The Real Reason DC’s Metro Doesn’t Work
31st May 2016
The continuing decline of the Washington Metro Rail can be traced to two mistakes made by the people who planned it. Their first was to chose an expensive, obsolete technology that most American cities had already abandoned. Of the hundreds of cities that had rail transit in 1910, only eight were left when the Metro Rail system was planned in the late 1960s.
By sharing infrastructure with cars and trucks, buses cost far less than trains and can go anywhere there are streets. The high costs of rails means they can only reach limited destinations.
The second mistake was to fail to plan for maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Such costs start out low but rapidly grow rapidly as rail lines approach thirty years of age.
Governments exist to keep people safe and to keep people honest. Once they wander outside of their natural sphere, they screw things up.