RIP the DC subway: the demise of one of the best underground networks

Why is the seat of US Government cursed by such an appalling Tube system

Metro station, Washington, DC, USA (Rex Features)

Washington DC's once glorious Metrorail system in now a mess and commuters face a litany of problems on a daily basis.

You're heading downtown for an evening out in the capital of the world’s richest and most powerful country. Virtuously, you decide to leave your car at home and take the Metro.

Two stations into the journey, the train refuses to start. The doors open and shut a few times, but nothing happens. Then a metallic, barely comprehensible voice comes through on the public address system: “This train is disabled and out of service. Everybody detrain, everybody detrain.”

You comply, and a new dilemma poses itself. Do you wait for this train to be hauled off and wait for another to arrive? Or do you go the surface, and hope for a bus, a taxi, an Uber? Either way it’s a mess, a word that these days pretty much sums up the state of Washington DC’s once glorious Metrorail system.

The inconvenience mentioned above is but a minor glitch compared to the greater calamities to beset Metro in the last few years. They include a crash that killed nine people in 2009, numerous derailments and smoke incidents caused by electrical fires, one of which last year caused the death of a 61-year old grandmother and sent 84 others to hospital. But they all add up – the true disasters and the daily litany of small problems, of breakdowns, delays and escalators that are eternally out of service – to create the largely correct impression that Metro is simply no longer capable of doing its job.

It wasn’t meant to be like that when the first line was inaugurated in 1976, a decade after the project had been launched by the Lyndon Johnson administration. By world standards Metro is a comparative toddler, even though it is the second largest urban transport system in the US, after the New York subway.

The network, now boasting six lines and 91 stations, reaches deep into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, but its 210m passengers in 2015 are dwarfed by 1.3bn who use the London underground each year, the 1.5bn who use the Paris Metro, not to mention the world’s busiest system, in Beijing, which carries 3.2bn people a year. But its symbolic importance, at least at the outset, was immense.

Metro was conceived in a golden age for the automobile. New freeways and interstate highways were cleaving apart great American cities, disrupting the urban patterns of decades, and similar plans were afoot for Washington. But Lyndon B Johson would have none of it. The 60s were also a golden age of liberalism, and Johnson wanted a project that would show government at its beneficent best.

The project was dubbed “The Great Society Subway,” intended not merely to ferry commuters to their place of work, but, in the president’s words, “to create a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” Tell that to patrons of the London Tube or the New York subway during rush hour.

Initially however, Metro lived up to the hype. To this day it remains a glorious specimen of the ‘Brutalist’ school of architecture, with its spacious stations and their vaulted cathedral-like ceilings forged in raw concrete. The carriages were (and still are) similarly spacious. Their floors are carpeted, they’re air-conditioned and, mirabile dictu, not an advertisement is to be seen.

But now darkness has settled over Metro. You almost wish there were bright lights and garish ads. Instead, even in the arts, it’s a sinister and dangerous place – nowhere more so than in the US version of House of Cards, when the poisonously evil Frank Underwood hides behind a temporary repair wall before emerging to push Zoe Barnes, his one-time paramour turned journalistic nemesis, onto the track in front of an oncoming train. His hat pulled down over his head, and unnoticed amid the near-Stygian gloom, the vice-President makes his escape to plot further mayhem.

Now years of warning signs have turned into a full blown real-life crisis. The number of passengers dropped again in 2015, by 5 per cent, returning to the level of 2004. The proliferation of mishaps has prompted the federal government to take direct control of safety issues. And all this at a moment when a booming city and suburbs, their population soaring, with traffic congestion now rated worse than Los Angeles, needs an efficient, reliable mass transit system more than ever.

The reasons for Metro’s plight are many, but first and foremost a lack of funding, a reflection of the wider plight of America’s transport and civic infrastructure, starved by a lack of investment. Metro has no dedicated source of income, such as a petrol or sales tax, and its situation is complicated further by the fact that three jurisdictions, who do not always agree – the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia – run it. More than almost any other mass transit system, Metro relies on income from fares. But to push up fares now would surely only drive more passengers away.

Mismanagement has been an equal problem. No-one seems to be in charge; veteran staff members resent newcomers, while some train drivers, according to Washingtonian, were so at loggerheads with the system’s controllers that they would sometimes “break” a train out of spite. “Consciously or subconsciously, everyone at Metro knows they’ve got a job for life,” a former employee told the magazine, “unless they sit there and smoke crack in the middle of the platform.”

But things may finally be changing. In November a new general manager arrived in the form of Paul Wiedefeld, who previously headed Baltimore’s BWI airport. Safety is his overriding concern and last month, giving barely 12-hours-notice, he ordered the shutdown of the entire system on a Wednesday, bang in the middle of the working week, so that safety inspections could be carried out at known danger spots.

The move created uproar, just as Wiedefeld surely had intended. Local politicians weighed in and suddenly everyone knew about Metro’s problems, and that something had to be done. Jack Evans, chairman of the system’s supervisory board, then doubled down by warning that entire lines might have to be closed for months so that safety and maintenance issues could be tackled.

Other mass transit systems have had such crises, London and New York to name but two. Both were able to overcome them, and despite its hybrid structure – Metro has been called “an institutional orphan” – Washington surely can do the same. But not before many more of those sudden, maddening breakdowns that drive you crazy, when you’re only goal is for a relaxed night out in the capital of the free world.