If Something Is Shut Down For Six Months, Is It Really Needed? -- March 30, 2016

Updates

April 4, 2016: The New York Times is reporting that the nation's capital's subway, only 40 years old, is creaky and at a mid-life crisis --

The Federal Transit Administration has issued a blistering indictment of the system, warning in a June report of “serious safety lapses.”

That month, the National Transportation Safety Board convened hearings revealing that employees of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — which runs Metro, as well as a regional bus service — often felt afraid to report safety concerns.

Commuters are frustrated and are abandoning the subway. Weekday ridership declined 6.1 percent in the last half of 2015, Metro officials say, compared with the same period the previous year. Metro’s new general manager, Paul J. Wiedefeld, who shut down service last month for a daylong emergency inspection after a tunnel fire similar to one that killed a passenger in January 2015, concedes that the public is losing faith.

I was unaware of that: more folks have been killed in Washington, DC, metro (subway) fires in recent history than have been killed in the US from CBR explosions/fire during the nine (9) years of the Bakken boom/bust.

I assume Hillary will hear this -- about the lack of safety on light rail, connect the dots with CBR, and propose to ban fracking. She proposed banning fracking as a solution to lead-contamination problem that Flint, MI, has. I can't make this stuff up.

Original Post

 

Uber could get huge Lyft in DC.

The Washington Post is reporting that the city's metro authorities are considering shutting down the entire system for six months for system-wide maintenance.

Metro’s top officials warned Wednesday that the transit system is in such need of repair that they might shut down entire rail lines for as long as six months for maintenance, potentially snarling thousands of daily commutes and worsening congestion in the already traffic-clogged region.

[Authorities] put rail riders on notice about possible extended closures at a high-level conference of local leaders.

The discussion also revealed strong resistance to what Evans said was a “dire” need for more than $1 billion a year in additional funding for Metro.

Yes, six months, not six weeks.

Funny how things work out. The metro authorities couldn't even think of doing this if Uber and Lyft didn't exist.