Scott Dorsey <
kludge@panix.com> wrote:
Gary McGath <garym@mcgath.com> wrote:
Keith is always bragging that the DC metro is the worst in the USA,
but Boston is giving it strong competition.
I never said the DC Metro system was the worst in the US. How could I
even know that?
ObFandom: Indeed, I once posted here that I went to Ravencon in
Richmond by taking Greyhound to downtown then walking to the con hotel
at the airport. That walk took five hours. There was a city bus I
could have taken instead of walking, but it would have taken even
longer. Now *that's* a bad transit system.
What I have done is debunked effusive praise of the DC Metro system,
which invariably came from people far from DC, or at least from those
who never used the system.
What might be special about DC Metro is the extraordinarily low ratio
of usable service to money spent. The system is a black hole that
sucks in dollars from all over the US and produces nothing in return
but faint Hawking radiation, i.e. occasionally when everything goes
right it's actually faster to ride than to walk. Whenever that
happens, I'm tempted to report it to the police, given that their PA
system, when it's working, constantly announces that you should report
anything unusual.
I'm speaking of the Metrorail system. The Metrobus system, run by
the same organization, WMATA, is so bad that lots of local governments
have established their own bus systems, including Fairfax Connector,
Arlington Transit, OmniRide, CUE, DASH, OmniLink, George, Ride On, The
Bus, Jitney Bus, DC Circulator, and TransIT. Some of these work well,
but of course don't typically cross county or state lines. (The DC
area comprises DC proper, Montgomery and PG counties in Maryland,
Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia, and the independent cities
of Fairfax, Falls Church, and Alexandria in Virginia.)
DC is having a lot of problems right now because they are trying to
clean up after years of deferred maintenance.
What year are you posting from? They first used that excuse more
than 20 years ago. They then started intensive maintenance that made
large sections of the rail system completely unusable for months at a
time, but which never seemed to make anything better. This intensive maintenance *never* *ended*. It's still going on. Every year or two
they pull a Groundhog Day and use the exact same excuse, i.e. that
they are about to "start" intensive maintenance since maintenance had
been totally neglected since the system was first built.
There are track fires that have suffocated passengers to death. The
new 6000 series of train cars had a problem with cars uncoupling while
trains were in motion. The even newer 7000 series of train cars has a
problem with wheels coming loose and sliding along the axles, causing derailments. They never even *tried* to figure out why that was
happening. (Some things were never meant for man to know.) Instead,
they do frequent, intensive, and expensive inspections of all 7000
series rail cars to see whether the wheels have come loose again.
The first part of the Silver Line opened in 2014, *decades* late.
Just six years later they shut it down for the whole summer for
intensive maintenance and rebuilding. The second part of the Silver
Line opened in 2022. It turned out to have rotten concrete. Instead
of tearing out and fixing it at the expense of those responsible, they
decided to just coat it to keep water out, figuring that that would
probably work well enough. Of course the coating wears off with time,
so frequent intensive inspections will be necessary in perpetuity.
It's not a transportation system, it's a jobs & grift program. And
a fetish object for politicians to pose in front of while boasting of
how green they are for giving billions of dollars of other people's
money to the system. It can sometimes be used as a slow and
inefficient form of transportation, but that's like defending Bitcoin
based on at-home Bitcoin mining being a good way to heat one's house,
or like saying that kinky boots designed specifically for porn videos
are useful for hiking in.
There's a myth that ridership dropped during the pandemic. Well,
it did, but the implication that it was highest just before that is
wrong. It peaked in 2008, even though most of the money spent on
the system has been spent since then, and even though the system
has more stations and track miles than ever before.
One of the worst things about the system is all the lies. Lies often
seemingly designed to inconvenience passengers and taxpayers as much
as possible. For instance Metro has promised to stay open late during
major sports events, only to close at the usual time, stranding tens
of thousands of sports fans. Gotcha!
"Stesseling" means for an official to tell lies so outrageous that
nobody is expected to believe them, but they had better pretend to
believe them if they know what's good for them. It's apparently done
mostly as a show of power. It's named for Metro's former spokesman,
Dan Stessel, who was notorious for this.
I remember one line that was shut down for more than a month just for installation of cell phone service in the tunnel. They used that
excuse twice, a couple years apart, for the same line.
And now Metro is once again saying that they need subsidy increases
far in excess of inflation, or they will be forced to close half the
stations, run trains only during peak commuting hours, and run only
one or two trains per hour on each line.
DC still has plenty of problems. They still have union issues,
Indeed. Driving a Metro train is so simple that any child tall enough
to see through the windshield can do it. (I have a copy of their
manual.) But their drivers, janitors, etc., make six-figure salaries.
Even the ones who work only in Virginia, even though Virginia is a
"right to work" state (i.e. no closed (union members only) shops).
I'm not anti-union, but unions shouldn't be allowed to hold America
hostage. Truman, a Democrat, broke the steel union. Reagan, a
Republican, broke the air traffic controllers union. I think it's
time to break the transit union. Fire everyone and replace them
with the chronically unemployed. They couldn't do any worse.
they still haven't got their 1970s vintage automation system working
properly again, and they still have plenty of track issues.
Indeed. After a fatal collision due to that system malfunctioning,
they "temporarily" shut it down and went to manual control (which
has resulted in lots of minor injuries when the train suddenly jerks
back into motion immediately after stopping at a station, just as
passengers are starting to stand up, as the driver discovers the train
isn't in quite the right place.
That malfunction was 15 years ago, and it's still shut down. It took
less time to put a man on the moon.
And some escalators have taken even longer than that to repair. They
then have a major photo op around the repaired escalators, as if it
was one of mankind's greatest achievements. Often, shortly after
the last reporters pack up their cameras and notebooks and leave,
it breaks down again, as defunct as the grandfather clock in the
old poem.
I have no college degree. I was falsely convicted of a felony.
But what finally forced me into early retirement was the increasing unreliability of Metro. Similarly with tens of thousand of other
people in the greater DC area.
Even Metro employees aren't expected to ride it. The new Metro
headquarters building, in downtown DC near all six Metrorail lines,
has four levels of parking. How else can they be expected to get
to work?
--
Keith F. Lynch -
http://keithlynch.net/
Please see
http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
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