Posted on 03/16/2016 2:24:19 AM PDT by Libloather
This is what happens when government takes over. The history behind this is utterly sordid; government prohibited fare increases for years until they bankrupted private companies, ad nauseam. A private company would not shut down the whole system like this.
Have you ever ridden the Washington D.C. Metro. It is run by arrogant, incompetent liberal Democrats. Trains are dirty. At almost every station the escalators are broken. Employees tend to be indifferent at best and often rude. Contract are given out based on political connections and affirmative action so they overpay for shoddy work.
And increasingly it is becoming unsafe in certain areas.
Couple years ago we rode the subway from the Virginia side to the baseball field several times.
Thought it was nice.
As far as the fire. Likely someone trying to steal copper. /g
Just heard from my little sister who is in Washington or rather was, just heard from her, she and her friends managed to get out of town before the shutdown, she said signs of discomfort already evident on residents, timing is everything...
Your assessment is 100% correct. The Metro was an engineering marvel when first opened. Politics ruins all achievement.
With LIB-idiots in charge you can count of demolition eventually...of anything and everything.
This is actually no big deal, as the entire federal workforce takes a day off every week anyway.
Black thugs target whites in unprovoked attacks. Sometimes as many as once a day.
I spent 3.5 years living in the DC area, and did it with no car. So I survived the whole time on Metro and the bus system.
First, when it was built in the 1970s...it was state of the art. You would think that some crew would have been there planning renovation phases every fifteen years. Basically, they’ve inched forward and the whole system is increasingly unfit.
Second, if you tried to compare it against Amsterdam, Melbourne, Frankfurt or Vienna....it would rate down near the bottom of every single comparison.
Third, crime...particularly along the Green-Line and it intersects in mid-DC...is a minute-by-minute episode. Punk kids hang out and either attempt simple assaults or attempt pick-pocketing you.
Fourth, the whole gang surrounding it are geared to a political machine of some type (I wouldn’t even say solely Democrat anymore). They can’t run honest contracts or handle a simple bidding process for even potted plants.
Fifth, incompetence to the ninth degree. It took them three decades to agree upon the Silver-Line extension which would take you from DC to the Dulles Airport. Every major city in Europe has connections from it’s local city to the regional airport.
Sixth, go bring up the Paul S. Sarbanes Transit Center in Silver Springs. The idiots for Metro handed out the contract for a multi-platform station which a bus would go down into a tunnel....dump passengers off next to the platform area, and exit (brilliant idea). Then the idiots built the whole foundation for the bus traffic with no reinforcement. The mistake was caught near the end....so they had to tear out this whole project and rebuild. They are still trying to blame someone in court for the extra millions that this cost.
I could write a 500 page book on the incompetence that I saw on a daily basis. You simply are lucky on a weekly basis that a dozen people don’t die by transit on the DC metro.
*****The Metro was an engineering marvel when first opened. Politics ruins all achievement.****
Discussing my Metro ride at the Drs’ office, one of my colleagues introduced me to a gentleman (wearing a metro pin of 35 yrs service) as Carlton Sickles. I had no idea who he was and asked “Are you someone important then?”
He laughed and handed me the pin - I later learned he was the ‘father of the DC Metro, What a lovely and talented gentleman,
I think there is more here than they are saying.
Shutting down DC is no big deal, the entire place is asleep when it comes to getting positive things done.
All paid for by your tax dollars when it began.
Yup. Unconfirmed terror threat. It is all over the net.
One of the issues with government owned transit systems (and highways) is that there is no glamour in ongoing maintenance—it just costs a lot of money with minimal visible results.
When is the last time you saw a politician bragging how they upgraded an electrical system with photo ops deep in the tunnels—not going to happen.
If this is a cover story my guess would be that the subway was hit with a cyber attack of some kind.
Oh I think the initial investment and quality of work was four-star. You can go and look at almost every subway tunnel and the quality still stands out today. From the prospective of the trains (they needed replacement a decade ago), the safety features, the escalators and their maintenance cycle, and the people who run the system...it’s gone downhill for over twenty years.
I don’t where the they put the yearly billions spent on maintenance or training or hiring of employees...but appears to have gone into a black pit.
They had an episode three years ago where some local grocery had two METRO employess who’d show up and buy hundreds of bucks in lotto tickets...with a large assortment of coins and one-dollar bills. The owner finally called Metro and made a report. They followed the two guys (maintenance crew for the ticket machines), and eventually figured out that they had one single machine hooked to the system....which they routinely robbed all contents, but it was not in the audit system. They were careful how they said it, but it may have been there like this for 15 years. They fired the two guys, but behind this....you have to wonder...just how much yearly did they walk away with....maybe into the $100k range yearly that audit system simply couldn’t track.
BKMK for future
Yes, I am aware of all the negative stories. It is true that the system is showing its age. It is true that deferred maintenance is a big issue. (This tends to be a chronic problem in government systems because of political misdirection.) It is true that pay and benefits are cripplingly high, again because of political misdirection.
Meanwhile, traffic in DC is among the nation's worst, and it is only going to get worse. The car lobby, naturally, is eager to destroy other people's neighborhoods to ease congestion on their long commutes, but as a resident of one of those "in the way" neighborhoods, I am not in sympathy with that plan. Metro is just one piece of the puzzle, but it's one we need to get right because it will become increasingly important as time goes on.
Metro needs to get its cost structure straightened out (yes, this means pay and benefits). It needs a better governance structure; we have the city, the feds, two states, four inner ring counties and a dozen independent suburban municipalities constantly bickering over service and fares. It's a mess -- but as compared to adding lanes to those outdoor parking lots known as I-395, I-66, and I-270, or building entirely new arterial roads through densely populated areas (ha, ha, ha, good luck with that), Metro is the easiest part of the problem to fix.
The most useful thing, of course, would be for people to start living closer to their jobs. Suburbs are fine in smaller to mid-sized cities. Above a certain threshold, however, the suburban commute falls victim to scale. DC has reached that point. Those of us with minimal commutes don't have these problems. There are good neighborhoods all over the metro area, and gentrification is reopening many long-shunned neighborhoods in the core. (And some of these are becoming crown jewels of the real estate game.) We'll get there, eventually.
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