Image by David Reece.

Some people loved him, including the WMATA Board; others hated him, including some bloggers. Was John Catoe a good manager or a bad one?

Last night, at the blogger roundtable, I realized the answer: it depended on what you were looking for in a General Manager. As with anyone, Mr. Catoe had his strengths and his weaknesses.

At that event, Catoe impressed some of his fiercest critics with his candor and grasp of the problems facing Metro’s service, equipment and budget, However, when the discussion turned to customer service, he sounded out of touch.

Metro needed to evolve from a primarily construction-oriented organization to a service-oriented one. For 30 years, Metro was an agency that built rail lines. Its structure was optimized to that mission. Once the original Adopted Regional System, the extension to Largo, and the New York Avenue station opened, Metro no longer needed to grow, it needed to keep everything working as system aged. It needed to be more efficient.

Catoe made huge strides for Los Angeles when he headed their transit bus system. Most notably, he significantly improved bus service by splitting service into local and express buses. He started a similar effort here with the 79 MetroExtra and later Metrobus Express routes like the S9, and he pushed for a more ambitious program of priority bus corridors. Note: Richard Layman points out that some of the bus changes were already planned when Catoe arrived.

Had Metro’s good times kept on rolling, these and other initiatives would have improved service for all. Catoe also pulled off a spectacular success for Metro’s busiest day ever, the Inauguration last January. There’s surely a lot more Catoe did inside the agency that we never saw, but which underlay the Board’s decision last year to extend his contract.

After the crash, however, the public lost confidence in Metro, and Metro needed a leader who could rebuild that confidence. Riders needed to hear that someone heard and understood their complaints, and moreover, was putting plans in place to address them.

The agency needed to continue its evolution from a service-oriented one to a customer-oriented one. Trains will suddenly go out of service regardless of how good a leader heads Metro; only large piles of money will fix that problem, money Metro doesn’t have right now. The General Manager can’t magically stop buses from getting stuck at lights or in traffic and making riders wait in the cold.

But what Metro could have done better was to make riders feel listened to. Make sure customer service staff respond to complaints quickly, and that every employee feels a responsibility to contribute to customer service. Customer service means not only responding to individual complaints, but helping customers understand how the organization is addressing them in the long run. If good people make the system more efficient on the inside but underfunding makes it worse at the same time, all riders see is nothing changing.

At the roundtable, Catoe didn’t know that many riders go weeks without hearing responses to complaints, and generally dismissed the complaints as stemming from unreasonable expectations. Maybe Washingtonians do whine a lot about their transit, and would feel differently if they lived in Atlanta for a while, but riders really were angry, and at the same time Metro was trying to fix the service, they could be helping riders understand the situation. Just like talking to the bloggers last night reassured them, so could a similar level of attention have assuaged the public’s fears and frustrations.

There were also clear ways that Metro was indeed falling short. That’s to some extent inevitable; any large organization has those. Riders wanted a leader to identify the flaws, admit to the flaws, and then explain how he’s going to correct the flaws.

What about the crash itself? Sooner or later, with deteriorating equipment, something was bound to happen. Former GM Richard White warned about it, and Catoe was warning about it. Metro remained far safer than driving. The head of the Maryland State Highway Administration doesn’t resign when a pedestrian dies on the roads, even if it’s pretty clear that bad road design was a factor.

Yes, there were safety lapses at Metro. Those need to stop. But there are probably safety lapses on highway construction projects too, and in buildings, and everywhere. It’s easy to find problems in hindsight. Now that we’ve found them, Metro must fix them, and with good safety monitoring, they will. Catoe wasn’t an obstacle to this; he didn’t even know that Metro had denied Tri-State Oversight access to the tracks.

If Catoe made a mistake there, it’s that he let his subordinates make decisions like that; avoiding micromanaging people is usually a good quality in a manager. In his farewell letter to his employees, Catoe wrote,

All of us know that different situations require different leadership styles. My skill — and the reason for my past success — has been leading through empowerment. Now, I feel that Metro is in a period in which a much more directive leadership style is needed.

“More directive” might be needed; more open is definitely needed. When looking for its next leader, the WMATA Board should look for someone who can communicate with riders as well as managing the service itself. An ideal General Manager would continue doing all the good things John Catoe did, but also push the organization to share its good work “under the hood.”

Finding someone to fit the bill might be tough; as Mike Silverstein commented, “Those who have been calling for his resignation should now remember the old adage of being careful what you wish for. … There is no guarantee Mr Catoe’s replacement will be any better, or will do a better job.”

If we’re lucky, the Board (hopefully with some input from riders) will find a new General Manager whose strengths best match Metro’s needs right now. And once Metro surmounts its current funding and confidence crises, hopefully the new General Manager will be as capable of improving service as Catoe was in Los Angeles. Maybe when the time comes, he can come back and help out.

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.