The Washington Metro Transit Authority (WMATA) may provide the subway that Washington, D.C. deserves, but not the one it needs.
And lately, the daily commute in the nation’s capital has been worse than ever. Despite a last-minute system-wide closure in March for emergency safety work, rush hour commutes have been snarled by broken escalators, cars filled with smoke, delayed trains, and a train that was stuck under the Potomac River for half an hour one afternoon.
The system is clearly broken and needs fixing, which makes it all the more shocking that WMATA’s chairman of the board, Jack Evans, skipped a National Transit Safety Board hearing on Tuesday looking into Metro’s most recent fatality.
When THE WEEKLY STANDARD called Evans’s office to query him about his absence, his scheduler promised to check, but instead hung up.
At the hearing, the NTSB presented the results of its investigation into an incident when the L’Enfant Plaza metro station filled with smoke on January 12, 2015, killing one woman and injuring 91 passengers.
The accident exposed worrying practices, including sending trains full of passengers to investigate reports of smoke or fire on the tracks. The National Transit Safety Board’s report offered recommendations for emergency response teams and federal transit authorities, as well as 33 specific recommendations for WMATA itself, including such seemingly basic suggestions as, “conduct regular emergency response drills.”
In addition, the fatality highlighted how little progress WMATA had made since 2009, when a crash between two trains at Fort Totten station killed nine people.
“Little or no progress has been made toward building a meaningful safety culture,” said NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart. “When the NTSB finds itself issuing a continuous stream of accident reports to address the basic safety management of a single transit rail system, something is fundamentally flawed. Here, that something is safety oversight.”
Robert L. Sumwalt, another member of the safety board, said that accident showed that the Washington Metro “historically speaking, has had a severe learning disability.”
“Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organizations,” he said. “And literally that is true in this case.”
Clearly WMATA isn’t learning. Although Evans skipped the safety meeting, he was present at a hearing of the House committee on Transportation and Public Assets in late April, when he asked for an additional $300 million of federal funds to keep the system operational.
Despite a ridership decline to levels not seen since 2014, WMATA has already proposed to raise its operating budget for the year, something that rider fares will not cover. To cover the bills, it will require additional subsidies, Evans argued. Without the additional money, “Metro will remain a system that’s maybe safe, somewhat reliable, and mediocre instead of the world class system that the National Capital region deserves,” he said.
When Evans was unanimously elected chairman of the board in January, a local radio station ribbed him as an infrequent metro rider, who vowed that one of his “goals” was to “visit all 91 Metro stops.” There hasn’t been a report on how he’s been doing on his goal, but it seems safe to say that Evans hasn’t been riding much. Then again, neither has anybody else.
