How the Washington D.C. Metro got so bad
washingtonian.com
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I think DC is also semi-unique in the makeup of its commuters since inside the beltway is such a hub for employers and a large number of employees are happy to have an hour+ commute each way. The cost of real estate is so ridiculously high around here that you don't start seeing 3+ BR townhomes becoming accessible on anything other than a VP+ salary until about 15 miles out from downtown DC. If you want a freestanding home over 1000sft the affordability distance becomes 20+ miles.
From what I've seen a vast majority of people will do whatever contortions they need to in their personal lives to get and keep a government/ government contractor job because those jobs have incredible stability (contractor not as much as working directly for the government, however that depends on what contractor you work for). Once you've got the coveted federal job you're happy to live in a basement 20 miles from the city on your entry-level pay tier because if you can just grin and bear it long enough you'll be almost guaranteed employment for life. Those employees can, do, and will continue to use Metro despite every problem it has because sitting in their car on I66 for an hour is not a viable alternative.
See e.g. http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/423/georgetown-neve...
This is completely true. Let's also not forget that these employees quickly become unemployable in any other sector. They are literally trapped in the region, because most of these jobs are simply a part-time task for a single worker in the private sector, or completely automated. This further drives up home prices, because even if you hate the area, you're going to buy whatever you can afford since you know you aren't going anywhere.
DC: The weather of Philadelphia, the home prices of the Bay Area, the traffic congestion of Honolulu, the hostile to newcomers attitude of Seattle, and the not-so-bright but got rich off the system anyway culture of Wall Street.
What a place.
Even if one puts a less cynical spin on it, it's absolutely true that a lot of the accumulated experience and human capital of an inside the beltway career is associated with working within and around a very specific system. Transplant a lot of people who work in DC elsewhere to an industry unrelated to the federal government and their skills just won't be as valued.
Of course, you end up having to pay the inflated cost of living driven by the Government/Contractor drones.
I'd actually have said Philly had better weather than DC though. It's enough further south that summers are starting to get more southeastern in temperature/humidity (which I personally hate) and, while winters are milder, snow storms still happen but they're infrequent enough that chaos ensues.
We are all complaining about metro on here, but going into the city it's the only option. Rent is sky high in the city, and you want to avoid these kinds of places:
Hip places like Dupont or Columbia Heights. Hip is expensive
Places with the new and upscale appearance that appeals to young professional women who tend to be very non-price sensitive, like Ballston or Rosslyn. Rents are insane there.
Places to check out:
Crystal City is less hip and less pricey, but going up fast.
Huntington is a great bet. It's an immigrant neighborhood, which scares away the yuppie white people who pretend to be multi-cultural but really are closet racists according to any realtor or apartment manager in the area. Rents are affordable, and the neighborhoods near there are walkable, but decidedly not hip or party places. Plus you have quick access to the Mt. Vernon Bike Trail, which will zip you up into DC in 30 minutes or even across the bridge into Maryland. Plus, Old Town Alexandria is a quick bike ride up the trail for bars.
Arlandria used to be super cheap. Again, look for the immigrant areas.
I don't know the Maryland neighborhoods as well, but there are a ton of good ones. They tend to be pricier.
That also happens to people who get sucked into defense industries. The security is false for many, though, because they are expendable if contract issues arise. Even if the company has a civilian arm, the guys on the defense side get pink slipped.
When I had to get to LEnfant plaza I took the Burke station VRE straight into town. Weekly passes were ~$60-70, and my commute was 1 hour including the 15min to get to Burke station. Taking the Metro on the other hand, cost me closer to $100 per week, took 30 minutes to get to Vienna metro (because hellacious traffic on 50/66 daily) and another 45-60 minutes to get to LEnfant.
Hands down VRE was better.
WTF.
I commuted in and around Boston for many years. It's just an exhausting, draining experience. Even a crummy, poorly maintained subway system is better than sitting in traffic jams for 30-45 minutes at a stretch. On the train/bus, you can at least close your eyes, or read a book.
