Washington Metro, 40 and Creaking, Stares at a Midlife Crisis
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and NICHOLAS FANDOS

WASHINGTON — Jack Evans was a summer intern here in 1976, the year Metro, the capital region’s subway system, opened to rave reviews. It was an architectural triumph, with escalators that plunged into clean, well-lit stations — a mass transit marvel “like ‘The Jetsons,’ ” he says — a far cry from the graffiti-scarred, decrepit system of that era in New York.

Now Mr. Evans, 62, is the chairman of the transit agency that oversees Metro — perhaps the city’s least enviable job. Last week, at a conference examining Metro on its 40th birthday, he said out loud what Washingtonians had known for years: The capital’s once-glorious subway system, the nation’s second busiest, is short on cash and a terrible mess.

“It’s a system that’s maybe safe, somewhat unreliable, and that is being complained about by everybody,” declared Mr. Evans, who estimates that Metro could face a $100 million budget shortfall next fiscal year.

Then he dropped a bombshell. He warned that whole lines may have to be closed for months for repairs, adding, “If we do nothing, 10 years from now the system won’t be running.”

At a time of deepening concern over aging infrastructure and rail safety around the nation — on Sunday, an Amtrak train struck a backhoe on the tracks outside Philadelphia, killing two people and injuring dozens more — Metro is hardly the only transit agency with problems. But years of well-documented safety lapses, including a crash in 2009 that left nine people dead, as well as petty annoyances like broken escalators and train delays, reveal how a grand vision of American liberalism has collided with reality now that Metro has hit middle age.

The Federal Transit Administration has issued a blistering indictment of the system, warning in a June report of “serious safety lapses.” That month, the National Transportation Safety Board convened hearings revealing that employees of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — which runs Metro, as well as a regional bus service — often felt afraid to report safety concerns.

Commuters are frustrated and are abandoning the subway. Weekday ridership declined 6.1 percent in the last half of 2015, Metro officials say, compared with the same period the previous year. Metro’s new general manager, Paul J. Wiedefeld, who shut down service last month for a daylong emergency inspection after a tunnel fire similar to one that killed a passenger in January 2015, concedes that the public is losing faith.

“Clearly in the public mind we have lost credibility in both delivery of the service and some of the safety issues,” Mr. Wiedefeld, 60, said Friday in a surprisingly blunt interview. He said he saw Metro’s safety and reliability problems as rooted in “a very large disconnect between front-line employees and management,” and in a culture in need of an overhaul.

“An organization that had such a proud history has lost it internally, to a degree,” Mr. Wiedefeld said. “That is something we have to rekindle.”

As Mr. Wiedefeld works on a plan to address safety and repairs — he spent part of last week interviewing candidates for a new chief safety officer — he says monthslong shutdowns are “highly unlikely.” Mr. Evans, in a separate interview, stuck by his original statement, and local officials warned that such a move would cripple the city.

Riders are a little disgusted, and a bit ashamed.

“It had been this bright and shining way to get to work, and now it’s become kind of a ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ operation,” said Bob Deans, 61, who rides Metro each day from his home in Bethesda, Md., to his job at the Natural Resources Defense Council here. He sees tourists on the train, he says, and wants to “apologize and say, ‘No, we’re really better than this.’ ”

The story of Metro’s transformation from a point of pride to the subject of eye rolling among commuters (as well as a Twitter feed, UnsuckDCMetro, with more than 49,000 followers) is, experts say, traceable to a lack of basic maintenance, a history of inept management and an unwieldy governance structure in which three jurisdictions — Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia — share responsibility for the system.

The United States was at the height of its car craze when the idea for a subway system in Washington began percolating in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Many cities were carving themselves up with freeways, often destroying poor African-American neighborhoods, said Zachary M. Schrag, a George Mason University professor and the author of “The Great Society Subway,” a 2006 history of Metro.

Metro, he said, offered an alternative, a way to connect the capital to its Maryland and Virginia suburbs in a “structured set of corridors where people would live and work,” with development clustered around train stations — a vision that, in many respects, has come to pass.

The system was to be a visual statement about the power and prestige of the American government, and was conceived, Mr. Schrag said, “very much in opposition to New York,” whose aging system was in the thick of a midlife crisis. In 1966, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation authorizing Metro’s construction, he directed planners to scour the globe for design concepts so the new subway system could “take its place among the most attractive in the world.”

Metro opened on March 27, 1976, with one line, the Red, and five stations. Today the system has six lines (including the new Silver Line, opened in 2014 as part of a plan to eventually connect the city to Dulles International Airport) and 91 stations. Metro riders made roughly 261 million trips last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Like other transit systems, Metro suffers from a lack of investment in infrastructure: As Mr. Evans broadcast on Twitter last week, some of the original 1976 trains are still in use. The Federal Transit Administration says one-quarter of the nation’s rail assets are in “marginal or poor condition.” In 2013, it estimated an $86 billion backlog in deferred maintenance nationwide.

But Robert Puentes, the incoming president of the Eno Center for Transportation, who wrote a 2004 paper on Metro, says the system’s problems also stem from a singular reality written into it from the outset: It is an “institutional orphan” with no single mayor or legislature in charge. Metro, he said, is the only mass transit system of its size without a permanent source of funding, like a tax on businesses near stations. It relies solely on allocations from its three jurisdictions and on its own fares for operations.

