
The fundamental problem here is that rail transit is an expensive and obsolete technology. In both Metro’s and BART’s cases, the regions found the money to build the rail lines and then to operate them, but no one has come up with the money to maintain them, which effectively means completely rebuilding them about every 30 years. As the Washington Examiner notes, “But with a life span of about 30 years on a system that is 37 years old, many of the pieces are due for major work if not replacement.”
Washington and the San Francisco Bay Area are not the only regions facing this problem. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, among others, have similar maintenance issues. Taxpayers in these cities are already paying too much just to subsidize operations; they repeatedly refuse to support proposals to increase taxes for capital replacement. In some cities building rail today, local taxpayers will still be paying off the bonds needed to construct the lines for years after the reconstruction bill becomes due.
Transit agency board members seem to think that, if they pay their general manager enough money, that manager will be able to solve this unsolvable problem. That simply doesn’t work and does little more than add to the cost of running the systems (not to mention giving general managers of bus-only transit agencies incentives to lie to their boards and the public in order to persuade them to build rail lines). Instead of celebrating rail transit as the sign of a world-class city, it should be seen as a sign of high taxes and poor transportation.
Vacation leave accumulation should be capped at say, 10 weeks as it is in most workplaces. Not only does that require that an employee take some rest time off which may well improve their overall job performance, but it gives their second in command experience in running the operation. Good management should require vacations be taken to make sure a system can function if the person becomes incapacitated for any reason. This also allows the system to experiment and see how well others manage a system. If a manager does not take time off it may well be that they don’t want to show how the system functions without them. I am certainly aware of middle managers who simply get in the way and the system actually functions better without them. Anytime an employee says they cannot take vacation time something is wrong with the system.
In addition, apparently the first thing embezzlement investigators ask for is vacation records. They then investigate those who do not take lengthy vacations. Apparently these are the people who have something to hide.
Perhaps in Federal grants there should be a requirement that accumulated vacation leave should be capped at 10 weeks.
The WMATA is worse than the editorial lets on. Thanks to comments from other readers I now believe the stench in LEnfont Plaza is from the fish market runoff and not a large rotting carcass. Just the other day I was noticing all the stains on the stainless steel trains and all the peeling paint. I check daily for my two pet mice that live in LEnfont, how they survive in the filth of the “spitting wells” (the space between the back of the platforms and the inside arched wall of the tunnel) I’ll never know. For some reason, more lights are out than normal down there, getting darker. The above ground is no better, seems like more and more trains don’t have the “Privacy curtain” for the driver, so you can watch through the front windows and see what the driver sees. I’ve never seen concrete in such sorry condition as that under the platforms. Rust, Corrosion, Spalling Concrete, cracking tiles. I remember being really impressed by the system many years ago.,
Got it trains bad. Roads, buses, and sprawl good.
Got it trains bad. Roads, buses, and sprawl good.
Got it roads, buses, and “sprawl” (a meaningless pejorative for how most Americans actually prefer to live), bad. High density, high crime, everyone regimented on trains and walking, with driving made as inconvenient as possible, in the supposed pursuit of nebulous environmental goals, good.
Got it roads, buses, and “sprawl” (a meaningless pejorative for how most Americans actually prefer to live), bad.
Actually sprawl more has to with segregation of uses than people living in their own homes. There are plenty of apartments in sprawled areas. In many cases it is illegal to build anything else so it is hard to say how much choice goes into it.
High density, high crime, everyone regimented on trains and walking, with driving made as inconvenient as possible,
This one is a complete strawman. Nothing wrong with high density it makes more efficient usage of land. I don’t support regimenting people into trains or walking. I choose myself to bike, walk, or use transit no one is regimenting me. Driving inconveniences itself through large traffic jams.
in the supposed pursuit of nebulous environmental goals, good.
Don’t really care about this one I am not a malthusian. Environmentalism is used to stop the creation of rail projects as well as other things such as nuclear power. What people today call environmentalism is holding back development of technologies and holding back human progress things which would actually improve the environment.
Got it trains bad. Roads, buses, and sprawl good.
*Making people wait in a train station that smells like rotting fish — BAD
*Making people try to navigate escalators, stairs in near darkness — BAD
*Making people try to avoid the edge of the train platform in near darkness — BAD
*Making people walk through spaces under the risk of parts of concrete falling on their head — BAD
*Making hundreds of people sit/stand and wait while the train stops at a station that normally has only one or two people waiting — BAD
*Charging people exorbiant fees to experience the above — BAD
The Antiplanner wrote:
Transit agency board members seem to think that, if they pay their general manager enough money, that manager will be able to solve this unsolvable problem. That simply doesn’t work and does little more than add to the cost of running the systems (not to mention giving general managers of bus-only transit agencies incentives to lie to their boards and the public in order to persuade them to build rail lines). Instead of celebrating rail transit as the sign of a world-class city, it should be seen as a sign of high taxes and poor transportation.
A lot of people (including elected officials) think (or hope) that rail transit provides highway congestion relief, and can “replace” highways in urban and suburban areas.
A friend and colleague calls that “faith-based transportation planning.”
OFP2003 wrote:
I’ve never seen concrete in such sorry condition as that under the platforms. Rust, Corrosion, Spalling Concrete, cracking tiles. I remember being really impressed by the system many years ago.
Check out this propaganda video ( here ) commissioned by the WMATA Public Relations Department in 1975 (the year before the first part of the system opened, in spite of what the video implies – the transit “patrons” were apparently WMATA employees and families, and some are seen more than once). Still, this is what the system looked like before it opened to customers.
The first section of the system opened to revenue service was in March of 1976, when the Red Line began operation from Rhode Island Avenue to Farragut North.
Note the repeated claims that it will divert large number of persons from their private automobiles onto the Metro trains.
*Making people wait in a train station that smells like rotting fish — Government
*Making people try to navigate escalators, stairs in near darkness — Government
*Making people try to avoid the edge of the train platform in near darkness — Government
*Making people walk through spaces under the risk of parts of concrete falling on their head — Government
*Making hundreds of people sit/stand and wait while the train stops at a station that normally has only one or two people waiting — Government
*Charging people exorbiant fees to experience the above — Government
@ Libertyrailroad…..
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