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Rare Rail Fracture Shuts the Red Line

When they call it a “rare” fracture, that means that this particular type of rail fracture is rare. Metro, with its increasingly degraded service, has rail fractures all the time lately.

I don’t ride Metro anymore (thankfully) because there is no station close to where I work (another complaint about the system—the NY subway system will take you almost anywhere in town, DCs only goes to comparatively few locations). But because I ranted about the system so often for so long, I figure some of you might actually care about its progress (or continued failures, as it were).

In all fairness, I have to give Metro credit for something. System policy has always been that the prices don’t change, no matter what happens. The way it works is there’s a base rate for each possible trip (it varies depending on where you enter and where you leave the system). The base rate goes up significantly during morning and evening rush hours. The system could be half shut down for most of a day and the trip could take three or four times longer than usual, and the prices stayed the same.

Well, they finally broke that policy. Yesterday, in the midst of the madness, they charged everybody the lower rates in the afternoon rush instead of bumping up the price. Sure, lots of people deserved a free ride (especially since many didn’t find out there were problems until they’d already entered the faregates and committed themselves to paying), but this small token of repayment for their piss-poor service counts for something.

I count the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (‘Metro’) along with the United States Postal Service and Amtrak as examples of what happens when you let the government run psuedo-independent corporations—nothing good.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.