The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, known as Metro, runs busses and commuter rail in the greater Washington area. The whole operation is bleeding cash, losing over $2 million a day.
Two out of the three government partners that usually help bridge the financial gap, Virginia and Maryland, are strapped. What this all means is that Metro is likely headed for layoffs, furloughs, delayed and canceled projects, and significant service reductions if Congress doesn’t step in.
Metro’s latest coronavirus-fueled woes come after years of scheduled and unscheduled delays and extensive track maintenance were starting to pay off for commuters.
Metro rail cars are powered by electricity, delivered via a third rail. Insulation on those electrical conduits had degraded over time. Other elements of the system had fallen on poor repair as well, and by the mid-2010s, it showed.
The systemwide degradation led to deadly derailments, random electrical arcing, fires, and arguments about those fires. The website IsMetroOnFire.com reported 73 fires in Metro stations in the first quarter of 2016. Metro famously contested this figure by saying that there was only smoke in some of those cases.
Robert Puentes is president of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington. He told the Washington Examiner that Metro’s current problems are “all related to COVID.”
After years of struggling with maintenance delays, “the agency actually was making a lot of progress,” Puentes said. Ridership was up, and all the critical metrics were “moving in the right direction.”
When the pandemic came to the region, that all changed rapidly. Metro was actually telling people not to use its services unless necessary. “It’s like opening a restaurant and asking people not to come in and eat there,” Puentes said.
Rail ridership declined by “at least 90%.” Bus ridership fell as well, though not as steeply.
Puentes thinks the transportation agency needs to stay the course. It can lure riders back over time by playing up “all these new cleaning protocols,” as well as insisting on wearing a mask and social distancing.
In the meantime, Metro is going to need money to keep running at the current speed. Over 120 members of the House of Representatives, including Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, wrote a letter to House leadership calling for $32 billion in additional funding for public transportation as part of any future coronavirus bailout package.
Puentes thinks that Metro’s cut of that would be enough to keep things from derailing. He’s also heard a compromise figure of $15 billion or so discussed. That would be better than nothing but would likely only “kick the can down the road,” requiring a future bailout, he said.
Baruch Feigenbaum is director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, with offices in both California and Washington. He disagrees with Puentes’s assessment of Metro and his funding-first approach to addressing Metro’s problems.
“[Metro] is in a lot of trouble, especially over the long term,” Feigenbaum told the Washington Examiner. “WMATA already needed major subsidies from the local governments pre-COVID. With COVID, many folks are going to be hesitant to board trains and buses, so ridership is unlikely to recover for years, if ever, necessitating even larger subsidies.”
He worries that “short-term bailouts may prevent transit agencies from making long-term changes.” Feigenbaum believes Metro should coordinate transit services rather than operating them by contracting out rail and bus operations. Metro considered doing this with its new silver line, but pushback by unions nixed it.
Feigenbaum also argued the federalist point that “mass transit is a regional service that should be funded regionally,” not by Congress.
Whether more federal funding will come for Metro this year is an open question. Negotiations over further COVID-19 relief between the two houses of Congress and the White House broke down. President Trump recently issued several executive orders and other administrative actions for the executive branch to do what it could in Congress’s absence.
A spokesperson for the Federal Transportation Agency told the Washington Examiner that Metro already “received $876,806,108 to cover operating and COVID-19-related expenses, including salaries, leave for affected employees, cleaning supplies, and personal protective equipment” as part of the CARES Act bailout bill Trump signed in March.
The FTA further explained: “We expect that many transit agencies will continue to spend their CARES Act funds through 2021.”
The Washington Examiner repeatedly asked the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign what should be done to address Metro’s “massive shortfall, with huge layoffs and service reductions looming,” and if they have any plans to “address the problem if elected” to the White House.
By press time, the Biden campaign only replied, “Thank you for emailing Biden for President. We will respond to your message as soon as possible.”