Others, like Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s nonvoting delegate to the House, complain that the federal government, which depends on Metro to carry thousands of workers to places like the Pentagon, does not contribute to the system’s $1.8 billion annual operating budget. It would take an act of Congress to change that; Ms. Holmes Norton, a Democrat, says that persuading Republicans to sign on would be “like pulling teeth.”

In 2005, Richard A. White, then Metro’s general manager, warned Congress in written testimony that “without adequate, predictable resources, it is not a question of WHETHER Metro’s service will further deteriorate, but WHEN.”

But the city paid scant heed until the deadly 2009 crash, which ushered in an era of greater federal oversight. Eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were injured when one train rear-ended another as it idled near an aboveground Red Line station on the city’s outskirts.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the widespread failure of Metro’s automatic train-control system for the crash, as well as general negligence about safety. The board also said that old train cars posed an “unacceptable risk” and should be replaced as soon as possible.

By this time, Congress had already passed legislation authorizing $1.5 billion over 10 years for Metro to make capital improvements and repairs, like fixing broken escalators and buying new rail cars. Some improvements have been made, and modern trains have been purchased, but Mr. Wiedefeld said Metro had consistently underspent the money.

Safety problems have persisted. In addition to the tunnel fire that killed a passenger in January 2015, a train derailment in August raised red flags. No one was injured, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier and ignored, reflecting “a system breakdown that was simply unacceptable,” said Peter Goelz, a transportation consultant who has advised Metro.

Metro spent much of 2015 without a full-time general manager, amid disagreement on its 16-member board over whether to hire a transit expert or a turnaround specialist. Mr. Wiedefeld, who previously ran Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, arrived in late November, and has so far been given good reviews.

Now, Mr. Wiedefeld and Mr. Evans appear to be pursuing a two-pronged public relations strategy. While Mr. Wiedefeld tried to tamp down the uproar over potential closures, Mr. Evans made clear in an interview that he was pleased with the reaction, which he hoped would help him “sell the region,” and Congress, on the need for an organizational overhaul and for more money. Metro also has a $2.5 billion unfunded pension liability, Mr. Evans said.

“Unless you are living under a rock,” he said, “everyone now knows that Metro has terrible financial problems.”

Now the question is what it will take to restore the system to its former glory — and whether that can be achieved. Mr. Schrag, the professor and author, remains hopeful. “The New York subway came back, and Metro can come back,” he said. Still, he added: “It’s such a bittersweet moment. This was supposed to be a birthday party.”

故障頻傳 華府地鐵擬停駛半年

大華府地區地鐵系統故障頻傳，即使先前實施罕見的29小時停運檢修，幾天後橘線又發生起火事件，對此華府交通局（Metro）主管表示，為了根本解決地鐵系統的諸多問題，他們不排除將全面停運半年以徹底檢修。

這無疑是對通勤族投下一枚震撼彈，華府市長對於可能的交通黑暗期也疾呼反對。

代表中國城區域已24年的華府市議員、交通局董事會主席伊凡斯（Jack Evans）與總經理威德福爾德（Paul J. Wiedefeld），30日在一場地方領袖會議上宣布這項消息。伊凡斯表示，大華府大眾運輸系統急需10億美元額外資金，但遭在場人士極力撻伐。

目前地鐵系統多半在平日夜間或周末短暫停駛進行維修，這次主管在明知將遭輿論壓力下宣布此事，華府地鐵問題的嚴重程度可見一斑。

伊凡斯說：「為了對系統進行必要維修，光是夜晚停駛三小時或在周末進行，是無法完成的…或許我們必須讓藍線停駛六個月，民眾會抓狂，但這是為了解決問題必須做的艱難決定。」他又補充，六條地鐵線的任何一條，都有可能部分或全面停駛，而紅線停駛的機率最低，因為維修工作已大致完成。

威德福爾德證實他有意下令長期停駛，「電纜與鐵軌都有更大的問題，過去幾年，我們都是零碎地處理，已經影響到所有的人」，他預計四到六周內作出決定。

對此，維州費郡（Fairfax County）主管佩妮‧葛羅斯（Penny Gross）表態支持，倘若有限度停駛發揮不了作用，就應該果斷處理。

但華府市長包瑟（Muriel E. Bowser）強烈反對，上次交通局未徵詢她的意見即下令29小時停駛，已讓她相當不滿，這次她透過發言人表示，「地鐵停運一日已經造成不便，數個月停運將對乘客與整個區域造成更大的衝擊」。

聯邦政府似乎也傾向支持交通局，董事會的聯邦代表海瑞特‧翠高寧（Harriet Tregoning）說：「我一直告訴交通局，直接了當說明真實情況與各種可行方案，這項計畫必須非常明確，提供乘客充足的替代交通工具。」

至於通勤族的反應呈現兩極，支持者認為一次把問題解決才能避免夜長夢多，反對者主張應該維持有限度停駛維修的方式。華盛頓郵報最新網路民調顯示，高達六成六民眾支持長期停運。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/washington-metro-40-and-creaking-stares-at-a-midlife-crisis.html

2016-04-02 世界日報 記者胡毓玲