“Safety first”? Time for WMATA to put riders first

From the outside, it’s not always obvious who does what at Metro. But a few roles are clear. The buck stops with the General Manager (GM) and their leadership team. The board looks after governance and holds leadership accountable.

That dynamic was articulated with Monday’s surprise announcement that GM Paul Wiedefeld and his Chief Operating Officer Joe Leader would step down immediately, six weeks earlier than planned for Wiedefeld. With reports indicating that the leadership team failed to act on an audit report a month prior to the Board* catching wind, it’s refreshing to see someone stepping up and making a hard decision. As yesterday’s news of yet more safety protocol errors showed, there’s no shortage of hard decisions ahead.

Nearly eight months have gone by since the 7000-series trains were pulled out of service, with riders having to put up with poor, crowded, and unreliable services, on top of cuts directly related to the actual pandemic. Every couple months brings riders reasons to fret about WMATA’s future (though with the odd bright spot).

The people without a clear say in a given system are the ones you eventually conclude don’t matter to it. It’s extraordinary that for WMATA, this powerless group should be the very constituency whom it cannot do without.

Who is speaking for Metro riders?

Elected officials might rightly seize the mantle to demand better service for riders. More of them should. External advocacy groups highlight the tremendous costs of a struggling transit system to regional competitiveness and human welfare. But without WMATA itself focusing concretely on riders, not just safety in a vacuum, there’s a real danger of misdiagnosing the underlying problem.

A “safety first approach,” such as that formerly attributed to Mr. Wiedefeld, might make the problem conceptually easy to grasp and therefore able to be tackled. But the problem is that “safety first” abstracts from the people and services to which it pertains.

Without that grounding in people, or riders, “safety first” replaces a central mission with bureaucracy, when both are necessary to keep a public service running effectively. Boxes are created to tick so that managers might be held accountable. Meetings are convened. But what and who is the safety for?

The last six-plus years of growing nationalism (“America first”) have surely underscored that putting an abstract, complicated concept “first” makes it impossible to take any constructive, practical action on complex problems. Safety versus service is a false dichotomy. They go together or they don’t exist in any meaningful sense.

Without a sense of purpose, and amidst an environment of turmoil, a global pandemic, and heightened scrutiny, it’s easy for processes like safety recertification to drift off the priority list. That’s less likely to happen when leadership, management, and staff grasp the connections between those processes and real world outcomes: that real people need them to fulfill those protocols to live their lives. The focus going forward must not be safety alone, but safe riders and staff.

A voice for riders was the idea of WMATA’s Riders Advisory Council, which by some accounts has been missing its teeth in recent years, but arguably was always external to decision-making processes. Replace it with something that works or put more actual riders (still a minority of board members) on the WMATA Board: right now riders have no seat, either figuratively or literally.

Everyone needs Metro

Major questions loom around the balance of safety and service. Every delayed or canceled trip alters the life of the person taking it, usually in a bad way, and a single-track focus on safety has occluded the bigger picture: Metro exists to facilitate trips.

You might well ask whether the enhanced scrutiny that WMATA is under from the WSMC due to the 7000-series issues is merely revealing failures common to other transit systems right now, which we wouldn’t otherwise have seen. But see them we have, we know they’re not good, and now we choose whether to totally erase the purpose of transit–moving people where they want to go–in service of safety, or to hold these things in balance.

It’s clear that WMATA’s current version of “safety first” created boxes that the agency couldn’t tick. Undoubtedly, individual employees and departments can take satisfaction from the fact that in recent years, actual rider and operator casualties due to technical or personnel failures have been scarce. But safety doesn’t benefit people who can no longer rely on Metro—in other words, riders who aren’t there.

Some take this as evidence that Metro can’t be what we need it to be, that driving’s the only recourse. But that strain of thought misses the point: Every rider who turns to driving is a loss not just for the region’s environment, equity, and efficiency, but for other drivers who won’t welcome more traffic. Carmageddon, or “everyone just stop moving around,” aren’t serious options.

Fixing WMATA will mainly be Randy Clarke’s job. Until he does, it’s everyone’s problem. Bus or train, WMATA must always have a seat for riders.

*Disclosure: GGWash Board of Directors chair Tracy Hadden Loh is also on Metro’s board. Hadden Loh had no role in this post.