Metro station by the author.

WMATA has been in a tailspin for so long that it’s difficult to see it objectively anymore, especially in view of the ongoing hardships of this never-ending pandemic.

Make no mistake, however: the crisis facing Metrorail today is the most dire it has ever confronted.

The agency doesn’t only need to continue to weather and then somehow climb out of the pandemic, which is a challenge for every city transit authority in the world. It also needs to accomplish something that has proved too difficult even in much better times: fix itself.

I’m a loyal rider and supporter of Metrorail, which has been vital to my work and life for most of 15 years. I depend on it, as do hundreds of thousands of other daily users. Like many of them, I lamented its decline before the pandemic. Now I fear for Metro’s viability altogether. I earnestly want the system to reform and succeed. But there are many reasons to fear it cannot — and this region must begin to contemplate the implications of that.

The perfect storm

Just as a nor’easter might combine with a hurricane over the ocean to generate an even more destructive storm, the pandemic has melded with WMATA’s longstanding dysfunction to create an existential combination of problems.

Ridership has plummeted. Many workers who are permitted to log in from home haven’t ridden a train in months or more. Metro’s average daily rail entries were lower in the second year of the pandemic than they were in the first.

If greater acceptance of telework, even “after” the pandemic (if it ever “ends” so cleanly) means many riders never return, that’s a huge problem for the future.

WMATA’s retiring general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, acknowledged to a House Oversight Committee panel this month that the rail system “is at a pivotal moment” and said the National Capital Region “must begin to address the critical questions that will determine the future of public transit in the nation’s capital.”

Bad service

So it must – but even that hearing gave short shrift to the ongoing crisis of Metro’s own making: its execrable quality of daily service right now, today, as the result of its baffling screw-up with its 7000-series railcars. Sixty percent of the nearly new rail fleet will have been idle for six months by mid-April, the earliest Metro says they might re-enter service.

Twenty minute headways or worse; phantom trains; greater wear and tear on the older-model cars that have had to take up some of the slack — riding the Metro today, to borrow a rail transit technical term, sucks.

A cadre of hardy souls, many of whom don’t have the option to log in remotely and don’t or won’t drive a car, gut it out through the infrequent service, paying a heavy premium in their own lost time on top of fares.

If the pandemic was out of anyone’s control, Metro’s current operational miseries are entirely of its own making. They follow years of other problems. Recall our lives back then: A few months of good service, then weeks or months of degradation or complete breaks in service … sitting on shuttle buses through evening gridlock … then the crawl back to something like normalcy. Repeat.

We never escaped WMATA’s spiral of failure. The pandemic just took most of the people away.

So Metro’s salvation requires more than some new rate structure or funding mechanism or other post-pandemic deus ex machina from regional governments or Congress.

It obliges WMATA somehow to fix itself, or be fixed by others, such that it can offer service on which people can depend. Otherwise, even after the 7000 series cars eventually are back on the rails, Metro will just stumble into some other operational quicksand or infrastructure woe or who knows what else before long.

Not all of this is the transit agency’s fault. It’s the victim of an antiquated funding and oversight model that no one would invent today – and which the outgoing general manager and others have said must be reformed. But WMATA must look in the mirror too.

The pandemic has brought the theoretical “someday” crisis for Metrorail faster than anyone thought. WMATA couldn’t afford to bleed off a few tens of thousands of riders per year even before the pandemic. Now it’s deep in a hole and it can’t count on many of its riders, including federal workers, to return.

I hope they do. What I want is to get back to the glory days of crisp daily service and efficient movement of riders for events from Nationals baseball games to fireworks and inaugurations.

Does that seem realistic, though?

Elegant decline versus embarrassing decline

The best probable case might be for WMATA and regional governments to get out of the pandemic … someday … and kludge together a minimum viable product for a smaller flow of daily commuter service, with drastic cuts off peak and on weekends. A banker’s railroad.

The outgoing GM, Wiedefeld, suggested in his testimony this month that permanent rail service reductions are inevitable – although a shift in focus could be good news for bus riders.

“The region should look at this moment as an opportunity to create a system that first, meets the changing travel patterns and second, meets the needs of the entire community — including addressing the disparity between the quality and service level bus riders receive versus rail riders,” he said.

There are worse scenarios that seem just as likely, if not more realistic: If most people who are able telework permanently and eschew their former rail commutes, an unreformed system may simply just atrophy and continue repelling riders.

Regional boosters and public officials will wave their hands and say, look at how important Metro is for the economy, for property values, for equity, for the health of this region. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes — assuming it works and enough people ride it. It doesn’t. They don’t.

The Gordian Knot

What makes this moment so grave is that even after all these years, no one on the outside really can say what, practically, must be done inside the agency to fix it. Hiring? Firing? More spending? Cuts? Who knows.

All we can do is describe the necessary outcome: WMATA must stop being its own worst enemy. Separate and apart from whatever happens with regional governments, Congress and the pandemic, it must find a way to make people want to use it.

That’s a difficult job. From the deadly 2009 Red Line crash, to rail system congestion around the introduction of the Silver Line, to the closures blamed on the woeful conditions of the network infrastructure, to the October Blue Line derailment that caused the 7000-series railcar debacle, the transit agency suffered one self-inflicted blunder after another.

Asking regional governments or Congress to save or sustain WMATA after the pandemic will be difficult enough, especially if it serves a much smaller number of daily users. Asking to save a system that keeps failing at the core competencies for any railroad – acquiring good trains and operating them well – would be a farce. If WMATA can’t prove that it has learned how to execute, Metrorail as we knew it may already be finished.

Philip Ewing lives in Old Town Alexandria and works in the District in the aerospace industry. Metrorail has been his limousine, library, art studio, second home, tormentor, betrayer and muse for more than 15 years.