Residents of the nation’s capital—already keeping one eye out for the coming of the four horsemen of the Trump Apocalypse—have one more thing to worry about: Repairs to the city’s crumbling subway system could require entire lines to be shutdown for months (plural!) at a time. Here’s the Washington Post with the details:
Metro’s top officials warned Wednesday that the transit system is in such need of repair that they might shut down entire rail lines for as long as six months for maintenance, potentially snarling thousands of daily commutes and worsening congestion in the already traffic-clogged region. Board Chairman Jack Evans and General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld put rail riders on notice about possible extended closures at a high-level conference of local leaders.
The system normally does most of its repair work overnight or during short shutdowns on the weekends. Those measures, though, haven’t been nearly enough to address the larger problems facing the nation’s second-busiest subway system, one that moves roughly 700,000 people on a typical weekday and that has experienced 18 accident-related fatalities in the past 34 years. Evans, the system’s chairman, summed up the current state of the Metro like so on Wednesday: “maybe safe, somewhat unreliable, and being complained about by everybody”—which sounds about right to this former D.C. resident.
Evans and Wiedefeld broke the news at an invitation-only affair to mark the Metro’s 40th anniversary, where safety and funding concerns took top billing. It will be another few weeks before officials release a systemwide maintenance plan, and it’s possible that their comments were meant to shock local officials into taking their calls for increased funding more seriously. (Alternatively, this could have been them breaking the news gently!) Regardless, it appears that Washington’s new normal is going to include major disruptions to its already struggling public transit system. The closures, though, are not expected to affect the tiny, adorable subway lines that connect the House and Senate office buildings to the U.S. Capitol.
