Train wrecks

As is often the case, one of the best examples of mass-transit incompetence and inefficiency is in Washington, D.C., on the Metro. In 2019, D.C.’s Metro had an average of 626,000 daily rail trips. The system has had a dismal recovery, with only 228,600 trips each day during a mid-May week, barely one-third of pre-COVID normal. (By contrast, New York’s transit system is seeing ridership at close to 60% of normal.) Washington’s bus ridership has recovered much more quickly, with 301,200 riders each day, not far off from the 350,000 daily riders in 2019. The disparity between subway and bus figures points to a long-running difference between the two modes of transportation: Bus riders are poorer than rail riders, and thus cannot work at home, as 60% of Washingtonians are regularly doing, or commute by car.

You would think, then, that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority would be doing everything it can to entice people back on the rails. Instead, it is doing the opposite, out of sheer incompetence. In May, WMATA’s regulator found that nearly half of its rail operators had allowed their safety recertification to expire. This management failure is egregious: Providing basic refresher training is not a surprise, and not hard to do, even in the second year of a pandemic.

The certification failure has caused yet more delays, with Yellow and Green lines running every 20 minutes, rather than every 15 minutes, as WMATA scrambles to retrain operators. Fifteen minutes is already well past the frequency necessary to maintain successful urban mass transit. A passenger with other options who knows that a missed train is going to add 20 minutes to her commute — or more, if there are further delays — will drive or hail a car instead.

Pandemic-related crew shortages and delays have been understandable, and customers have, by and large, accepted as much. But this is not that. Moreover, WMATA hasn’t earned much slack even on that front, since its pandemic-era struggles came after years of bad and unsafe service coupled with high spending. Between 2005 and 2015, nine passengers and 10 employees died because of safety lapses. By 2019, operations were marginally better, but only after massive public outcry — and they still weren’t good enough to lure rail passengers back to their 2011 high of 737,000 passengers daily.

Washington isn’t the only major transit-dependent city struggling to offer even decently minimal rail service. Also in mid-May, Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had to pull its 64 brand-new rail cars on the Orange Line out of service because of braking problems caused by a shoddily installed bolt. The cars were back in service after four days. But the Orange Line trains, built by an affiliate of the Chinese government, have caused nothing but problems since even before the pandemic, including a high-profile derailment last year, with several such recalls and returns to service. The poorly built Orange cars weren’t the only safety menace on the Boston system: Last month, 39-year-old Robinson Lalin was killed after the likely faulty doors of a Red Line train closed on his arm as he was exiting, with the train dragging him into the tunnel to his death.

Such a gruesome incident, coupled with derailments and collisions unrelated to the new Orange cars, is hardly likely to lure missing “T” riders back. People are making only 344,000 T subway trips each day, compared to 717,000 in April 2019. Just as in Washington, though, subway ridership had been falling for years before the pandemic, from 761,000 in 2016, thanks partly to deteriorating service.

Smaller-scale incidents abound elsewhere. In March, San Francisco’s BART — Bay Area Rapid Transit — halted all service on its Red Line for two weeks because of a power-cable failure. Ridership is only about 30% of the pre-COVID normal of 400,000 each day, and such unreliable service will hardly encourage people to resume planning their lives around the rails. In New York, crew shortages are delaying more than 10,000 trains a month. The problem isn’t COVID sickouts, which passengers patiently tolerated, but the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s failure to replace retiring workers with new ones. During Andrew Cuomo’s time as governor, the MTA focused on a “transformational,” rethinking-the-workforce program that was entirely for show and produced no new efficiency improvements.

One might say that this is all just a return to the pre-COVID normal: American transit systems have long been more inefficient than their developed European and Asian counterparts, despite the fact that they cost far more to build and run. Before COVID-19, London, an expensive, unionized-transit city, moved 2.1 billion people each year for $8.4 billion, while the MTA moved 2.6 billion each year for $13.7 billion. And in the years before COVID, transit riders from New York to Washington suffered overcrowding, delays, and breakdowns. Though transit systems lost ridership in the half-decade leading up to 2020, in part because of cheap e-hail Uber and Lyft riders, most passengers had no other way of getting around, unless they wanted to desert urban life entirely.

Now, though, urban residents and commuters are not simply going to go back to the pre-COVID normal level of dismal, unpredictable service. For the first time in modern history, white-collar workers have demonstrated that they don’t need to be in center cities, at least not five days a week, and that if and when they do have to be there, more of them will be driving in, despite the increasingly high cost of doing so. Now, we are stuck with the results of decades of simply taking transit for granted as an alternative to pollution- and carbon-spewing cars, rather than actually caring about the day-to-day workings of rail-car procurement and transit operations: massively expensive, unwieldy underground transit systems that far fewer people use.

So, what is the solution? To abandon heavy-rail transit means to abandon long-term urban growth, or to condemn future city residents to LA-style (and now Boston- and Washington-style) sprawl and traffic. The sluggish growth in ridership since early 2020 means that next year, transit agencies from around the country will inevitably be back in Washington, asking for a fourth federal rescue. This time, Congress shouldn’t offer money with no strings attached.

What should those strings look like? One aspect to consider is institutional reform: Most riders of large transit systems are at the mercy of transit authorities that are an amalgam of state, regional, and local oversight, with large boards of directors and no clear points of political accountability. WMATA is, as always, the worst example: A quartet made up of the federal government, Washington, Maryland, and Virginia are in charge of it, which means that no one is really in charge. These unwieldy bureaucracies manage equally unwieldy workforces, with workers on both the construction and operations sides adhering to decades-old union rules that increase costs and decrease productivity.

One condition of reform might be that large American transit agencies hire the real experts: the men and women with experience at the helm of truly successful transit systems in London, Paris, and Tokyo. New York’s MTA did that, though, and then Cuomo proceeded to disregard the management advice given by Andy Byford, its U.K.-native subways and bus chief, frustrating him to such an extent that he went back to take up the reins of London’s transit system. Maybe the key is to hire transit experts from overseas to supervise U.S. transit systems — but then actually take their knowledge, expertise, and advice to heart. More money alone won’t do it, and the aversion of bureaucrats and politicians to admitting their role in the debacle threatens to accelerate the decline of these cities.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.