
‘Empty Ride’
courtesy of ‘Samer Farha’
“There is no more valuable currency to a transit system than the trust of its ridership. The accident at Fort Totten severely shook the faith of Washington area riders and the millions of tourists who visit this city. WMATA can win back that trust by taking our safety recommendations to heart, and, at its core, fundamentally changing its culture. This effort has begun, but there is still a long ride ahead.” — National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman, July 27, 2010
Trust. You can’t buy it. You have to earn it. Without it, you’re going to lose customers, no matter your business. When you get into your car, you trust the manufacturer to have tested all the design elements as well as the car you are in. You trust your mechanic to have kept the car in good working order. You trust yourself behind the wheel to keep you safe. The trust you have in each of these things comes from years of observation (by you, or by others you trust).
When your car fails in a way that should have been detected and was preventable, you lose some trust. Depending on the severity of the problem, you might decide to never buy a car from a certain manufacturer or you might no longer do business with your mechanic. And if it turns out that are unwilling to fix the problems or to get a reliable car or to drive in a safe manner, you wouldn’t expect people to continue to trust you to drive them around, time and again.
But that’s exactly what is going on with Metro. It took years of neglect, years of not caring about safety, for the system to get into a state where a deadly accident was all but inevitable. The NTSB report found that, in the words of chairman Deborah Hersman, “the layers of safety deficiencies uncovered during the course of this investigation are troubling and reveal a systemic breakdown of safety management at all levels.”
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