TheAgitator.com
Greedy Executives Double Pay, Cut Customer Service, Will Likely Ask for a Bailout
Friday, January 2nd, 2009No, it’s not the latest Wall Street failure. It’s D.C.’s Metro public transportation system. The D.C. Examiner reports that the system is anticipating major reductions in service, a hiring freeze, and possibly layoffs. Yet salaries at all levels of Metro have increased at several times the rate of inflation.
Metro’s Approved Fiscal 2009 Annual Budget includes large pay hikes for salaried management employees, as well as hourly workers such as bus drivers, rail operators and maintenance workers. But the numbers take on added significance when compared to previous years.
For example, in the section entitled “Multi-Year Operating Cost Comparison,” we see that salaries for Metro managers in the Bus Services section have more than doubled since 2006. Next year, Metro’s top bus executives expect to be paid twice what they made just three years ago, and this when almost every economic indicator is steadily heading south.
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In 2007, an exclusive Examiner series highlighted the excessive overtime payments that pushed more than a hundred bus and rail operators into six-figure territory – almost double the median income of the Washington, D.C. area.
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Meanwhile, Metro’s “customers” have to contend with broken escalators, defective subway cars, increasing crime and decreasing system reliability even as they continue to pay the higher fares and parking fees imposed on them last year when most Metro employees were getting yet another raise.
Just unreal.
I know the libertarian response to this is that a privatized public transportationsystem is the answer. But I wonder how effective that would truly be considering that you could really only have one public transportation system (you couldn’t have 2 different sets of subway tunnels) or at best little sections run by different people each having a sort of mini-monopoly. And of course the contracts would have to be awarded by the government.
So, while the motivation of turning profit would almost certainly improve things like customer service and maintenance, would that cancel out the increase in corruption and the continued overall non-responsiveness to public demands?
I guess my real question is: Can we go back and make public transportation completely government free?
Slightly off topic, but I wish Metro would just get rid of the escalators, except for those few stations with very long staricases. (I’m thinking Roslynn and a couple other areas.) Hundreds of escalators running each day for 14-20 hours, that electricity requirement must be enormous. Not to mention the maintenance and repair costs. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t save millions of dollars. I know I’m in the minority in wishing that, people do love their creature comforts.
A libertarian solution may mean that a subway cannot be accomodated. Please remember that a subway is the solution that the state came up with and they have access to unlimited funds and an ability to take property.
Libertarian/free market/private solutions do not guarantee that every service now provided by the US Gov will be replicated.
Yeah, but with the escalators not running, people would have to *GASP* use the stairs! But with stairs come those nasty things called “slip and fall” incidents. I imagine that any savings on the electricity and maintenance & repair side would be quickly made up with increases in liability insurance.
Sorry…I’ve been an insurance agent for almost a decade. I think in terms of liability and indemnity.
As we’ve seen, government, as well as private industry will continually serve itself, leading to its eventual destruction. One of the only ways privatizing the transportation would work is if there was a civilian oversight committee. One who would change each year, composed of ORDINARY citizens. Just a thought.
I think there exists the technology to make sensor-based escalators so they don’t run when no one is there. As for slip and falls, I rode the “T” (boston’s subway) on NYE and I was a little inebriated (by which I mean insanely drunk) and I slipped and fell on the esclator, and now my thigh looks like it has grill marks in it.
I’ll be filing a lawsuit on Monday :)
You can still “privatize” quasi-governmental industries where there is no real competition by bidding out an operations and maintenance contract. The successful bidder would do it for $X per year plus a percentage of revenues. You could build in performance measurements (percentage of downtime or delays, number of escalators out of service, even customer satisfaction surveys) and ding the company if it didn’t meet them. When the company has to manage with both profit and financial punishment for poor performance as considerations, it will almost surely increase the efficiency and quality of the system.
The difficulty with an arrangement like that is that it is spun by labor officials and newspapers as a ploy to remove high-paying union jobs that the current employees feel they have an absolute right to. As a result, private operators often are forced by governments or by the bid contract to promise all employees jobs at their current pay rate. That immediately cripples the new operator’s ability to make necessary changes and can doom a partnership from the start.
The DC Metro system was one of the few things I actually liked about living in the DC area back in the 90′s. It’s sad to hear it is apparently going the way of subways in other major cities.
This is going to end well when the 4+ million show up on January 20th.
I’ve got a few friends up in that area. They are not planning on leaving the house around that time.
That got me thinking…Radley are you going to document the madness for your loyal readers?
Don’t lets forget the constant police harassment for such heinous crimes as, eating french fries and standing on yellow lines. It’s been almost nine years since I lived there but I definitely have some great stories that involve being shoved with a nightstick by a storm trooper in riot gear just for being on the Metro on a crowded day. Perhaps the overpriced government excuse for first, second, and fourth amendment violations isn’t the golden ticket we imagine it being.
Government is the only organization that prospers from failure.
Its prosperity, and need for failure, is entirely due to its foundation of violence.
Three cheers for Boyd’s comment #3.
Unionized labor is certainly contributing to the problem. Furthermore the DC metro like other public transportation is tax payer subsidized. I find it hard to believe a metro system would exist anywhere without public funding. Even with these subsidies DC metro claims to be operating at a loss. The great promise of metro is efficiency, but the costs don’t seem to represent a more efficient solution to driving. At $3-4 fare each way I don’t find it to be a cheaper option than driving, especially when paying to park at the Metro station. There are other arguments to be made for taking Metro, but most of them point back to shortages created by government. From HOV to parking restrictions, to penalties for drinking and driving, most incentives to take Metro are created artificially.
Coming from New York, the metro is actually pretty nice, even though there are large parts of the city not covered and it shuts off at midnight. I do wish that they would just make it a flat fee though, instead of forcing people to swipe when they got on and when they get off.
To those who say that public transport has to be provided by the state, check out the history of the New York subway system. Several privately-held companies and later joint ventures with the city ran the subway system from its origin in 1870 until 1940, when the city took over the remaining private service providers.
It’s all too easy to assume that the way things are today is the only way they can be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway