I lived in Arlington for 3.5 years and came to regularly use ‘Metro’ (2010 era). It only took a month or two to realize the twenty-odd problems that existed. One day, I was sitting at a local coffee shop and this topic had come up, and there was a guy there who’d been a Metro employee and hired up in the late 1960s (one of the original folks). For thirty years, he’d worked for them.
His take was that it was built with all the bells and whistles in the original plan, and properly maintained through the 1970s and 1980s. Then at some point in the 90s...real maintenance just plain stopped. Bad management decisions became the norm. The hiring of substandard employees was a regular issue. Around 2000, he took retirement and just walked away. In his mind, you’d have to go and fire half of the folks there, including the managers.
One of the odd stories that came up when I was there....was the Pentagon station. There were a couple of escalators that took people from the surface down to the platform. Well...on one side was a rather unique escalator system that was European-made, and metric. It was the only escalator system on the entire system (probably over 350 escalators throughout all the tunnels) that was metric. So, it required unique tools, and special certified crew to perform any maintenance. At some point, it probably took 15 years for them to admit this....this was a chaos-loaded piece of equipment and maintenance was screwed-up. At some point, they said enough and shut down the escalator....to replace it. Course, this meant that the remaining escalators had to carry a larger crowd, and more traffic was involved.
Any place that elects Marion Barry, twice, for 16 years, is going to be dysfunctional, no matter how much Federal money is pumped in.