Metro Madness

I can't understand Metro. Seriously.

Don't get me wrong, it's an easy commute that ultimately drops me off everyday just a half block from my office.

But I can't understand something. With July being a month in which Metro set a ridership record in terms of number of riders on the rails, combined with the fact that everyone on each of those 19.2 million is spending at least $1.35 to ride, and large numbers of them, at least in the morning and evening rushes.

Now, even though I was a physics major in college, the numbers and math side was never my strong suit. But let's just for a minute assume that the average fare on Metro is $1.50 for each of those 19.2 million people sticking a fare card through the gates each day. That means that in July, the transport system took in $28.8 million. Since we're physicists, let's just round that to $30 million. And that's just the train part, not including the bus service, parking for those train riders in the outer suburbs.

Why all the math first thing on a Monday morning? Well sitting in the subterranean caverns under the Centurions (Union Station Metro stop, Red line), I waited for two trains to roll through because they were too full. The problem? At least one car in each of the first two six-car trains, had it's lights turned off and was out of service.

I see cars out of commission every night on my way home too. In times of record ridership, why can't Metro throw the money back into the cars and service? I can deal with having to wait, with single tracking and trains that aren't evenly spread out. But that's because at the end of the day, I expect that when a train rolls into the station, I'll be able to hop on quickly. When cars are too packed to stand there without spraining your back (as I did this morning piling on and then arching my back to fit in with the seas of humanity), can I ask where my transit money is going?

And does anyone know why this is happening repeatedly? Has Metro said anything? And isn't Metro a non-profit? Don't they have to sink all their money back into the system?