For me, the scary thing is that the multitude of issues the Metro has almost weekly means that another fatal incident can happen any day now. After the 2009 crash the trains all went to manual brakes so they could sort out the automatic braking system that failed. To my knowledge that still isn't fixed. That indicates to me that they're still way behind on getting safety under control, much less making the organizational changes required to avoid another fatality like the L'Enfant incident.
WMATA embodies the cautionary tale of an organization that has allowed incompetence, selfishness, and indolence to metastasize and paralyze a big organization to the point that it is killing people. It's going to take a whole new cadre of leadership to root out the blight at WMATA, not to mention the boatload of money that will be needed to pull out of the death spiral.
It's a shame, I bought my damned house partially because of its proximity to a Metro stop and now I avoid taking it.
That said, I really think it's a matter of time before overcrowded rush-hour platforms lead to someone falling on the tracks or getting stampeded. I fought thought this crowd this morning: https://twitter.com/wowindc/status/676761566751105025
The crowding thing at rush hour is a huge pain, usually on the evening commute. Haven't actually ridden Metro since Silver line started up but I can't imagine that has lessened the crush.
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-the-new-york-city-...
The BART sucks too, don't get me wrong. But the DC Metro is simply AWFUL compared to NYC, and it has far less tracks to maintain.
When the New York subway has a bad day, you're 20 minutes late. When Metro has a bad day you can be 1-2 hours late.
It's also pretty lousy on weekends, especially if you have to switch lines it can be 5x slower than a car.
The reason is simple. It was completely hijacked by a union who turned themselves into a "good old boys club" for people from the poor neighborhoods who were born and raised in DC and educated in it's horrifically bad public school system.
The union once treated the management as the enemy, but once there was no more money left to squeeze from the system itself, they began treating the riders as the enemy. Fares were raised every 6 months by the time I left, and the system continued to degrade.
The racial statistics of the system are clearly indicative of a racial bias in hiring which is a direct result of the good old boy hiring system.
New mechanics are iced out in the same way the new managers were by the salary doubling overtime culture the employees practice. Because to them, a single mechanic working 12 hour shifts is better than two mechanics working 8 hour shifts, despite the former costing the same and doing far, far less than the latter to keep the system operational.
I support unions in the private sector. But my experience dealing with the DC Metro has made me loathe them in any public monopoly where consumers have no way to choose a competitor when the union gets out of hand and starts siphoning money from them.
My favorite, glaring example which is a tiny sliver of what occurs courtesy of the union:
A bus driver, several years ago, randomly pulled his bus over when he saw a person in a "McGruff the crime dog" costume talking to children about drugs. He assaulted McGruff, and then got back on his bus and continued operations.
The union forced the WMATA to rehire him, WITH BACKPAY. He still works there, serving the public. He also had a previous felony record.
Vaughn reduced Brim's penalty to a 30-day suspension and awarded him back pay for the rest of the time. Farbstein did not know the value of back pay awarded in either case."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06...
http://wjla.com/news/local/metro-employee-police-officer-acc...
It boggles the mind that someone who is collecting fares from ticket machines can simply pocket the money without anyone noticing for a long time.
Is it the union's fault that Metro's estimates on Silver Line ridership were way off? Or that newly ordered 7000-series train cars are not up to spec? Or dangerous overcrowding on certain platforms?
The ridership numbers were impacted by the overall decline in ridership that the union created. Commuters in the Silver Line corridor have a choice, and they all are well aware of how unreliable the metro is. The funneling of the silver line through already overcrowded and poorly managed Orange Line stations didn't help.
Overcrowding on platforms: too few trains in operation due to the union hiring too few mechanics
Silver Line ridership below projections: the locals don't trust metro because it is unreliable because of poor management, too few hires at operator and controller level, because of the union.
7000 series cars not up to spec: Not the union's fault. But good luck hiring smart people at metro. The culture is toxic and nobody wants to work there.
That is so true. I hate to say it and it is solely based on behaviors and actions, but the mentality of the people with Metro is atrocious, at absolute best. They move like sloths, if you can get them to acknowledge you, yell and scream while talking to each other and totally ignoring things they should be doing ... let alone could be doing, know essentially nothing but giving you information to go somewhere else, and have absolutely no care to assist anyone with anything without being compelled to ... it's abysmal! The worst part about it is that it is an absolutely horrific image for both DC, the USA in general, and especially the black American community of our whole country.
