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.
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.
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.