Lies or Incompetence?

Photo via @FixWMATA

On Wednesday night, there were some unexplained Red Line delays. Metro, after catching some heat on Twitter, finally coughed up the above tweet as an explanation.

Turns out it was only partially true.

According to this article in the Examiner:

A computer outage delayed some riders on the Red Line Wednesday night, leaving two trains stuck for more than 20 minutes.

I got lots of emails from people who said the delays were up to an hour. Several more sent pics of trains so packed you'd think it was rush hour.

"Train movement" was definitely affected, and people screamed "Metro lied!"

There could be two explanations for tweet.

One is that ^BA flat out lied.

The other is that the "social media trailblazers" were desperately fumbling to get some information out there, and they were lied to by another department, probably in CYA mode, that trains were not delayed.

Sadly, both seem plausible.

Throughout my three-plus years of blogging about Metro, I oscillate between the notion that Metro is run by evil bastards, and/or it's run by stunningly incompetent boobs.

Either way, we're screwed, and Metro's credibility sinks even lower, and the system becomes nearly unusable on the weekends and now, increasingly, on weeknights.

What do you think?