Maryland “Freak State” PING!
The unstated issue is that people don’t like riding with the great unwashed if they don’t absolutely have to ride transit. We like the privacy of our cars.
For a period of 3 years, I ran a parking pass program for a Pentagon agency. We were allocated x-number of parking spots, and the emphasis was to convince people to accept Metro (you’d get funds added to your card) to use the subway/bus system throughout DC/Arlington. In the beginning, about half the organization did the subway/train/bus routine, and we had around 20 parking spots left-over.
But each year that went by...I’d have five or six people come in and just say ‘enough’....they’d given up on the METRO/bus routine, and wanted to drive into work.
Toward my last year there, the Pentagon was going to give up around 300 parking spots and we were all going to have the bare minimum for drivers...thus trying to force everyone back to the METRO.
The whole METRO/bus program was crap. I’d ridden hundreds of times on it, and you just sat there frustrated. Buses would fail on some route. The subway was aging and they were ten years behind on maintenance. Escalators (some of these tunnels were 300 ft below the surface) would fail and be out of commission for a month. Virtually every single member of METRO needed to be drug-tested. There were various VIP METRO SUVs that you’d see parked at sites, with managers doing virtually nothing.
A nation’s capitol city is prosperous only to the extent that they rob the country’s citizens blind. There should be NO notion of a “prosperous” capitol.
Every bus takes about 50 cars off the road but impact traffic like 500.
The first significant change should be the firing of every single person at the management level of that dysfunctional operation.
Lord knows you cannot depend on the Metro. But busses?