Metro, One Year Later

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Washington, DC Metro crash. I write this as my train pulls into the Fort Totten station. We just passed the place where two trains collided last year.

I was home safe and on maternity leave when the trains filled with commuters smashed into one another, but it was the line I take to work, and I couldn’t help but feel particularly fortunate to be home last year at this time. Nine people died, 76 were injured. There are plenty of people who are too scared to take the train even now.

There is something eerie in the air today. The man next to me is carrying a paper with a year-old image of one train derailed under the frame of another. It’s rare to see someone holding the image of a tragedy in the same place where that tragedy occurred—completely by happenstance. It’s not a memorial, just a newspaper.

As we pull into each stop, the conductor’s voice is strong and clear. I wonder if she was nervous this morning, thinking that disaster’s anniversary might breed calamity. Personally, I battle an impulse toward superstition, knocking on wood for most anything, cutting a long circle around open ladders. Umbrellas only get opened outdoors. I wonder if the conductor has any special protective measure sitting in the car with her. I would guess if she did, she carries it every day.

In the time since the accident, a number of Metro employees have died working on the lines. It’s the sort of news that gets tagged on at the end of an evening news segment, shortly before breaking for commercial. There aren’t annual media blitzes organized to commemorate their untimely deaths.

So many things about Washington are wonderful, but much of it is broken. The high schools have only a 48.8% graduation rate. The concentration of HIV/AIDS in the District is equivalent to that in Uganda. And our train system has among the worst safety records in the country—despite the fact that a year ago a massive accident cast tremendous scrutiny upon those responsible for running Metro.

This is a city where power strides through poverty. Washington itself holds one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, but shares borders with some of the wealthiest counties in the nation. The thing I’ve always loved about the Metro is that its riders include Hill staffers, work-a-day stiffs, students and homeless folks looking for a little air conditioning. It’s not quite as well segmented into have and have not as the rest of the city.

My cynicism tells me that if nothing else, Metro’s mixed demographics might save it from complete dysfunction. It’s not quite like the rest of the District’s issues that can so easily be put off as other people’s problems. If nothing else, the Federal Transit Administration is pushing for increased federal oversight if systems like Metro don’t get their acts together.