Posted on 04/09/2018 9:22:34 PM PDT by BBell
A city government that would drag everyone down to its level.
It’s like the old saying of city government goes: if at first you don’t succeed, tax something that is succeeding.
Members of the Washington, D.C. government have suggested a way to prop up its failing Metro system while hamstringing its competitor. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently proposed a nearly 400 percent tax increase on ridesharing services, increasing the fee that users pay from 1 percent to 4.75 percent. This would increase the tax on a $10 trip from ten cents to forty-seven cents.
Local officials are proposing to use this tax increase to prop up the D.C. Metro system, run by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). According to D.C. Council Member Jack Evans, “Uber and Lyft are part of the transit system here, and so they should help pay to fix Metro because they’re benefiting from Metro’s demise.”
Make no mistake: Metro is a disaster. Residents of the D.C. area have developed a sense of camaraderie around being subjected to the same delays, “single-tracking,” and fare increases for years. Chronicling WMATA’s failures has become a city tradition, with the most dedicated hashtag being known, fittingly, as “Unsuck DC Metro.” There is even a website dedicated to informing visitors whether or not the Metro is on fire — too often, visitors are met with a morose “I’m afraid so” or “unfortunately.”
The statistics bear out D.C. residents’ anti-Metro sentiment. In 2016, just 70 percent of rail trips arrived on time. After nearly two years of “SafeTrack,” WMATA’s effort to catch up on badly needed track maintenance through fare increases and track section shutdowns, D.C. residents are still waiting for improvement.
A review of a 16-day shutdown of a critical juncture where three lines meet in 2016 found that the stretch still fell
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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?
Does free crack go with the job of DC Mayor?
Lyft & Uber vs Metro
One is run by the government and one is not.
Guess which is more efficient.
They benefit from Metro’s demise?? Really? That’s how they look at things?
By that reasoning, anybody who buys a car to drive to work, rather than depend on Metro, should be taxed extra.
Anybody who rides a bicycle, should be taxed as well.
Anybody who buys new shoes to walk to work, anybody who informally forms a carpool arrangement, to avoid Metro, then also needs to be assessed a Metro tax.
Anybody who quits a job in Washington, and gets a job elsewhere, who decided not to deal with Metro to get to work, then also needs to be assessed a Metro exit tax, because they benefit by getting a new job outside Metro’s jurisdiction, but Metro still suffers.
I’m being a bit sarcastic but just to make the point, that government officials seem to think that everyone, and every business entity, somehow owes them money.
Meanwhile (in Boston) Charley’s wife makes a sammich...
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.
DC needs to hire Hilary Clinton to give her infamous
“I AM SICK AND TIRED!” speech. I’m sure GWB remembers it too.
She has nothing else important going on now.
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 loved her in Sha Na Na
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.
One of their issues (of dozens) is that it crosses three boundaries (DC, Vir, and Maryland)....so they all have seats on the board, and they all hype up who to hire, and arrange for fake renovation projects. If this was owned by one city....it’d probably function. As it is....it is in absolute decline, and the three voices can’t resolve this.
Go look up the Silver Springs terminal project, and the mess that was created with that subway tunnel.
And the sad thing is that the whole region is now utterly dependent upon it working (as marginal as it is). The street and highway system cannot handle traffic if it came to a stop.
If I had a taxi I would base it in Boston and call it “Mary”.
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.
...
Same here. I was impressed.
An inter-city system doesn't make sense considering the size of the USA, but within the densely populated North-East it should be good.
Amtrac has trains that run the north east corridor and it is one of the few profitable lines. There is another one on the west coast. Of course these are inter-city. Who knows, Amtrac could probably do a better job running these local metro trains. They could not do any worse.
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.
Salaries. Right now it is just a jobs program. Transportation has little to do with it.
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