Half a day into an unprecedented emergency shutdown of the subway system of the capital of the most powerful nation on earth, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx acknowledged that Metro’s problems don’t just come down to money — and they won’t be easy to fix.
“We are digging ourselves out of a hole,” Foxx acknowledged Wednesday afternoon in a roomful of senators, aides and lobbyists whose own travels were hampered by the daylong close of Metro’s rail system, which threw a huge kink into the commuting plans for 700,000 people.
Story Continued Below
Metro’s problems include “culture,” said Foxx, whose department took over safety oversight for the troubled rail system last fall. He promised a “safety inspection blitz” beginning next week to evaluate problems with trains running red lights, the use of emergency brakes and the integrity of the tracks — woes that go beyond the fears of faulty electrical cables that prompted Wednesday’s shutdown.
Rail service is set to resume at 5 a.m. Thursday after a 29-hour hiatus, although some stretches of track may remain closed or forced into single-tracking as repairs continue.
History Dept.
How Congress Undercut Its Own City’s Subway System
Sen. Barbara Mikulski said she remains frustrated with a transit agency for which she's fought to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars since 2008.
“For months and years now, we have called for a culture of safety, but what we get is a culture of resistance to making changes for safety," the Maryland Democrat said, noting that 15 people have died in accidents in the rail system since 2009.
Neither Foxx nor the lawmakers offered any instant answers for the regionally governed Metrorail system, which was considered a crown jewel when it debuted in the mid-1970s but has become — in the words of one transportation blog post Wednesday — “a transit embarrassment of epic proportions.” Age, size and money don’t quite explain its problems: The rail system is seven decades younger than the much more sprawling New York City subway, and transit advocates say it’s not significantly short of funding compared with its peers around the country.
Whatever the cause, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio said he hoped Wednesday's travel interruption would focus the attention of the people who run This Town.
“I’m glad finally somebody’s taking some action here," DeFazio, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, told POLITICO. "And maybe if they find there are enough of these bad cables and this becomes an extended problem for the metro area here in D.C., it’ll wake Congress up, or wake up the staff of Congress who can’t get to work or wake up some lobbyist — someone who will finally get these idiots to allocate more money intro transportation and begin to deal with our crumbling infrastructure."
Among those inconvenienced by Wednesday’s shutdown were the lawmakers themselves, plus their aides and the lobbyists who seek to sway their policies.
Some lawmakers showed up late to speaking engagements, including House members trying to navigate to an airport executives’ conference through heavier-than-usual cab traffic around the Capitol. The Obama administration had to cancel a listening session it had planned to hold in conjunction with the American Public Transportation Association.
Also caught up in the transit mess were members of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who had descended upon the Hill to make one of their regular pleas for more money to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure.
People throughout the region felt the pinch Wednesday, even though many government workers apparently took advantage of the opportunity to work from home. Commuters who had to find alternatives to the trains rode buses, rented cars, booked downtown hotel rooms, took advantage of free use of Capital Bikeshare and even used their own two feet. But those options weren't trouble-free either — Twitter was filled with reports of backups on Interstates 66 and 395, full parking garages, Uber surge pricing, and buses too packed to take additional passengers.
Metro CEO Paul Wiedefeld told reporters late Wednesday that workers had inspected about 80 percent of roughly 600 "jumper cables" in the rail system after walking through 100 miles of tunnels. They had so far identified 26 areas where equipment needed to be replaced and would work overnight to finish the repairs, he said.
While the cables did not seem to present an imminent fire risk, they posed a hazardous condition "we cannot accept," Wiedefeld said.
“Let me tell you that the shutdown today was necessary," he said.
The shutdown and inspections were prompted by an electrical fire outside the McPherson Square station that snarled rail traffic on Metro's Orange, Blue and Silver lines throughout the day Monday. The agency said it will share its findings with the Federal Transit Administration, which took over safety oversight of WMATA last fall, and the National Transportation Safety Board, which had issued an urgent call for action on faulty power cables last year after smoke killed a passenger in a rail tunnel.
Numerous transportation-focused lawmakers and experts suggested the real problem at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is WMATA itself.
“Metro has been very, very poorly managed,” DeFazio said, though he had some kind words for the "new manager" who ordered Wednesday's inspections and shutdown. “I can’t speak to his credentials, except that he had the guts to do this. That’s progress from the old management.”
The problem, DeFazio said, is much broader than just Metro.
“It’s a nationwide infrastructure investment backlog problem,” he said. “So part of it is funding, part of it is the construct of Metro — which is bizarre because of three jurisdictions — and part of it has been the management. I can’t assess a percentage.”
But according to the National Transit Database, Washington’s Metro system isn't exactly a pauper when it comes to capital spending for the country's eight biggest transit systems. Instead, it falls in the middle of the pack — ranked No. 4 — with $2.8 million invested per track mile. That places it just behind New York City, which has a little more than $4 million invested per track mile, but well ahead of Boston and Chicago.
“The data suggest that Metro’s problems lie elsewhere, such as poor spending of the money WMATA already has and ineffective monitoring of the system’s infrastructure and equipment,” observed a blog post from TransitCenter, an urban mobility foundation.
GOP Supreme Court blockade showing early cracks
But one local lawmaker took issue with Foxx's criticisms of the troubled agency, pointing to comments he made last month on a local NPR affiliate that WMATA has had a "sweetheart deal" with the feds for years.
"If Secretary Foxx wants to test the 'sweetheart deal,' look at today. When metro shuts down, the federal government shuts down. Your workforce can't get to work, Secretary Foxx," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "So I'd like to see his rhetoric shift to a more positive and helpful tone, and I’d like to see him emulate his predecessor, Secretary [Ray] LaHood, who rolled up his sleeves and actually played a very helpful role."
Connolly said he fears Foxx's tone could inspire conservatives in Congress to push to shrink what federal funding Metro receives.
"Particularly in a Democratic administration and particularly given somebody who was in local government like I was, I have been astounded at his statements and his unhelpful and, in fact, I would argue injurious [comments]," he told POLITICO. "To use that phrase ['sweetheart deal'] — what do you think my conservative Republican colleagues hear when they hear that from a Democratic secretary of transportation? I mean, that’s such a damaging thing to say."
It remains to be seen whether this week's events at WMATA affect how Congress funds the agency. But Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, said there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the root causes of WMATA’s aging infrastructure and its punted maintenance — and not much of it lies with federal lawmakers, who have historically earmarked money for new Metro projects with the intention that they would not need to fund operations and maintenance.
It's unclear whether that will change as a result of the shutdown, Puentes said.
When it comes to “any money from Congress that Metro can use for maintenance and operations, I would be really surprised if they found that in their budget,” he said.
Martine Powers contributed to this report.
