Metro Crash
Fort Totten Station (CC photo by katmere)
Obviously, it’s a bit ugly to talk politics in the wake of a tragedy, but since I cover mass transit issues here regularly I think it’s worth making a few points about yesterday’s terrible Metro crash here in DC:
— Fatal train accidents are national news stories precisely because they’re so rare. Deadly car crashes are a dog-bites-man story. Obviously, what happened was unacceptable but the fact remains that commuting by rail is very safe.
— Clearly, it’s important to do your upkeep work in a serious way. Metro is a relatively new heavy rail system, and a lot of its infrastructure has been reaching the end of its lifespan in the early 21st century, causing a lot of problems because maintaining the stuff has been neglected. One fears this kind of short-sightedness may have played a role here.
— Metro is strikingly lacking in any kind of redundant capabilities. The lack of extra tracks (for express train, e.g.) or additional lines through downtown creates a situation where a serious problem at one point can paralyze transportation throughout the city.
Beyond that, it would just be really nice to know what happened here. Metro has a number of systems in place that are supposed to stop this from happening.
34 Responses to “Metro Crash”
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June 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 am
I don’t think it’s ugly at all. i posted something on Facebook last night as soon as i saw the report saying that it would be good if this could wake national politicians up to transit infrastructure needs. It’s a critical point.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 am
We need to double funding (at LEAST) for public transportation in the next Authorization. That’s $123 billion+, this year.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
Re:point 1, there’s also the fact that train crashes like this look epic. Car crashes usually result in a smashed front, crumpled exterior, but one train on top of another? By the very difference in size and structure, train accidents carry a much more powerful aesthetic shock.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
It seems there is something systematically wrong at Metro. This is the third serious crash since 1996. I wish someone could explain to me why New York’s system — far larger, busier, and OLDER has had so many fewer incidents.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am
The thing that is so disturbing about a train or plane crash is the feeling of helplessness–”it could have been me just sitting there reading the paper and there’s nothing I could have done about it.” Whereas with car crashes everyone thinks that it wouldn’t have happened to them because everyone thinks they are a good driver. People like to feel in control of situations–lack of control breeds fear.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am
Agreed with #4. They perform “routine maintenance” on the red line almost every weekend, but the system continues to deteriorate. WMATA has a lot of ’splaining to do. I would not be the least bit surprised if this investigation shows that large sums of money have been disappearing into someone’s pockets and little actual maintenance work has been done.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 am
@Rick
True, New York may be doing something better, but perspective, please. 3 accidents in 13 years? You get into a car every day without thinking twice, but the death rate has to be an order of magnitude higher at least.
The relative safety of public transportation doesn’t get enough publicity. American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines spend a huge amount of time dealing with motor vehicle safety; cars are one of the leading causes of death for adolescents, so doctors discuss it along with nutrition, STDs, drugs, and other preventative health measures.
Ezra Klein has a post on food that just went up; he makes an important distinction in spending for health vs. health care. Transportation is analagous: I wonder how many lives we could save if we moved the driving age up to 20 and gave everyone in that age group bus/metro passes (assuming, of course, that the high rate of accidents in adolescents is due to their immaturity rather than just inexperience). I think it might be of greater value than paying for more coronary stents.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:10 am
Judging from events around the nation, I’m guessing cell phone or texting.
Obviously the train driver had no idea there was a stopped train on the track ahead of him. The moving train was going almost full speed- the trains are designed to crumple and withstand enormous impacts to prevent the kind of over-riding seen in the photos.
The train driver ran past signals showing stop or slow. The system is designed so that if it fails, the aspect displayed to the driver means stop or slow. The driver must stop in the absence of a signal telling him to come ahead.
As for why NYC has fewer incidents- “culture of safety”.
Ironically, we’ve spent decades ‘fighting drugs’ and the cell phone has made the highways and railroads worse than they’ve ever been.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
I was trying to get from Dupont Circle to Union Station (red line, of course) yesterday at about 5:20 and experienced the beginning of the delays that hit the Metro system in the wake of the accident. This was before I had any idea of the seriousness of the situation that was causing the problem. The “time to next train” boards became very frantic and inconsistent, but a train arrived and slowly made its way to Union Station, where I detrained onto a very full platform of people trying to get home to NE Washington and Maryland. I want to compliment the operator of the train I was riding on, who repeatedly and emphatically informed passengers and those on the platforms of the various stations between Dupont and Union Station that he was only going as far as New York Avenue station and that the system was in an extraordinary situation.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:28 am
I wish someone could explain to me why New York’s system — far larger, busier, and OLDER has had so many fewer incidents. – Rick
Someone alluded to this above, but the reason is that if there are any issues with signals or tracks (which could possibly result in two trains on the same track going at different velocities such that they might collide), the slow trains down, stop them where they are, etc.
