Controllers can’t prove operators sabotage trains for personal retribution, but the trainees say the practice is well known. ROCC veterans kept track of repeat “train breakers,” Watkins says, and trainees were warned about one driver who “was almost guaranteed to break her train if she didn’t like the way you talked to her.” A Metro spokeswoman says, “We have no reason to believe this is a widespread or systemic issue.”
The trainees were equally disturbed by the poor safety practices they witnessed. The ROCC was noisy and chaotic; controllers yelled across the room and were distracted by their cell phones. Radio communication with trains was often impossible because dead spots exist throughout the system. Alarms sounded constantly, triggered by everything from power surges to water in tunnels—although many were false warnings. “It’s well over a thousand alarms a day,” Watkins says. “But they ignore pretty much all of them.”
How was this dysfunction tolerated? Leverage. Because controllers—the most critical employees—were in such short supply, they were allowed to follow their own rules. “The ROCC is like God at WMATA,” Scarbrough says. “They operate kind of autonomously from the rest of the company.”
It’s a self-reinforcing problem. Metro hasn’t been able to improve the ROCC culture because it’s so beholden to the current personnel—yet the current personnel are a big part of the staff shortage. Despite a concerted effort to recruit and train new hires, Metro added just three controllers between 2011 and 2015, the FTA says.
Comments:
* It’s sad to see metro suffer like this. I’ve been riding metro since ’91. It was a gem then. Something to be proud of as the article notes. Now I wish I could only look at it as a joke. It’s downright dangerous. The bottom-line is that it’s not a professional organization. It’s rife with political cronyism. It’s been sued repeated for discrimination. For instance, hispanics dominate entry-level jobs in the DC metro area. In 2012, only one laborer out of 67 is hispanic. 97% of the bus and metro operators are black. Their civil rights division has 17 employees, all of whom are black. The average starting salary — in 2012 — was over $60,000, well above the average for the DC area. The culture is insular and unaccountable. 75% of operating expenses goes to salaries? I support dedicated revenue streams for metro, but only until there is real governance, meaningful employee-culture reforms, as well as increased employee diversity. Think the Washingtonian has that backwards (with the 75% number coming at the end of the article, almost as a coda). If you don’t have knowledge of the appropriate policy and procedures for your job, you’re out. If you are intentionally pulling your train out of service, you’re out. It’s time to put the taxpayer and customer first. Not to mention their safety.
* The American public and lawmakers, whether consciously or not, tend to view public transit as “welfare transportation.” This means that people believe public transit: a) is primarily for use by those of lower income groups and students, b) that it should be priced as inexpensively as possible to put the least possible cost burden on riders, and c) that it should be operated and subsidized by the government.
These views tend to lead to very minimal public transit systems built to provide the minimal justifiable levels of service and service quality, which then attract low ridership and fare box revenues that little chance of covering operating and maintenance (O&M) costs. Transit agencies are then forced to grovel to municipal and state governments to find sufficient monies year in and year out to cover those O&M costs and more often than not, the money they are able to procure make even keeping up with maintenance difficult to do, never mind expanding or improving service.
When you throw in the added challenges of having to deal with the bureaucracies of public agencies and the challenges of unionized workers, it can be extremely challenging to have efficient public transit systems in the US.
But public transit doesn’t have to be this way. In many countries, public transit is viewed not as “welfare transportation,” but as the primary form of travel in urban areas and the most important piece of infrastructure. It is also viewed as a business that can and should operate profitably.
Cities should look at Tokyo for how to do public transit the right way. The Tokyo subway system has two primary operators (Tokyo Metro, and Toei Subway) providing service to 13 lines and 290 stations and has nearly 9 million riders daily. The stations are clean and well-lit, the trains are always on-time, and the ridership revenue covers 180% of annual operating and maintenance costs.
Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.
The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.
With Metro’s budget chronically strained and reports of mismanagement coming more regularly than trains, interviews and internal records depict a likely root: an environment in which hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum — never causing a stir by flagging rampant safety violations, reporting malfeasance or proposing improvements.
“When the accident happened in 2009, I called a supervisor and said, ‘Is this the one we all dreaded?’ The way workers do their jobs, we all knew it was a matter of time. … The inept get promoted, and the capable get buried. Smart people were put in the corner, ostracized and given nothing to do,” said Christine Townsend, who sued Metro for discrimination and won.
It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.
“The average rider wouldn’t believe the things that go on. There are so many easy things we could do to make the system better,” a station manager said. “But they’d never put me in charge because they know I’d make sure others actually did their jobs. They don’t want change. It’s go along to get along.”
