Metro officials are in the process of interviewing candidates to replace former General Manager John Catoe, who left abruptly in April to run a consulting firm. One question at the top of their list should be: What are you going to do about the “Pick” system? As the UnsuckDCMetro blog initially reported, twice a year Metro maintenance workers are apparently allowed to pick which escalators they will be responsible for during the upcoming six months. Employees with the most seniority go first, and they tend to pick escalators needing the least amount of repair. So less experienced mechanics are routinely assigned to fix the worst escalators. Although the Pick system is theoretically supposed to provide mechanics with the broadest range of experience, Metro riders already know how this works in real life: Escalator breakdowns are a perennial irritant. But when all three brakes on an L’Enfant Plaza escalator failed in October, sending four passengers to the hospital, the Pick system escalated into another major safety problem at Metro. A follow-up inspection of the transit agency’s 588 escalators by Vertical Transportation Excellence found many of them in various stages of disrepair, including loose or missing screws, worn sprockets, metal shavings where they shouldn’t be, leaking or missing lubricant, and brake pads “worn beyond usable life expectancy.” All six escalators at the Woodley Park station had brake problems. Many of the escalator brakes inspectors looked at were in a questionable state of repair under “no load” conditions, which means that on a typical busy workday, they posed a clear and present danger to Metro riders. Yet nothing was done until that terrifying 18-second freefall at L’Enfant finally forced Metro officials to confront the fact that more than 10 percent of their other escalators had the same problem.
The Pick system is just one manifestation of the gross mismanagement at Metro that has been harshly criticized by the National Transportation Safety Board, the Greater Washington Board of Trade, the Metropolitan Council of Governments and Metro’s own Riders Advisory Board. Metro’s still- malfunctioning automatic track circuit system, whose failure caused last year’s fatal Red Line crash, is another. Together they provide a disconcerting glimpse into a transit agency in which employee preferences get priority over passenger safety. Starting with the Pick system, Metro’s new general manager must be ready to take on this dysfunctional culture before anybody else gets hurt.
