Transportation
The Chart That Explains Why D.C.'s Metro System Has No Leader
Who would want this gig?
On Thursday, the board of the Washington, D.C., area’s public transit agency, WMATA, will meet to confront its ongoing revenue crisis. As The Washington Post detailed this week, the situation has gotten so bad that the often-defensive agency has been forced to admit something it never has before: that increasingly unreliable rail service is at least in part to blame for annual ridership declines over the past five years.
Here’s the key chart from a related report. Note that the operating subsidies referred to here are a combination of federal dollars along with contributions from the local jurisdictions served by the agency—D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.