Metro is a quasi-public agency that receives funding from the federal government, Maryland, Virginia and local jurisdictions to operate a regional bus and rail transportation system in the national capital area, but is not beholden to rules that apply to fully governmental entities. With a $2.5 billion operating and capital budget for fiscal 2012, Metrorail serves 86 stations and has 106 miles of track, while Metrobus serves the nation’s capital with 1,500 buses.
Metro’s affirmative-action plan notes that the 1.4 percent of its bus and train operators who are Hispanic and the 25 percent who are female of any race are “less than reasonably expected.” It does not make note of the 1.5 percent who are white.
Even in entry-level occupations typically dominated by Hispanics, there are virtually none at Metro. Only one laborer out of 67 is Hispanic; of 540 landscapers, carpenters and cleaners, only 22 are Hispanic. In the national capital region, Hispanics make up 13 percent of adults and blacks comprise 25 percent; white women constitute 29 percent.
“The odds of such a disparity occurring by chance are statistically infinitesimal,” Ronald A. Schmidt, a lawyer representing 12 white women exploring a class-action lawsuit, wrote in a 2003 letter. “There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”
The average Metro worker had a $60,000 salary, which rises to $69,000 including overtime. That is more than 71 percent of area residents who had an income in 2010, including 62 percent of whites, census records show.
No recourse
White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black. Until at least 1999, that office tracked complaints via a handwritten ledger on a series of taped-together sheets of paper, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The system “made determining statistics impossible,” said a civil rights employee from the time.
In recent months, such antiquated record keeping has allowed employees to steal thousands of dollars that electronic systems easily could have detected — and in more than one case, a culture of complicity has kept prosecutors from trying those who were caught because they feared no clean witness or proper records could be found.
“There’s a strong sense of nepotism, and it is the culture of Metro,” the civil rights employee said. “It was more of a buddy system than it was merit-based.”
…Of a dozen senior supervisors overseeing the rail division in 2007, 10 were black and two were white, and five black supervisors, all with less than a year of tenure in the position, were paid more than both whites, who had more seniority — one with 20 years — personnel records obtained by The Times show.
The group making more money includes senior supervisors such as Orlando Terrell King, who has been charged with reckless endangerment and fraudulently attempting to obtain a driver’s license, according to Maryland state records. Mr. King, who is paid $62,536, was promoted by Metro to oversee those who drive trains carrying thousands of passengers daily.
Also rising rapidly to senior supervisor was Robbie O. McGee, who spent eight years in federal prison for felony distribution of PCP while on probation for another crime. He received five pay increases at Metro in two years.
…The personnel record of the white male senior supervisor, Robert Fish, meanwhile, indicates strict standards and scrutiny, including suspensions and severe reprimands for minor infractions such as possession of a covered cup of coffee.
Ms. Townsend had a college degree and a decade of experience as a schoolteacher when she was passed over for a training job in favor of a man who had taken some community college courses and, it turned out, could barely write a sentence.
…It is not just that mediocrity is overlooked. Dozens of employees whom Metro rules forbid from speaking to the media said: Diligence is discouraged, because anywhere one looked was something that needed to be fixed — and change, especially when it involved work, was anathema to senior Metro line workers.
For example, Ms. Townsend said, by 2004, many trains were operating without radios in defiance of federal rules. Other drivers confirmed that was common knowledge. So she authored a study and included a recommendation that Metro start substituting cellphones.
“I was read the riot act: ‘You had no right to compile these statistics,’ even though it was my job. They didn’t want people showing problems,” she said.
…Days after a Red Line accident killed nine in July 2009, Brenda Whorton drew the line.
“I told them I wasn’t going to pencil-whip for them,” she said, referring to a technique so common in Metro culture that there is a term for it. “It means fudging it: like marking down that a motor’s according to specs when it’s not.” It is common for midnight-shift workers to “lock the doors and go to sleep, because they’ve got other jobs,” and equally common for supervisors to turn a blind eye, she said, leading to pencil-whipping of the inspections they’re supposed to be doing — and delays for morning riders.
“Anyone who blew the whistle or caused any trouble, when pick time came — every six months you pick shifts — you’d be moved. They spend more time trying to manipulate this stuff than they do doing their job.”
Dozens said white workers, especially women, were openly subject to racist and sexist remarks without repercussion — behavior that drove many targets to seek transfers or leave the agency. All said they have been inexplicably passed over hundreds of times for promotions to positions such as station manager while others with less seniority passed them by.
“I was the only white woman in car maintenance out of 338, and they made my life miserable,” Ms. Whorton said, adding that colleagues once electrified a track circuit on which she was working and laughed. “Nothing happened to them.”
No one knows what the two white women were doing on that Metro in that part of Washington, D.C.
