I assume it has declined a lot in 25+ years? Or was I missing something back then?
Judge for yourself. You can buy a t-shirt from Washington DC's own https://ismetroonfire.com/
I used to ride the DC Metro in the late 80s and early 90s as a young man. I thought it was great. Seemed clean, efficient and on-time.
I assume it has declined a lot in 25+ years? Or was I missing something back then?
It's the same DC Metro that you remember, only now it has run 25+ years with only minimal maintenance done to keep it from derailing/catching fire. They even succeed in meeting this low bar at most of the time.
Who knows what rot the funds were spent on instead.
This is just more within the great body of evidence that proves the District and its citizens are unable to manage themselves. The only question is who ought to manage it: Annapolis is already full of corrupt and incompetent Democrats who mismanage the whole of Maryland, and Virginia couldn't absorb the District without upsetting their present delicate balance and casting them to the same fate (not to mention that they already took back the piece of the District they initially gave).
Perish the thought, but I think I'm suggesting that letting the District revert back to Congressional control might be the least dysfunctional thing that we could do.
I had the same experience in the 80s as a grad student and up through 99, then from 2010-2014. Always clean, well maintained, very nice. I really do not think that is changing so much as that they are not doing track maintenance and so forth. Plus, they need to build more lines to get to more neighborhoods. I really can’t imagine that Uber and Lfyt are cutting into their ridership. More likely they simply want a bigger cut of the money, money that they used to get from cab companies.
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.
I used to ride the DC Metro in the late 80s and early 90s as a young man. I thought it was great. Seemed clean, efficient and on-time.
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Same here. I was impressed.
I’ve been in the DC area 3 times in the last 6 months and have used the DC Metro subway , busses and AmTrak ... what the DC area has built with funds taken from me in Florida is so far superior to any other urban transit system I find it hard to believe they can’t compete.
Considering the lack of maintenance and replacement of Metro assets, commuters are still trying to ride in the same cars on the same tracks you did almost 30 years ago.
I think no maintenance was conducted in that 25 years.
I assume it has declined a lot in 25+ years? Or was I missing something back then?
I rode it a lot during a visit about, hmm, 20 years ago, really enjoyed it (y'know, for mass transit it was clean and went where I wannted to go), at that time they were planning more expansion of the lines down into Virginia and so on.
It is no longer clean, efficient or on time. It also has a lot of crime. A lot has changed in 25 years! :)
Me too, c.1995. It was great. Just the fact it spread out in all directions to be convenient was good. And getting farecards was easy - now there are only those stupid “credit” cards. Why can’t they still have the simple paper cards paid by cash even? And they still have the old turnstiles - YET do not use that wonderful in-one-end out-the-other AS you walk through - instead of now, where everyone has to stop and wait for card to pop back up in same spot! Stupid!
Other than that, I don’t have much experience lately. Just some tourist stuff. It’s OK but don’t know what it’s like on a daily basis as a commuter.