I agree based on my observation. I also question how mentally alert Metro workers are. There’s just something about them which doesn’t add up. It is like they are openly doing just the bare minimum to get by. And don’t care if the public sees them slacking off. Such job attitudes can be deadly in an emergency.
I lived in Arlington for 3.5 years....leaving summer of 2013. I had the rare opportunity to talk one day with a retired guy at a coffee shop...he was in original crew of mid-70’s hired as subway ‘driver’. He’d done a couple years in the Army and this was the dream job of his life. He noted most of the guys who were hired...were former military.
So as we talked, he went into detail about small screw-ups in the beginning but the management team was the resolution type...fix it right and move on. So for about fifteen years, he had absolute confidence in the whole system. At some point in the late 1990s...he started to note folks retiring, and new people being brought in. New folks weren’t the same caliber...some had the “I don’t care” attitude...some with drug issues...some just didn’t grasp the significance of the job. He ended up retiring around 2000.
His assessment was centered around two issues. It was all state-of-the-art for 1976 when built. The basic design and technology of the whole system today? Still built off technology of 1976. For two decades, they’ve been talking of the way ahead, but it’d be into the billions and it’d take a federal grant to make it happen. As he pointed out...the automatic pilot system to watch and gauge speed has been taken off line since that big accident from five years ago....the trust isn’t there, and so it’s run on manual now...requiring maximum concentration.
The second problem he noted...guys come in to test and they’ve got a copy of the test. They memorize enough of this...to show aptitude but they really aren’t that bright.
I should note while I was there...they had the strange accident where no deaths but a couple of injuries. They discovered the gal-driver had been on injury time for three or four years, and then rushed back into service with just a refresher training course (violating every rule in their book)...she should have taken the entire driver course which requires a month of class. As far as I know...she quit after that accident, but they never fired the guy who approved her re-entry into the system with only refresher training.
I could probably write a sixty-page book off the 3.5 years I lived there and the various Metro stories I gleaned from daily news and local gossip. We even had the 16-year old kid who stole a Metro bus from the ‘yard’ and in a Metro uniform....he drove a third-of-a-route with passengers before he hit tree, and cops stopped him.