WASHINGTON — Cuts to Metro late-night and weekend hours appear to have moved closer to reality Thursday as a number of Metro board members signaled support for changes, however reluctantly.
After other board members praised Metro staff’s explanation of what work they plan to do with added closings, a seemingly dejected D.C. Council member and Metro Board Chair Jack Evans asked whether there was some way to save late-night service on weekends at the expense of hours elsewhere. The Metro board is expected to vote next month on one of four options for reductions, or some type of combination.
Metro Assistant General Manager Andy Off said that in the past, Metro did no scheduled work on weekends outside of single-tracking or shutdown zones, since long setup and breakdown times meant only one hour of actual work could realistically be hoped for between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.
“So we did not work on Friday and Saturday nights,” Off said. “Our crews were scheduled Sunday through Thursday night, and the only work we did on Fridays and Saturday nights was primarily emergency response-type work.”
Since June, Metro has done some additional weekend work following General Manager Paul Wiedefeld’s decision to close the system at midnight every day of the week. Wiedefeld said his authority for that temporary change will expire at the end of May.
On regular weeknights, Metro crews are expected to get about two hours of work done in areas where work zones do not set up until after the system is closed. The rest of the time is not used because trains are moving across the system, or crews are setting up or breaking down their work zones.
“We do acknowledge that there are efficiencies to be gained in those two shoulders,” Off said. “However, the amount of efficiency to be gained there is not overly significant, and it certainly wouldn’t be timely enough to address these pressing issues.”
In some cases, workers have just stood around, not doing any work, due to problems with setting up work zones or communication with the troubled Rail Operations Control Center.
Chief Operating Officer Joe Leader said technological or other changes to allow more efficiency could take years, due to a reluctance to change worker protection rules.
Off said it is crucial that the Metro board approves cuts to hours that are included in the budget proposal for the year beginning July 1.
“These proposals would impact about half a percent of our ridership, so what we get out of those negative impacts is we’re able to double the amount of productive work we can get every week from 10 to 20 hours,” Off said.
The different proposals lead to different amounts of work time.
Federal Railroad Administration Safety Leader and Metro Board Member Robert Lauby questioned why Metro could not begin to set up work zones as trains run less frequently in the evenings in order to get more work done without cutting back on hours, or at least without cutting back so significantly.
“It seems to me that since we have a two-track system here, that expanded work zones could be established in the evenings on one track while maintaining a level of service on the other, especially if this is in the evenings when we have 20-minute headways, we don’t have as many trains out there, don’t have as many passengers, don’t have as much congestion,” Lauby said.
But Leader said that while some of the work can be done, single-tracking would be in different spots each evening, which he believes would be confusing for riders.
“If you go to a preventive maintenance cycle, that single-track[ing] is moving every day. So, for just communication to the customers and disruption to the customers, moving it constantly will be a problem,” Leader said.
He also said that it is better for Metro to have a single, consistent solution rather than shutting down stretches of tracks only when needed for power testing, which requires both tracks be shut down. The power systems for the two tracks in much of the system are linked.
Off said that it could take a full two-year pass of this maintenance effort across the entire system before Metro could really make a good judgment on its effectiveness going forward and whether hours could be added back. Alternately, Metro might need two years of surges, Off said.
“Merely fundamental programs that we have not carried out to any reasonable standard in the past, they need to be done, and if we don’t do them, we would foresee ourselves falling back into a SafeTrack or surge-type logic,” Off said.
“At some point we need to get away from fixing stuff that is already broken, and get more into a cycle where we’re maintaining what we have and not allowing it to break, thus not resulting in a passenger delay,” he added.
The 24/7 track work schedule focuses not on this maintenance, but instead the even more basic work of replacing decades-old crossties and selected related parts of the tracks.
“Probably about 90 percent of the work we do every night is all corrective maintenance: We’re addressing failures that have already happened in the system,” Off said.
On Wednesday, at least six speed restrictions were added across the rail system that crews worked on overnight.
Arlington County and Metro Board Member Christian Dorsey asked what Metro has been doing for the last decade or more.
“For however many number of years, we have been abrogating our responsibility to perform fundamental preventive maintenance according to industry standards. It’s quite disappointing,” Dorsey said.
Fairfax County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Cathy Hudgins said the way to change that is to shut down the system for more hours, since when past Metro leaders have asked for additional track time they have been told no.
