It's the Trains, Stupid

Via @aretting: Metro car on fire at the McPherson Square station. Plenty of smoke in here. instagr.am/p/PawiM0P0HW/

From Ron:

I was bored at work, and looked at the latest Vital signs report. I stumbled on what I think is really telling about what's really going on at Metro. I wonder if the board members will ask about this at the upcoming meeting. I kid. I know they won't.

In the report, the pretty pages highlight "better maintenance practices," but if you look closer at all the charts, it's ugly, really ugly.

Metro has a goal of 60,000 miles between breakdowns (delays) for each rail car.

According to the report, here are the average number of miles each series of car in Metro's fleet goes before they break down and cause delays:

1000s (26 percent of fleet): 40,671 miles
2/3000s (32 percent of fleet): 33,559 miles
4000s (9 percent of fleet): 26,581 miles
5000s (17 percent of fleet): 47,640 miles
6000 (16 percent of fleet): 67,421 miles

The fleet average is 40,275 miles!

They're missing their goal by almost 20,000 miles per car in the fleet, and only one series of car meets the goal. The rest are way off.

I would also imagine that since the trains contain different series of cars now (dumb), the bad cars' effects are even more widespread when whole trains are taken out of service because one car has a problem.

I'm starting to think Metro should lay off the track work for a while. It's the trains, stupid.