A woman got on the elevator with me at work the other day. I said good morning. Her response was predictable. “Boy,” she said with exasperation, “my commute gets worse and worse.”
“How long is it?” I asked.
“Today it was an hour and a half,” she said.
We talked about our commutes as we rode up.
“What about metro?” I asked.
“I used to ride metro, but I won’t anymore. I don’t trust it.”
I can guess one of the reasons she doesn’t trust it: safety.
Over the course of this past year people have been sent to the hospital because they got in the middle of fights on Metro trains and platforms. Escalators have broken down or pulled from service. Four riders were hospitalized. The paper recently reported the fourth arrest of a Metro access driver for sexual assault. A MARC commuter train recently derailed at Union Station. Last week a block of concrete fell from the roof of the Farragut North Metro station.
That woman must not be alone in her opinion of metro. According to the Examiner last month, “Metro’s ridership and revenues have fallen well below the transit agency’s projections…”
“Metrobus transported about 21 million passengers in July and August or nearly 2 million fewer riders than a year earlier…
“Metro trains carried about 18.5 million passengers in August, roughly 600,000 more than during the same month last year. But rail ridership still fell more than 100,000 below projected ridership levels in August, the most recent month for which data is available,” according to the Examiner.
The Metro system’s failures come just as a study by the Reason Foundation found that Maryland and District of Columbia highways are among the worst in the nation. According to the Examiner, the study ranked Maryland’s highways at 43rd in the nation and said the D.C. highway system is one of America’s poorest performers (Virginia’s roads got higher marks).
The decline of Metro suggests the need for new leadership of the system. But it also suggests it is time for political leaders to reassess their 40-year love affair with the Disney-like dazzle (remember the monorail was the wave of the future?) and false promise of mass transit and public transportation. That reassessment is critical now because while the government has been flirting with public transit, they have allowed the real backbone of our commercial and personal transportation system–roads, highways, bridges and bypasses, to crumble into a dangerous and destructive state of disrepair and neglect.
You would think that giving higher priority and devoting more resources to roads and bridges would be a no-brainer.
Nope.
The regional transportation board plans “to spend two-thirds of future transportation dollars on improving the region’s public transit systems, despite estimates that public transit accounts for less than 10 percent of area travel,” according to an Examiner account last month.
The Board apparently intends to spend $142 billion for public transit projects while devoting only $81 billion to highway projects, “even though the planning board estimates driving trips account for more than 80 percent of all local travel, while public transportation accounts for just 6.2 percent of local trips.”
Public transit has not captured the public imagination nowhere near the degree the behavioral engineers thought it would. It has proved far costlier than first estimated. It has proved difficult to manage, hard to maintain, and almost impossible to expand or improve. Meanwhile, regular traffic congestion has grown worse, increasing pollution, creating an economic drain on the region, and making the lives of millions of motorists miserable.
So why do the decision-makers persist in dumping more and more tax dollars into a transportation system that has, is and probably always will, operate on the margins of human behavior and human needs? Because the Metro system is the symbol of social engineering and as such it cannot fail. That’s why. If Metro fails, social engineering fails and if social engineering fails then the bedrock of progressive–dare I say socialist—governance, forcing change in human behavior to fit a government model not the individual’s model, fails. In the wake of that failure, people in Maryland and the District of Columbia may start taking to heart that “failed policies of the past” gibberish and elect Republicans.
There is a place for public transit in any urban area’s transportation network. There’s no question about it. But giving it a place in the network doesn’t square with it replacing the backbone of that network or advancing public transit at the expense and the ultimate demise of the area’s unquestionable and undisputed primary mode of transportation.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board. Or maybe we just throw out the drawing board and expand the roads, fix the bridges and build another bypass.
