It had been a long time since I’d been to a big league ballgame and I was looking forward to this one. My brother had bought the tickets, and going by the stadium schematic, it looked like we had good seats. Grandstand on the third base line, not too far up. We had lucked out on the schedule, too. The Nats were in first place in their division and playing the Mets, who were chasing and two games out. We’d even stumbled into a good pitching matchup. Gio Gonzalez for the Nats, and if he could get out of the first couple of innings, my brother said, then he could be tough, since the Mets were not an especially hard-hitting team. They were starting the best pitcher in their rotation, Matt Harvey.
It was mid-July and hot, almost 100 degrees, but the game didn’t start until early evening, when things would be cooling off a little. Fine night for a baseball game, and I had that old eager feeling. Cold beer, salty peanuts, the sound of a hard pitch hitting the leather of the catcher’s mitt . . . what could be better?
But first, I had to get to the park. I’d spent the day at the offices of this magazine, which are located right in the tenderloin of D.C., where the lawyers and lobbyists keep their offices. I had to get out to the stadium, not far from the Navy Yard. Much too far to walk, so it was either a conventional cab, Uber, or the Metro.
I’ve never much liked going underground—nothing that rises to the level of claustrophobia, but when I lived in New York, if it was a nice day, I’d walk 40 blocks to keep from taking the subway, where it was dark and noisy and the space around you seemed to shrink, little by little, the longer you were down there. And, of course, there were your fellow passengers, some of whom looked dangerous or deranged or both.
That was some time ago and people tell me the subways in New York are now much cleaner and safer and . . . I’ll take their word for it. Especially since there is Uber.
But I had a different feeling about Washington’s Metro. A long time back, I’d ridden it every day for a week, when I was working on a story about one of those “high government officials” whose name I seem to have forgotten. I remember he was important. He had a car and driver and a very big office.
Anyway, I would take the Metro into the District every morning from Virginia, where I was staying with my brother and his family. And I would ride back out every night and bore everyone with accounts of how fantastic the Metro was. It was clean. The trains ran on time and never seemed to come to a halt between stops and then sit there for long, troubling interludes, leaving you to wonder if you would ever get out.
Washington, it seemed to me, had come up with a world-class system for moving people around.
So an hour or so before the first pitch, I went down into the Farragut North station feeling no fear and lined up at one of the machines to buy myself a fare card. But the couple in front of me was having trouble with the machine. It had taken their money but had not delivered a card. They punched buttons more and more forcefully in their frustration, but that didn’t work, so one of them went looking for someone to help and came back with the news that there was nobody in the area with the expertise to fix the machine.
I went to another machine, which took my credit card and, then, its own sweet time about giving up a fare card. Eventually, I was cleared to ride.
I walked down the platform, and things seemed less bright and clean than I remembered them. And then the public address system crackled, and an announcement came over the air. “Bllleggha, coooophlll, thrrrre . . . ”
Whatever the voice was saying, it was incomprehensible. And I remembered this was a feature of the New York subway—to the point that you wondered if it wasn’t done intentionally, to keep the riders in their place, reminding them of the contempt in which the system held them. Hard to build new tracks and dig new tunnels and pay for new cars. But a speaker system?
I made the ride to the park with one change and several new announcements coming through the speakers along the way, all of them garbled beyond recognition.
The Metro delivered me to the park, which is handsome and up-to-date enough that I had forgotten the discontents of the ride before the first pitch. The Nats took the game. I might have wished to see a big league double play and a Bryce Harper dinger, but those were mild regrets. Then, it was back to the Metro.
There was another line change on the way to my destination, and along with a few hundred other riders who had been to the game, I waited there for a full half-hour. No announcements came through the speakers. Not even the garbled kind, which would have assured us, at least, that somebody was paying attention and knew we were down there.
The Metro’s brass had not, plainly, laid on any extra cars for the inevitable crush that would follow a ballgame. Maybe, someone behind me whispered, they had shut down for the night. It didn’t sound to me like whoever was saying it considered this beyond the realm of possibility.
The train showed, eventually, and I made it to my destination. Later, when I said something about this to someone who lived in Washington, he gave me the old “What rock have you been hiding under?” look and recited the litany of recent Metro woes, to include a murder and a train stalled in a tunnel with passengers breathing toxic fumes that killed one of them.
The system, it seems, is a mess, and though there have been studies, reports, and hearings in abundance, nobody seems to know how to fix even the little things, like the speaker system that delivers only garbled, incomprehensible announcements that fit right in with the overall gestalt. And when the great marbled city that is the capital of the world’s most powerful nation cannot maintain a system for moving citizens around efficiently and safely . . . well, we all know the rest.
Up above ground, in the clear air of the private sector, Uber is getting it done. Down in the tunnels of the public sector, you can’t understand a word that comes through the loudspeakers.
Sic transit …
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
