A trolley in Philadelphia, part of that city's extensive mass transit system---at least SEPTA is reasonably (somewhat) well managed.
My day job involves transportation. It is part of my job title. I ride transit to and from work—not having any other option since I don’t drive. (In case you’re wondering, I’m the only non-driver in the office.)
Part of my job involves keeping up on transportation news from around the nation and world, and researching that, so WMATA’s woes are well known to me. Friends and relatives deal with it as well and in recent years, almost nothing positive has come from that front. WMATA’s gotten so bad (and so expensive!) people have abandoned it for Uber.
WMATA is the Metro, the subway system that serves Washington D.C. and its immediate suburbs. It was built at a time when no one was building subways; when most Americans owned a car, and most transit systems had been changed from trolleys and trams to buses. An exquisite book, The Great Society Subway, describes its genesis. In May of this year it served 712,000 daily passengers (a 5% drop since 2010).
But WMATA has been hobbled from the start. It is run by an interstate compact between Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Funding for it comes from the appropriations of both states and the District. It has no oversight group with any regulatory authority. The NTSB has stated this has contributed to multiple fatal accidents. They make safety recommendations---that then get ignored (worth noting here if an airline did this, it’d be grounded—and yes the linked article is 10 years old. It’s still true today.)
And now, the December Washingtonian reports the place has simply become toxic. The controllers—the people in the control center (ROCC) are toxic. They have created for themselves a nice fiefdom that doesn’t like outsiders---or new employees. Positions are deliberately left unfilled for overtime opportunities for long-term staff and safety culture has eroded so much the system is at times dangerous. The entire organization is full of incompetents. Nine people died in a train collision in 2009. A woman died in January of this year during the infamous smoke incident.
I recommend reading the entire thing. Here’s a sample:
The hostilities extended to other parts of the agency. Controllers and train operators were constantly at one another’s throats because, according to the trainees, controllers belittled operators. “They treat operators as if they aren’t capable of doing anything,” Watkins says. “And [the veterans] told us that. They said, ‘Don’t trust operators.’ ”
The men say operators would occasionally get so mad that they would “break the train” by dumping the air out of brake lines. The maneuver temporarily disables the train and requires ROCC staff to go through a lengthy troubleshooting protocol. “[Operators] will do something like this because they think, ‘Well, you screwed me, I screw you,’ ” Colvin says. But riders feel the brunt of it, too—they have to sit and wait (or offload) until the situation is resolved.
Controllers can’t prove operators sabotage trains for personal retribution, but the trainees say the practice is well known. ROCC veterans kept track of repeat “train breakers,” Watkins says, and trainees were warned about one driver who “was almost guaranteed to break her train if she didn’t like the way you talked to her.” A Metro spokeswoman says, “We have no reason to believe this is a widespread or systemic issue.”
The trainees were equally disturbed by the poor safety practices they witnessed. The ROCC was noisy and chaotic; controllers yelled across the room and were distracted by their cell phones. Radio communication with trains was often impossible because dead spots exist throughout the system. Alarms sounded constantly, triggered by everything from power surges to water in tunnels—although many were false warnings. “It’s well over a thousand alarms a day,” Watkins says. “But they ignore pretty much all of them.”
How was this dysfunction tolerated? Leverage. Because controllers—the most critical employees—were in such short supply, they were allowed to follow their own rules. “The ROCC is like God at WMATA,” Scarbrough says. “They operate kind of autonomously from the rest of the company.”
Again, click through and read the entire thing.
Even the FTA (Federal Transit Administration) is fed up. This is the audit they released in June of this year, issuing a stunning 44 safety findings (many of which are mentioned in the Washingtonian article).
Some highlights:
- WMATA’s Rail Operations Control Center is significantly understaffed.
- WMATA’s ROCC lacks formal procedures, manuals and checklists.
- Technical training for Operations and Maintenance Departments is under-resourced and fractured, currently provided by five different departments and IT, is insufficiently directed and resourced, and relies significantly on on-thejob-training (OJT) which is informal and lacks oversight.