If you want to see one of the sources of bad impressions of black people in America go observe Metro staff or interact with them through their customer service line. I don't even think people quite grasp the damage to the global impression of black Americans the Metro does. There are millions of tourists from all over the globe that come to DC and ride the Metro and I can tell you from first hand experience hearing from many of them; the rude, lazy, unfriendly, boorish mentality of Metro staff sticks with people and they take it home and tell tales of how disgustingly crude American black people are base on their Metro experience.
I mean it's so bad if I didn't know any better I would have thought the Metro system was a plot by some racist group to spread hatred for black people by hiring the worst people imaginable to make black people look bad.
It's incredible how short-sighted the D.C. Metro planners were.
This probably had greater play in the reasoning years ago to forgo an extra track than we realize at this time.
Most of the DC Metro was built by tunnel boring underneath already existing DC buildings. Very little, until one gets out to the suburbs, was built by open-cut and backfill, and even less of the system is surface grade. The planners in the late 50's to mid 60's, budgeting out 2*X (where X is likely a largish two digit number) of miles of tunnel boring, likely thought they were making a great money saving decision by not boring a third or fourth tunnel.
And since typical human nature is to not think of the "what can go wrong" scenarios before they actually go wrong, those same planners likely never considered the "how do we fix track in tunnel 2 without having to half shut the system down to do so?" aspects of their decisions at the time.
Having met transit planners before, I think you're probably not giving them enough credit.
The sort of hellish clusterfuck that happens when things go wrong in a 2-track system is well understood and not new even during Metro's planning and construction. More likely it was decided that a 2-track system that went straight to hell the moment something went wrong is a better choice than nothing at all, which is the alternative.
It's not that they were trying to save money, but rather trying to fit the system within a budget that simply couldn't get any larger.
Same deal here in NYC - the new Second Avenue Subway is 2-track even though everyone, the MTA included, knows the problems inherent in it. The problem is that there is literally no way to cough up enough money to make it a 3- or 4-track subway.
Public transit has been a dirty word in American politics for over half a century, and the willingness to invest isn't much different. These weren't short-sighted decisions, they were entirely cognizant of the shortcomings, but there wasn't any other choice.
One reason for some of the cost overruns was that Metro discovered that many of the buildings they were boring under weren't built very well and they had to do a lot of extra, unplanned, work to strengthen the foundations. I remember a building somewhere around Florida and U Street that had these massive girders holding it up while Metro rebuilt it's foundations. Who knows? Maybe that extra work helped us during the East Coast earthquake a few years back.
It also prevents anything like an express train from being possible. This might not work anyway given the relative distances and train frequency, but I would absolutely build my schedule around an express if such a thing existed here.
1. One time, they stopped working with a startup (which provided payment cards/passes via direct paycheck/deposit) without giving any warning. So I was stuck with $465 on my card, which I couldn't really use now.
2. There also have been several cases when some drunk/high/angry people would assault passengers in the evening. Ok, that happens in other places too. However, one time I went and complained about it and they told me "Sorry, we can't do anything. They left, we can't stop them now" Ok, how about you look at your cameras so that you can stop them next time or increase number of police? Yeah, their employees didn't really care about it.
If you live in DC, please join. I think wheat they're trying to do is a good thing. They are trying to focus on a few key areas to put various kinds of pressure on WMATA officials.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, except that I went to their first public meeting. To say that it was "eye opening" would be an understatement. I've lived in the DC metro area for over 25 years and I thought I knew all of WMATA's problems, but some of the stories I heard at that meeting made me realize how lucky I am to live within walking distance to an Orange Line stop.
That being said, I feel like it depends on the stations. I would argue that the dirtiest stations in NYC are way way more gross. You got some pretty gnarly rat situations in some of the stations.
Including European systems I feel that I can tell if a system is good or not if it impedes the travel part of my day. Can I notice that the system is actively getting in my way?
This is false, CBTC has greatly increased L train capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_of_the_New_York_Cit...
The Canarsie line is two-tracked and doesn't have any mechanism for passing besides single-tracking (also, no tail tracks at the Manhattan terminus).