More Passing the Suck

Here's another in a series about how a culture of departmental infighting and passing the buck at Metro screws commuters.

Part one explains why there are so many breakdowns at rush hour.

The below is from a 15-year Metro veteran. They asked that specifics be omitted so that they could not be identified. Department names and equipment types have been made generic.

There is a whole lot of "cover your ass" at Metro and a lot of passing things off to the next shift. My immediate coworkers and I honestly try to do that as little as possible, but for some techs/mechanics it is a finely honed skill.

There is also a lot of "not my department."

Take "gadget A" for example -- there are any number of reasons for them to fail (without endangering riders but causing delays). Most of these failures involve equipment from my department. Sometimes however, it will be another department's equipment that is the cause.

We try to get that department to do the necessary repairs, but more often than not they delay and come up with excuses. We are told to inspect and/or test every single piece of our equipment (sometimes two or three times over multiple shifts) before the other department will grudgingly go out and fix what was clearly the cause of the failure all along.

Passengers are often unnecessarily delayed due to these inter-departmental squabbles.

A fairly common occurrence within my department is for one shift to allow a piece of equipment they are responsible for to gradually fail because they don't want to go through the trouble of replacing it.

There are ways to keep the equipment limping along for a while, but failure is imminent. It is only a question of time. It may be months or it may be days.

It seems to be a game to some of my coworkers, related to the 'passing it to the next shift' game.

They know that since they typically work 40 hours out of 168 in a week there is only about a 25 percent chance their equipment will fail while they are at work. The chances are much greater that someone else on another shift will end up replacing it if they just let it go until it fails.

If the equipment could be changed before it actually failed, it could be changed at a more convenient, planned time. All the necessary parts and supplies could be gathered, and the job could go much more smoothly than when there's an unexpected failure during rush hour. The disruption to passenger service would be much less.

A major contributing problem is no oversight -- no quality assurance (QA). Management personnel rarely review the data. If they did, they would see that the problem had been brewing for some time and could have been avoided.

Another source said:

All management cares about is the numbers. How many tickets open in Maximo and the delay numbers. It's never the root, always the numbers. So we get into a rut where we worry about the "ticket" and never mind patterns or causes.

Other items:
Summary of public hearings (WaPo)

Do Feds' Free Rides make Metro Worse?

From Richard:

The party line is that Metro doesn't have a dedicated source of funding, and that's why it's so bad. I say this argument is mostly bunk.

Forty percent of the riders, or so goes the conventional wisdom, are feds. Until recently, they rode completely for free (and probably took a lot of personal trips for free) thanks to a super hefty $230 monthly transit benefit. With the return of the transit benefit to $125 per month, many of them will now have to fork over a little for their daily commutes. But still, even with the fare hikes, Metro will likely be way cheaper than any other way to commute--for them, not me.

So 40 percent of the ridership will probably ride without Metro lifting a finger to provide a service worth paying for.

I can hear the internal monologue these riders have: "Yeah Metro sucks, but it's free."

Can we lower expectations any more? In that kind of a model, what incentive is there for Metro to improve and attract new riders or retain the feds it currently has?

I'm convinced this is why Metro has this huge PR apparatus to placate the low bar feds with a bunch of cockamamie stats about spending on this, that and the other, mystery shoppers, charts, bogus reports, public hearings, Metroforward schemes and all the other associated Metro BS accoutrements.

Am I totally off here?

Full disclosure: I voted with my wallet and said goodbye to Metro some time ago. Now, through a combination of carpooling, telecommuting, and the occasional solo drive, I barely have to hand over one dime of my heard-earned money to Metro.

I'm interested if there are other people out there who have cut back or eliminated Metro from their lives.

I'd like to support mass transit in the DC area, but Metro? Nah.