- Walking track inspection resources have been cut in half.
- WMATA has no formal program for reviewing the proficiency of maintenance field staff.
There are more in the report. This is not a healthy organization. It’s split between three political jurisdictions who squabble over how to pay for it so it has no dedicated funding stream like most transit systems everywhere else. At the same time an incompetent and toxic culture has ossified in its ranks, compromising its safety. Finally the system’s close to the 50-year mark—an age where most infrastructure needs a visit from the maintenance doctor so it lasts another 50 years. It’s going to break and soon if nothing is done and despite what the Right might think, the “Do Nothing” option can cost as much as doing something.
This is not acceptable.
Now they have a new General Manager. I have high hopes that he turns this place around before it finally shatters. It looks like he’s on the right track: he’s looking for a new safety chief.
This isn’t the only thing that’s pissed me off this week in my field.
In Boston, the costs for the extension of the Green Line have ballooned to the point that they may cancel the project all together. That too is not acceptable.
Not that they’re thinking about canceling the transit extension, but that they ballooned to a cost that’d buy other cities an entire commuter system.
I love transit extensions, especially for things like the Green Line. They help people move around their city, they look cool, and they spur economic development. In a number of other countries (and this one before the rise of the car) the subways are retail and real estate developers—they build their own customer base.
This project wasn’t particularly complex. A right of way already existed, so building it wouldn’t be too difficult. Or expensive. Or so they thought.
What was supposed to cost $450 to $600 million in 2005 has ballooned beyond a billion dollars, with numbers as high as $3 billion cited.
$3 billion for a 4.3 mile extension on an already mostly extant right-of-way? Even as a liberal who works for a big government agency, I find this obscene and an embarrassment to my profession.
Perhaps MBTA was equally embarrassed by the press (as they should be, as they awarded the contracts!)—they canceled several contracts today relating to the project. Not sure if they’ll cancel the entire project—which would be at significant cost to the MBTA. It would NOT be free.
According to a press release, MBTA General Manager Frank DePaola canceled contracts with the Green Line extension’s “construction manager-general contractor,” White Skanska Kiewit; its “project manager-construction manager,” HDR/Gilbaine; its “independent cost estimator,” Stanton Constructability Services; and its “final designer,” AECOM/HNTB.
Late last month, consultants told transit leaders that the T had failed to institute proper safeguards for its contracting process, which allowed for costs to spiral. The consultant suggested White Skanska Kiewit had taken advantage of the process.
The companies will continue to work on parts of the project that have already been awarded.
“The decision marks the start of a transitional period, during which no new construction work will be awarded,” the MBTA said in the release. “During this time, however, much of the construction work that is already under contract and in progress will continue.”
It’s well known that megaprojects can balloon out of control and there is a lot of research about that (this link is but a sample..the author is an expert.) This wasn’t even a megaproject. It was a simple transit line extension. I accept the need for contractors—this is how everything is constructed almost everywhere. I don’t accept that these contractors basically took Boston for a ride and gave back nothing in return.
I also believe, even though I doubt anyone will publicly admit it, that people deluded themselves and misrepresented how much this project would cost to the public (that’s a fancy way to say they bloody lied and there’s research on that too.) The public resents that, as well they should. It’s their money being used.
And Bent Flyvbjerg, the linked researcher above, basically says this in his research. (you can read a chapter here).
This too is unacceptable.
I want a transportation system that works as smoothly as it possibly can, that serves everyone, and is quick and functional. We can’t have that if organizations like WMATA are full of toxic incompetents and the MBTA can’t keep a handle on its contractors and tell the public the truth. The probability that the next American president is a Democrat is somewhat to fairly good. That president may demand, and ultimately get, a massive infrastructure program through Congress. The public will deeply resent it if costs are eaten up by overruns. Just tell the public what it will cost up front. The public isn’t stupid.
