Fifty-five years ago, Congress saddled the Washington region’s jurisdictions with an inherently unworkable arrangement to run a transit agency.
It was conceived in such an unwieldy way merely to avoid doing what should have been done: having the federal government fully fund, and run, a transit network for the national-capital area. Members of Congress just didn’t want to be bothered, so they did what they do best – punted and passed the buck.
Those errors in no way are the fault of today’s regional leaders, but they represent the reality in which those leaders must live. Today’s local leaders are merely the latest to try and corral a management/funding/oversight scheme that has never worked adequately, is not working adequately now, and will not work adequately in the future.
To get to our point: The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently outlined concerns about the future of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority while, as Fairfax leaders done for a half-century now, attempting to protect service to its own residents, even if at the expense of others.
“The current financial path [of the Metro system] is clearly unsustainable,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeffrey McKay wrote. No doubt his predecessors Jack Herrity, Audrey Moore, Tom Davis, Gerald Connolly and Sharon Bulova all penned the same line at some point in their tenures. It’s the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of transit management in the local region.
McKay’s recent letter is fine for what it is, but it seems clear many regional leaders continue to be in denial about what the future holds.
COVID has upended everything. Many of those hundreds of thousands of employees who decamped for home in March 2020 are still not back in the office much, and are unlikely to be in the office much going forward. Metro’s passenger counts are going to remain depressed, maybe (perhaps likely) for good.
So all of McKay’s commentary, which on its face is reasonable, in the broad picture is merely another case of deck-chair choreography on the Andrea Doria. (Titanic references are overused ...)
It will take real leadership to stop nibbling around the edges and tackle the – buzzword alert! – “systemic” problems head on. Will local politicians, and the federal government, prove up to the task?
