Despite National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations and General Manager John Catoe’s personal pledge after the June 22 Red Line crash that killed nine people and injured 70, Metro is still putting old, unsafe rail cars at the front of some trains. Outrageous as it is, this is what inevitably happens with union-heavy, quasi-statist bureaucracies like Metro: They aren’t unresponsive to the public they are supposed to serve because there is no effective accountability to the public.
With billions spent to build and expand Metro, the most important day-to-day task for the system’s managers remains operating and maintaining it to ensure passenger safety. Despite huge taxpayer subsidies, 10 of the nation’s 25 largest transit agencies have had to raise fares (as high as 33 percent in San Francisco and Boston) to cover looming deficits. But Metro has taken a slightly different route: It’s deferred literally billions of dollars in needed maintenance while appeasing ever-escalating union wage and benefit demands. Even now, union leaders are demanding a six percent cost-of-living-raise for Metro employees – at a time when area private sector employees are being hit with salary freezes, furloughs, and even pay cuts. Since last year, Metro’s operating costs increased $159 million, and even with increased ridership, revenues fell $17 million. The $1.46 billion budget for 2010 includes a $130 million deficit, due mostly to increased wages and benefits for union employees.
Some Metro bus drivers make more than $100,000 per year, while hundreds of Metro employees are paid $40,000 or more for overtime, as the Examiner’s 2007 investigation revealed. Even after the near-miss involving three trains under the Potomac River in June 2005 – which Examiner reporter Kytja Weir first reported on July 22 (the Washington Post reported it just Sunday) – and the Red Line crash this year, Metro officials apparently still think they can ignore the experts, mislead the public, and get away with it.
Safety is where the interests of the traveling public and union members intersect. The fact that train operators themselves are in grave danger should be a wake-up call to union officials negotiating the next contract. Cost of living increases and cushy pension benefits are nice, but not if union members aren’t alive to enjoy them. The essential first step to ensuring that Metro managers put rider safety ahead of union compensation demands is to open the system to full – and we do mean full – public scrutiny. This includes posting all Metro contracts on the Internet. It also includes no more denying this newspaper’s long-standing request for updated salary and compensation data for every employee, information that Metro officials stopped providing following our 2007 investigation. Washingtonians have learned the hard way that secretive and unaccountable bureaucracies can be as dangerous to the traveling public as a runaway train.
