Posted on 03/31/2016 6:18:23 AM PDT by C19fan
Entire rail lines in Washington's Metrorail subway system could be shut down for months at a time to conduct repairs, the transit system's leaders acknowledged Wednesday.
Board of directors Chairman Jack Evans raised the possibility during a Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments conference, saying there is not enough time to complete work during nights and weekends, according to The Washington Post.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Then you better rent some buses....
Ouch.
Ain’t mass transit great. We use to build a Liberty ship every 3 days. Now it takes months to rewire the primary on one subway route.
Having lived in the area for 3.5 years and used the rail/bus system greatly (I lived there without a car)...I can make these observations.
1. After each summer, there would be weekends when they’d close an entire line and make life miserable for just that weekend....while telling us of their massive maintenance on that ‘project’. Well...so these weekend closures for the last decade....what did they really accomplish? I’m not buying into this talk here unless they admit that they literally did nothing with each weekend closure.
2. The rest of this story is that they need literally a minimum of one billion dollars. They don’t want to raise tickets or cut services....so they need Virginia, DC, Maryland, and the Feds....to cough up the billion. Where do you think DC’s chunk of donation will come from? The Feds. So everyone outside of the beltway....is contributing to make this marginalized system work. Most Americans won’t buy into that.
3. What they aren’t really saying is that it’s all the lines. If you notice how they word this....it’s certain lines. Why? Were certain lines just looked over and avoided during the past decade of maintenance?
4. Finally, maybe it’s time to hire some review board to come in and look over Metro management and suggest certain people need to leave because they can’t do their work.
You got that right. Regular maintenance and PM's would have negated the need for this kind of drastic action. I'm glad I don't live or work in or near DC. This will be a nightmare...on steroids.
Anybody know if other cities (Chicago, New York, London, etc.) shut down their lines for months at a time?
Maybe those of us in Oklahoma should ante up some Federal gas tax money to build and support that system. OH . . . Wait.
Well, maybe we should just send a whole lot more.
The mugger-robber express will temporarily cease to deliver miscreants to better neighborhoods with fancier pickings. What’s the downside?
I completed a response to a RFP for technical support in June of last year. The award was to occur in October 2015, then November 2015, then December 2015, etc. Now it is postponed to June 30.
If they can't make a decision on selection of vendors to provide technical services, then how can they maintain a maintenance schedule for the physical property?
Liberty ships didn’t have nearly that much electronic. Heck your average Gold Wing motorcycle today probably has more electronics than a Liberty ship. The real question is how’d they let it get this bad. Months to rewire is a legitimate estimate, NEEDING to rewire is not.
I have lived in the area as well. On any given day a quarter or more of the escalators were not working. It was common for the doors on the subway trains to stop functioning. When this happened they would take the train out of service, abandoning you at some random stop.
Chicago shut down the Dan Ryan line for 6 months and ran shuttle buses. The alternative was to muddle through 3 years of construction. A good call in my opinion.
Your number four is the real reason for the problems. The number one priority of the metro system is not to transport people from place to place. Its to provide as many jobs to a certain demographic as possible. Maybe half of the people who collect a paycheck there contribute nothing. Fire them, and they will have enough money to perform maintenance.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. What else would you expect from a city that can’t keep police cars and fire trucks in working order?
Someone once observed that if a foreign power had imposed our educational system on us, we would regard it as an act of war.
From what I was told about the escalator deal in DC....everyone wanted to contract this out to firms in the area that had qualified people. The union argued about this and demanded that they assign the task to them. So fine, but they didn’t have enough qualified people....so they sent them off to classes. Eventually, when the people did come back...half of them really didn’t grasp the manuals or the repairs required....plus a fair number gave quitting notices and went to work for real companies that paid better...so Metro ended up with a crews that weren’t that good at the job.
I sat once for twenty minutes watching a four-man crew of metro escalator guys work on a Pentagon Metro issue. One single guy appeared to know what he was doing. One young guy showed enthusiasm but no grasp of the tools or repair. The other two guys were there to collect a check but weren’t actively doing much of anything. That escalator was down for three days.
Looks like it’s been affirmative actioned into obsolescence.
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