All paid for by your tax dollars when it began.
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.