Gulliver | A subway system's problems run deep

How to fix Washington, DC's unloved Metro

The metro system in Washington, DC is about to celebrate its 40th birthday. It won’t be much of a party

By A.W. | WASHINGTON, DC

THIS Sunday, the metro system in Washington, DC will celebrate its 40th birthday. It won’t be much of a party. If residents of the American capital have a reputation across the nation for talking politics, locals know that Washingtonians’ favourite pastime is, in fact, griping about its subway.

On Wednesday, those gripes reached a new level, as the entire Metro system was shut down for the day due to safety concerns. The closure was caused by a fire on a track earlier this week. That alarmed Metro’s new general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, who saw “commonalities with the cable fire at L’Enfant Plaza” last year, which caused a train to fill with smoke and left one passenger dead. (That incident followed a deadlier one in 2009, in which two trains crashed on the Red Line, killing nine people.) Mr Wiedefeld decided he could not “rule out a potential life-safety issue here”. In the face of such concerns, he shut the system down to inspect the system’s 600 jumper cables.

It was a gutsy call. As social media erupted in outrage, severalwriters jumped to his defence, arguing the closure was needed to protect the safety of Metro passengers. The problem with this argument, though, is that this type of work has been done before, and it hasn’t seemed to have helped. After the L’Enfant Plaza incident, engineers inspected all of the jumper cables and replaced 125 of them. So why, a year later, must the system shut down for a reinspection?

It is the first time the Metro has been taken out of commission other than for extreme weather, and it unleashed commuting chaos across the region. The Washington region is highly dependent on the Metro, the country’s second-biggest transport network after New York. It quickly transformed the way people get around when the first line opened in 1976. Fewer than half of the people who work in the city get to work by car. According to the US Census Bureau, the percentage who use public transportation to commute increased by a third between 2000 and 2013 to 39%—a figure that’s much higher for residents of the city proper.

The system has helped in other ways, too. Development around Metro stations can bring trendy restaurants, bars and shops to a city previously known as rather staid. After decades of decline, Washington’s population is booming. Yet Metro ridership is not. After consistent growth from the 1990s to 2009, the number of daily riders has dropped alarmingly in the past few years. People have begun to see it as a broken system of delayed trains, crammed carriages and weekend track work that renders service infrequent and unreliable.

Metro’s problem is twofold. Bad management is partly to blame, although there is hope that Mr Wiedefeld can turn this around. But the more intractable issue is inadequate funding. Without the money to be proactive, Metro is constantly playing catchup on important safety measures and repairs. So it raises fares and cuts service in an attempt to make up for the shortfall. That, in turn, causes people to turn to other ways of getting around. So the system loses more revenue and the hole deepens.

Ideally, the solution would be a big financial injection from the government. But Congress is not willing to foot the lion’s share of Metro’s bill, as it did when the system was first constructed. And securing more local funding can be maddeningly complicated. The trains run through DC, Maryland and Virginia; getting all the jurisdictions to agree on budget increases is nearly impossible.

Still, the problem isn’t unique to Washington. All across America, a reluctance to dedicate substantial public funding to subway systems has led to public transport that is an embarrassment in comparison to the cleaner, faster, more reliable systems in Europe and Asia. One recent visitor from France remarked to Gulliver that he’d never again complain about the Paris Métro after riding on a few American subways.

Unwilling or unable to muster the funding for subway improvements, American cities are increasingly turning to streetcars as a cheaper alternative. But, as we recently discussed on this blog, systems like the one that has just opened in Washington, and the one that is proposed for New York, are not well thought out. What is needed is a bigger commitment to subways. Frustrations like the one that consumed Washington on Wednesday can lead passengers to forsake the subway altogether. Let’s hope the reaction is the opposite one: a renewed push for the kind of funding America’s transit systems need.

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