But even some transit advocates are questioning whether taxpayers can trust Metro with additional dollars. Gus Bauman, a former Montgomery County planner, in January voted in favor of automatic funding as part of a regional task force. However, Bauman said, "there's no way [White and his managers] can go to the public with some sort of tax proposal to save Metro without fixing this problem of management accountability."
White describes Metro's daily challenge this way: "One thousand, five hundred and thirty-eight times a day we run a train that has to make a total of 35,419 stops, and almost a million times a day, doors have to open and shut properly. That's a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong."
As ridership has exploded, so has the number of delays caused by passengers. These incidents -- riders who stick briefcases between doors to keep them open, for example -- account for one of every five delays.
But the biggest cause of delays, by far, is mechanical problems with the rail cars. And Metro's efforts to improve the record, by overhauling old cars and buying new ones, aren't working very well.
'Possessed' Cars
On a recent morning at the Greenbelt rail yard, CAF car No. 5133 was perched high on a lift. It had broken down twice in a week, this time because it wouldn't accelerate properly. Bob Popp, a Metro electrician, climbed a ladder into the car, tilted open one of the seats and hooked up a laptop to the diagnostic equipment that lay beneath.
"It's a CAF wiring problem," Popp told a manager after a few clicks of the keyboard.
Metro's $383 million program to buy nearly 200 rail cars from CAF Inc., a firm in Spain, has been marred by a series of highly visible problems as well as some the agency has yet to make public, including a possible design flaw that may be behind a string of derailments, records show.
"Those cars have been a headache from Day One," said Jackie Rhodes Jeter, a spokeswoman for Local 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Metro's largest employee union, representing about 8,000 bus drivers, train operators, mechanics and other workers.
The new CAF cars suffer major mechanical problems almost as often as Metro's oldest rail cars, which were built in the 1970s. In fact, the CAF cars traveled an average of only 319 miles farther -- or 7 percent -- before needing major repairs, an analysis of 12 months of Metro statistics shows. Problems with CAF cars caused passengers to be delayed once every 52,420 miles on average -- far short of the 72,000-mile goal Metro set when it bought the cars.
Those numbers include dramatic improvements the cars showed in March and April, the latest months for which Metro provided statistics. Some of that improvement is due to stopgap measures to reduce delays and problems, said Steven A. Feil, who took over Metro's rail operations last summer. Instead of pulling problem trains out of service for repairs, the agency is running them unless they present a safety hazard, he said. Metro is trying to improve train performance by sending in workers to hand-scrub faulty electronic relays.
Feil acknowledged that those kinds of "quick fixes" cannot be sustained over time. He also has begun an aggressive effort to shore up the rail bed. Track problems cause nearly one in five passenger delays.
Meanwhile, four CAF trains derailed in less than 18 months. In each case, the trains derailed in places where the track was worn. None was carrying passengers, and all were operating at a low speed while rounding a sharp bend, typically found in rail yards and not on the main railroad. For those reasons, Metro officials have decided against pulling them from service.
