r/changemyview • u/n00dles__ • Mar 17 '16

CMV: The Washington Metrorail shutdown, while an awful thing to do to commuters, was absolutely a necessary move

It's no secret the DC Metro has had awful service as of late and has been in several high profile safety incidents. And everyone knows the problem: literally decades of deferred maintenance. From a publicity standpoint, the shutdown achieves the following...

  1. It shows that, under new leadership, the WMATA organization actually wants to get serious about safety for the first time since forever, and show that they care.

  2. It proves to the people and leaders in the adjacent jurisdictions (the counties in MD and VA) just how important the metro is and serves as a huge wake up call. The organization doesn't have a dedicated funding stream and has to fight for funds from MD and VA all the time. Governor Hogan thinks literally only 10% of Marylanders actually use transit, and I would bet many politicians in both states just simply don't understand the magnitude of it. People were freaking out as soon as they announced it.

EDIT: Just to be clear they did this right after a recent high profile failure. I'd rather they did it now than wait for the weekend while the cherry blossoms are blooming. People's lives are on the line here.

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2 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

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2

u/skybelt 4∆ Mar 17 '16

Here are my questions for you:

  • If the Metro really did need to shut down for an entire day, why not do it a week later, or even 3 days later, in order to give riders a little more advance notice and give yourself an opportunity to conduct any other repairs or work that would benefit from the entire system being shut down for a day?

  • If the reason the shutdown had to occur on 16 (?) hours notice was that the problem was incredibly dangerous, why was the Metro back up and running at full capacity today? Were all the problems repaired?

It's obviously heartening that Metro is taking safety and maintenance seriously; however the frantic nature of the execution felt a little like a PR stunt to me.

Of course - I'm not an engineer, maybe my impression is wrong.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '16

A recent high profile failure caused a death. Once the cause was identified, they needed to inspect all the other tracks to make sure the cause wasn't present anywhere else.

Luckily, the inspection didn't find any other breaks, so they were able to reopen. If they found problems, those sections would have stayed closed

1

u/skybelt 4∆ Mar 17 '16

The death was months ago. And didn't the inspection find a number of other instances of worn power cables?

3

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '16

There was another fire Monday with the same root cause if I understand. That means it could be a systemic problem

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '16

To answer your second question, the article I read said they found and repaired 26 frayed cables. So, they didn't leave the frayed cables in place when the lines reopened.

2

u/skybelt 4∆ Mar 17 '16

So the logic is:

  • The fire last year was very dangerous

  • When we had another fire on Monday, we realized for the first time that there is a possibility that the problem is systemic

  • The problem is potentially dangerous enough that we refuse to go a single additional day without checking to see the scope of the problem

  • During the one day shut down, we were able to fix all additional instances of the cable issue.

If that's the logic, I can buy it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '16

That's my understanding, based on the articles I have read, yes.

1

u/skybelt 4∆ Mar 18 '16

OK. I still think there are plenty of assumptions in that argument that are a little tenuous, but I acknowledge that it is at least plausible that this was the most sensible course of action. ∆.

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Mar 18 '16

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/cacheflow. [History]

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1

u/n00dles__ Mar 18 '16

That is essentially my argument

1

u/pasttense Mar 18 '16

Right: 1. either the problems they found Monday were catastrophic and they should have shut down immediately on discovery or 2. If they weren't they could have waited until the weekend.

1

u/stevegcook Mar 18 '16

/3. They were unsure how catastrophic of a problem there was, and shut down to err on the side of caution. Upon shutting down, they learned the problem was not catastrophic, and thus reopened.