Category: Metro System/WMATA

On Wednesday this week, Metro experienced a rare system-wide shut-down, as WMATA’s General Manager Paul Wiedefeld addressed urgent electrical issues that posed an urgent safety hazard according to Metro officials.  So what was the impact on area traffic?

The Washington Post ran a very interesting article in the Sunday edition analyzing the impacts.  It is worth a read.  Here is the link, if you missed it.

Metro clearly plays a key role in meeting the diverse travel needs of an even more diverse region, but the fact that people found ways to adjust significantly reduced the level of economic impact many would have expected from such a drastic move on such short notice.  It truly could have been much worse.

SMTA has long advocated for increased in Metro’s capital program, to improve reliability, safety and to keep the system in good repair by working through years of deferred maintenance.  This week’s closure is a sign that Metro’s poor state of repair is a real issue that regional leaders need to address far more effectively than they have to date — and that means coming up with a long-term solution to Metro’s chronic funding shortages through creation of a dedicated regional revenue source like every other major urban transit system in the United States (except Metro) already has.

 

 

As Dr. Gridlock wrote in the Post recently, Congress is weighing possible cuts to Metro funding that would be both severe and unwise.  Here is a link to the Washington Post article.

Members of Congress from the DC region should unite to oppose this short-sighted proposal.  Experts across the region, as well as the public, recognize the key role Metro plays in keeping Greater Washington moving, and the federal government in particular has every reason to support Metro, given it’s critical role in supporting the transportation needs of the large federal workforce here.

Metro has significant capital investment needs — for safety, reliability, performance and user-experience improvements that are sorely needed — and Congress needs to be a constructive part of the solution.  It is one thing to criticize WMATA’s leadership or its well-known governance issues, but cutting the funding the agency needs to make progress and improve its performance is both unwise and irresponsible.

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In the Metro section in Sunday’s Washington Post, transportation reporter Robert Thompson invited the two groups to “define the problem, propose solutions and tell us how we would know if their ideas worked.”  While there were commonalities in the solutions proposed, only SMTA had a realistic answer to addressing all modes of transportation and measurably reducing congestion, which continues to be the top threat to our economy and quality of life.  Here’s a brief summary:
  
SMTA Lays Out Balanced List of Transportation Priorities:  Citing the need for comprehensive solutions to our traffic problems in the Washington area, SMTA President Richard Parsons defines our top transportation problem as “too much traffic congestion.”  He cites years of traffic studies which show the primary cause is the lack of suburb-to-suburb transit and road capacity connecting our major activity centers in the region.  For solutions, most transportation experts recommend a combination of:  Investing in Metro reliability, new transit lines (Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway, regional bus-rapid-transit network), new highway and bridge capacity (including a regional network of high-occupancy-toll lanes on the Beltway and other key corridors), and more sustainable “transit-oriented-development” to concentrate future jobs and housing and reduce the need for future auto trips.  Studies show using all the tools in our toolbox would significantly reduce congestion, make travel times both shorter and more predictable for commuters, and keep our region more liveable, sustainable and economically vibrant.  One of the key problems, Parsons notes, is that “we’ve clouded the debate, allowing popular myths and wishful thinking to supersede sound research and expert analysis.” View the entire article here.     
 
Smart Growth Coalition Offers Familiar “Wishful Thinking” Approach that Won’t Reduce Congestion:  Coalition for Smarter Growth President Stewart Schwartz blames congestion on “bad land-use planning and poor location decisions by major employers.”  For solutions, he lays out a familiar list of land-use changes, most of which are good ideas, but are either already being done in Maryland (e.g. concentrating new development near metro stations), or too vague and unrealistic, like shifting employment from the 270 corridor to the east.  He offers no specifics on how these might impact future congestion levels.  Recent data from the Transportation Planning Board indicate that smart-growth land-use changes alone, without new transportation capacity, actually makes traffic congestion slightly worse.  Schwartz does cite the need for new transit capacity, which is a good thing.  However, transit only works for those relatively few commuters who can use it, and does nothing to address all the other non-commuting trips for which we also need to plan (interstate traffic, shipping and freight deliveries, errands, business-to-business travel, etc.), and which make up most of our daily trips.  By ignoring the mode of travel that accounts for roughly 90% of all daily trips in our State and region — our heavily congested roads — such prescriptions are simply not realistic and will have no impact on congestion in our lifetimes.   

A federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) performance audit, released yesterday, faults the Metro Board of Directors for micro-management and lack of strategic focus, among other failings, according to an excellent article in today’s Washington Post by Dana Hedgpeth.

The Metro Board has been called to task by GAO for getting involved in decisions no Board of Directors should ever be involved in — the hiring and firing of individual employees (other than the General Manager) and other minor personnel policies, “excessive contact” with mid-level managers, and such operational minutae as picking out seat colors and station tiles.  As anyone who has ever run an effective non-profit organization knows, these are not the kind of decisions any Board should make.  This is why you hire a General Manager who then manages his or her professional staff without any interference from the Board. 

A Board of Directors should stay focused on its proper role:  Setting policy and overall strategic direction, providing resources and financial oversight,  and hiring and overseeing the performance of a General Manager.   That’s it. 

According to GAO, if Metro’s Board did a better job of staying out of the weeds, it would be more effective in keeping its strategic focus where it should be:  On key issues like safety, repairs and maintenance, and customer service.  If the new Board takes this feedback seriously, and lets General Manager Richard Sarles do his job, perhaps we can see better results and more accountability in the system in the future.

Today the 2030 Group released a new study that was conducted jointly by SMTA and the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, to explore how the region sets transportation priorities and what leading experts in the field feel those priorities should be.   The survey was conducted over the past several months through telephone surveys and focus groups with over 40 top transportation professionals from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

 Summary of the Key Findings:

1.      The nation’s most congested region lacks a well-defined short-list of transportation investments that would have the greatest potential to reduce congestion/improve mobility over the next 20 years.

2.      Among transportation professionals, significant consensus exists as to highway and public transit investments that would be the most productive. 

3.      The top-ten projects are listed in the report, including continued investment in Metro System Maintenance and Operations, New Potomac Bridges, and multi-modal projects to add capacity in several key transportation corridors.

4.      The prioritization process should focus heavily on highway and transit investments that do the most to reduce travel times/delays, reduce congestion, and improve transportation network safety and reliability.

5.      Meeting the region’s transportation challenges requires not only selecting/advancing the right priorities, but a new process that is more regional and professional and less parochial, political and ideologically driven.

The number-one priority identified by regional experts:  Invest in current Metro system operations, core capacity and maintenance.  Multi-modal investments to area highways, bridges and new transit lines to better connect regional activity centers and key economic corridors together throughout the region rounded out most of the remaining  top-10 priorities, along with better land-use policies to encourage more transit-oriented development.

This independent study was sponsored by the 2030 Group, an association of business and community leaders working towards greater regional cooperation on long-term planning and economic issues.