Cross-overs. Guarded 8s. Gauge rods. It’s hard for most Metro riders to follow all the talk about track inspection practices, the blistering number of Federal Transit Administration recommendations, and regular single-tracking over one problem or another.

While Metro has many problems with its track inspections, the real problem is deeper. Metro lacks a culture of not just safety, but of getting jobs done properly. The organization hides information from one level to another instead of working together to root out and fix problems.

Photo by Ben Schumin on Flickr.

Frederick Kunkle effectively summarizes the problems with Metro’s organizational culture through one recent employment action.

Seyoum Haile, a senior mechanic, had falsified preventive maintenance inspection reports on [a] fan, court documents say. When confronted with discrepancies in those inspection reports during the post-accident investigation, Haile also lied, Metro’s management says. …

[But] Haile, who had been employed with the agency for 13 years, had only been following routine procedure in a workplace where management fostered incompetence and allowed people to make stuff up as they went along. … Haile’s supervisor, Nicholas Perry, acknowledged in arbitration testimony that he gave out pre-signed inspection reports to his crew. The forms said “reviewed by a supervisor,” even if that were not the case, a practice Perry testified that he has since discontinued. …

When mechanics wanted to run a test remotely, they had to contact Metro’s Rail Operations Control Center (ROCC). The ROCC staff sometimes put the mechanics on hold, failed to call back, or had trouble locating the correct switch for the fans in question. On one of the last inspections Haile and a co-worker conducted on the fan before the fatal Yellow Line incident, he was heard in the background on an audio recording respectfully trying to help the ROCC official locate the right switch. But the ROCC operator couldn’t find it and hung up. He and his coworker went to work on another fan but did not return to the original one.

The ROCC hung up? Are you kidding me? And Perry handed out pre-signed reports and never checked them? Come on.

I worked at an organization (Google) known for its culture, around innovation, around encouraging engineers to pursue crazy ideas with 20% of their time, around launching products in “beta” (at least at that time) to see what happens. Culture didn’t come automatically to it or any other Silicon Valley company. They worked hard to communicate and reinforce themes and consider it strongly in hiring.

Metro’s culture, clearly, is lacking. Many employees, whether front-line or managers, don’t take responsibilities seriously. If employees falsify reports, and their managers encourage them to, and other departments hang up on them without solving a problem, something is very wrong not just with a few people or a department, but a culture.

Paul Wiedefeld is trying to change this

Thursday, the WMATA Board grilled agency managers on this. David Strickland, one of the new federal board members and a former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said, “There has to be a crosscurrent of responsibility among every employee at WMATA, and quite frankly, it’s not there. It’s not just individual accountability and punishing wrongdoing. We need to have a self-policing culture.”

WMATA General Manager/CEO Paul Wiedefeld agreed. He said, “We have years of disconnect between management and employees. I want to reinforce we’re all together in this. We respect each other; we’re not going to have retaliation.” (Many front-line employees have said they didn’t speak up for fear of retaliation from their immediate supervisors, just one of many culture problems that have come to light.)

“I think it’s a major reset of how we approach our employees, to hold everyone accountable,” Wiedefeld went on. “The thousands of employees I’ve talked to, they want that, they want to get there.”

We need Metro to succeed

It’s very hard to turn around large organizational culture. It’s possible, and people have done it, but companies in this situation are more apt to decline and go out of business than turn around.

That’s not an option for Metro. It isn’t something we can abandon (earlier, silly Kunkle columns notwithstanding). With all its problems, it’s still the nation’s second-best subway system.

It’s made the Washington region appealing to the many people who want to live in walkable areas with transit to jobs. It’s fed residential and job growth in central DC and many mini-downtowns in Maryland and Virginia. And it’s made it possible for downtown DC to thrive without needing to cover all of this land in five-story parking garages:

Image from WMATA.

For those of us who think Metro is one of the best things ever to come to this region, it’s heartbreaking to see these problems run so deep. They have to get fixed. They just have to. And all of us need to do whatever we can to help that happen.

There may not be much we can do. The board has hired someone, Paul Wiedefeld, to turn around the organization’s culture. So far, people in the know believe he can. It’s a tough job.

It will be harder if Metro also has no money

One thing we can do is ensure Metro isn’t under-resourced. The more time Wiedefeld is spending out convincing local, state, and federal officials to give him the funds he needs to actually make repairs, the less time he can be fixing the management structure.

It’s hard to argue that Metro needs money when so many people seem to be drawing salaries and not doing a good job, but an organization that’s spending all its effort cutting expenses to the bone isn’t an organization that can devote real management attention to reform. It’s not a purely zero-sum game and he can and should do both, but some things really require the top manager, and there are only so many hours in a day.

Until they can, Metro is going to keep having layers upon layers of problems, just waiting to pop to the surface when the right conditions arise. Only a culture of working together to fix problems, not cover them up, will get Metro back to the pride of the region. “Culture changes can be generational, and we don’t really have generational time to see that our culture changes,” said Arlington’s Christian Dorsey at the meeting.

I hope the union and management can truly work together to solve this. It’s clear that some front-line employees should be fired, but also clear that many middle managers need to be. This won’t get fixed by scapegoating anyone or union busting, but it also requires a shared commitment to change the culture, including removing the most toxic members.

Metro’s still got a tough path ahead. Let’s all root for it to succeed.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.