(The Associated Press circulated the following on January 23.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On any given work day, the subway system that serves the nation’s capital and its suburbs shuttles nearly 700,000 people to their destinations – to federal jobs, to lunch meetings, to museums and memorials.
With nearly 1,000 rail cars traveling a more than 100-mile route, Metro has been praised by transit experts as a model of efficiency and by planners as a counterweight to ever-expanding sprawl.
But a series of accidents in the past 15 months – a derailment this month that injured 20 passengers and the deaths of four workers struck by trains – has prompted federal safety officials to take a hard look at the nation’s second-busiest urban rail system after the New York City subway.
The scrutiny comes during a tumultuous time for the organization. Its management is in flux, its infrastructure is reaching middle age, and many employees who have been at Metro since its early days are approaching retirement.
At the same time, ridership has climbed rapidly as more people have sought to escape worsening highway congestion. A record 205 million people rode the trains in the fiscal year that ended June 30, a 5.3 percent increase over the previous year.
In the most recent accident, Jan. 7, one car of a six-car train slipped off the track as the train pulled into the Mount Vernon Square station beneath the Washington Convention Center. The derailment sent 20 people to hospitals and forced the evacuation of about 60 passengers from two cars that were stuck in the dark tunnel.
Worker deaths
About six weeks earlier, two track workers were struck by a train and died. That followed the deaths of workers struck in May 2006 and October 2005.
Metro officials say they are eager to get to the bottom of the recent accidents, but insist it is too early to draw conclusions.
“Is there something going on here? That’s a thing we have to try and figure out,” Metro board member Chris Zimmerman said.
Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the recent incidents, say they are concerned about the frequency of accidents in recent months.
Bob Grow, director of government relations at the Greater Washington Board of Trade, said the problems point to the need for more stable funding to pay for maintenance as the system ages. Metro began operating more than three decades ago.
Metro is supported by the District of Columbia, Maryland and the Virginia jurisdictions that it serves. However, it has no dedicated funding source.
“They have to go hat in hand every year,” Grow said.
Metro’s proposed budget for fiscal 2008 is $1.9 billion. To cope with rising wages, health care, electricity and fuel costs, the agency’s management is asking the board to approve a hefty fare increase.
Metro supporters are optimistic Congress will pass a bill this year that would provide $1.5 billion for capital improvements over 10 years. More than 40 percent of Metro’s rush-hour riders are federal government employees, so advocates say lawmakers should recognize the role Metro plays in keeping the government working.
Though relatively young, Metro has become a key part of the region’s fabric.
Urban character
The system helped preserve Washington’s urban character at a time when the automobile was fueling migration out of the city and further into the suburbs, said Zachary Schrag, a history professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of The Great Society Subway, which chronicles Metro’s birth.
And it would be difficult to replace.
“If we woke up tomorrow and there was no Metro, we would have to build about 1,400 lane miles of new roads,” Grow said.
Attorney Bonner Menking drives daily from her Gaithersburg home to the nearby Shady Grove station, where she hops on the Red Line to downtown Washington. For her, the choice between driving into the city and taking the train is a no-brainer.
“I like to arrive at my job unaggravated,” she said.
System problems
But the transit system has had its problems – even before the recent spate of accidents. A lawsuit filed in 2004 claims Metro’s pickup service for the disabled was so poor – frequently leaving riders stranded – that it violated federal law. Long-running repairs on the subway’s escalators have frustrated passengers, and outages are still common. Rush-hour riders say crowding has gotten worse and complain of delays.
The system has seen frequent derailments of a new type of rail car brought online in 2001. While those derailments did not involve passengers and occurred mostly in rail yards, the cars in question are the same kind that went off the track this month.
The NTSB is looking at the past derailments as it investigates the most recent one.
But the board has not publicly drawn conclusions or recommended changes, and Metro says it has no plans to remove the cars from service.
Investigations into the recent worker deaths are also pending, but Metro has initiated changes. New rules allow track inspections only during off-peak periods and call for trains to slow down to less than 20 mph around track workers.
Meanwhile, employees who have been with Metro since its beginning are leaving.
About 18 percent of Metro’s 10,600-member work force is eligible to retire and 28 percent will be eligible within five years, Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.
Spate of retirements
More than 1,400 people retired from the agency over the past four years.
The turnover has been even more stark at the top. Metro has had two interim general managers since its longtime leader left last February.
On Thursday, it will finally get a permanent chief when John B. Catoe Jr., previously deputy chief executive of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, takes over.
“It would probably be good for things to settle down,” Zimmerman, the Metro board member, said.