They “did not want any trouble,” they said on the video. To the black mob that confronted them, threatened them, beat them and robbed them, it was no trouble at all.
So they grabbed their iPhones, but not before the girls fought back to retrieve them. Unsuccessfully.
All the while one of the members of the crew was rolling video.
Members of this mob call themselves the 44th Street Crew in Southeast Washington. For those not familiar with the different sections of Washington, that is not the lobbyist/media/functionary dinner-party part of town.
Reporters at the Fox affiliate in Washington seemed surprised at the mob violence. But to people who ride the Metro, it was just another day.
Metro police have seen so much of it they are ready with instructions for riders who encounter it: Resistance is futile:
“There’s nothing worth fighting over and getting assaulted for,” said Deputy Chief Ron Pavlik of the two women defending themselves. “There are lot better ways to fight back.”
Some people devote entire newsletters to the lawless Metro, where black mob violence is often seen, but seldom reported. According to UnsuckDCMetro, here’s a “Harrowing Account of Yet More Metro Violence” that never made the Washington Post:
I have never been more disgusted or shocked by what I witnessed Saturday night at the Anacostia Metro. I went to pick up a family member at the Metro, and just as she was telling me about the fights (Yes, plural!) that happened on the Green Line train [between L’Enfant and Anacostia], we witnessed a group of 6 to 8 young black teenagers kick, stomp, punch and push a lone teenage girl.
I could not believe my eyes! I also could not believe there was not an officer in sight.
When the family member arrived, she had her own story as well:
When she got on the train toward Anacostia, a group of teenagers proceeded to verbally and physically assault a group of young women. One of the boys threw a bottle and another threw the contents of a bottle in one of the woman’s face. The assaults got so out of hand that some people landed on a woman and her baby.
The attacking group had the doors to the train blocked so people couldn’t get off the train. My cousin told me she was so scared that she hid behind some seats and pulled out the box cutter she used for work.
Every story like this prompts readers to tell their own stories, in this case, dozens of them. This is typical:
I was leaving a friend’s place around 11 p.m. on a Saturday a few weeks ago and groups of teenagers were harassing everyone at the top of the escalator on the north-bound side of Eisenhower station. I could see it getting bad fairly quickly and was lucky to catch a train after only about 2 mins of being on the platform.
Over at DCist.com, they are also not in any danger of running out of material from the Metro violence beat. Whether it is a “huge fight” of 100 black people, or violence on a more modest scale, they got the goods.
“Stunning is the sheer number of participants in this fight,” said DCist. The site does not report the race of the participants.
TBD.com also reports on the Metro. The big story last year featured Allen Heywood. A black mob attacked Heywood as he was reading a book waiting for a train. As they beat and taunted him, Heywood begged for mercy:
Haywood repeatedly asked the girl why she was attacking him, pleading with her to end it. “Stop it! Stop it! G—— it! You stop this s— right now! I did nothing to you!”
That got a good laugh from other members of the mob, who “egged her on.” They left him dazed and bleeding and so upset that no one helped him that he stood outside the station holding a sign:
“I WAS ATTACKED AT L’ENFANT METRO SUNDAY AT 7:15 PM. NO ONE HELPED. PLEASE BE CAREFUL.”
One spectator who took the above video offered the video to Heywood to use as evidence against his attackers. But only if he paid for it.
From the Washington Post 2015:
Horrified passengers witnessed brutal July 4 slaying aboard Metro car
Jasper Spires boarded the Red Line Metro train at Rhode Island Avenue shortly before 1 p.m. Saturday, joining passengers from the District and elsewhere headed to various Fourth of July festivities, among them the Foo Fighters concert at RFK Stadium.
As the train rumbled toward its next stop, at NoMa-Gallaudet, a three-minute ride, D.C. police said, the 18-year-old Spires — who may have been high on synthetic drugs — tried to grab a cellphone tucked into the waistband of a recent American University graduate headed to a gathering with friends.
The two struggled, police said, and the terror began.
Police and a witness interviewed said passengers trapped in the moving train huddled at both ends of the car and watched in horror as Spires punched 24-year-old Kevin Joseph Sutherland until he fell to the floor, then stabbed him until he was dead. Court documents say the victim was cut or stabbed 30 or 40 times, in the chest, abdomen, back, side and arms. Police said the assailant then threw the victim’s cellphone and returned to stomp on Sutherland’s body.
“We were in a moving train,” said a 52-year-old woman, who spoke on the condition that she not be named because she is both a victim and a witness to a crime. “You’re not really sure what you need to do. . . . This man is holding a bloody knife. I don’t think anyone was going to try and stop him.”