It makes for fewer spectacular crashes but for a lot of delays!
What doesn’t make sense to me is why MTAs have to pay for signals/track maintainance in the first place. The government should pay directly for signals/tracks like they do for signals/roads.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:30 am
Aside: a dog-bites-man story would be a common story unlikely to go reported due to its banality. I believe your point is that this sort of rail crash is rare and is thus an example of a man-bites-dog story.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:30 am
@bdbd
The redline was already experiencing heavy delays in both directions before the collision due to a train with “mechanical difficulty” between Tenleytown and Friendship Heights. I had to wait 10 min for a train from Dupont at 5:00. I decided to transfer at Chinatown instead of Totten yesterday and saw on my twitter feed that there had been a collision waaaaaay before wmata made any announcements.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:30 am
Car crashes usually result in a smashed front, crumpled exterior, but one train on top of another?
The “telescoping” that occurred in this crash looks horrendous, and can be a death sentence for people unlucky enough to be in the telescoped area, but actually might not be an entirely bad thing. It helped reduce the deceleration experienced by people elsewhere in the train in a manner similr to an automobile’s crumple zones. Train riders obviously don’t wear seat belts, and the interiors of train cars have all sorts of hard objects, so a very sudden deceleration can be disastrous.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Carlos-
I totally get that public transit is very safe — I use public transit almost every day. But based upon comparisons to other systems (like New York — and don’t get me started on comparing to true world class systems like Hong Kong) 3 serious incidents (with casualties) in 13 years is simply unacceptable. We are not going to be able to get more people to use public transit, nor muster political support for improvements if we don’t have a credible plan for attacking the perception (which may in fact be founded) that this system is not as safe as it should be. If we want to encourage improvements (and usage) of public transportation it’s critically important that we understand why Washington’s performance has been so poor relative to its peers and put in place a proper plan to fix it.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 am
To back up Matt’s point today, over 37,000 people died last year from automotive accidents last year. As tragic as this is, and how close to home it is, it’s still safer than driving into town.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 am
Rick: Huh? Yglesias said that car crashes are dog-bites-man, which they are.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:41 am
Is there a second “Rick” writing here — I did not write the following:
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:45 am
Matt, as usual, ignores the most obvious reason why such an accident would happen in that location rather than others, and that is the percentage of African-Americans as both passengers and drivers.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:11 am
Welcome Steve Sailer everybody! Nothing like a little racist hyperbole in the morning with your Joe.
While I know what he is fetching at with the African American drivers (their IQs are lower a la “The Bell Curve,” so they are probably to dumb to operate the system) but the passenger part is a bit rich. Not sure Sailer spends too much time on the Red Line (I do), but after the Rhode Island stop, its hardly serving uniform Black neighborhoods. And more to the point, how did the passengers cause the crash? Just curious. Metro trains dont have much – if any – passenger interference with operation, and after the train has left the platform such a supposition seems even less plausible.
However, Sailer might be suggesting that the nascent Hispanic population in Silver Spring is responsible. What, with their bilingual swine flu havin asses, those illegals were probably overcrowding the train or something.
Somebody call Lou Dobbs, we’ve got a story here!
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:17 am
Dude, that’s not Sailer.
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Just to inform everyone, there were serious delays on the red line before the crash even happened. In fact, I truly believe that the crash was the result of the delays and the driver’s inability, for whatever reason, to stop before crashing into the train in front.
I take the metro Red Line from Metro Center to Bethesda, about 5 stops, it normally takes me 20 minutes. Yesterday it took me over an hour. and this was BEFORE the crash. I got on the red line at about 4:20-ish and got into Bethesda at about 5:30-ish. There were TWO malfunctioning trains that needed to be off loaded, I believe between Tenleytown and Friendship Heights or Cleveland Park. This caused the 12+ trains going the same direction on the Red Line to be all backed up, waiting 10+ minutes in tunnels or at platforms to get clearance to continue on. As soon as I got off my train in Bethesda and saw it starting to pull away, I saw another train slowly coming into the platform. The trains were all fairly close together because of all the back up. Also, the trains had to “single track” it through a few of the stations because of the malfunctioning trains stuck on the tracks. Thus causing even more of a back up. All of the trains on the red line going from Glenmont to Shady Grove were all backed up and experiencing major delays. I firmly believe that that is why the train that got hit was stopped on the track. The driver of the train that got hit said that it had stopped because of a third train in front of it that was stopped at the platform, probably because of the delays, and it had not yet been cleared to go. The front train that got hit was NOT moving, and the train that hit it, according to witnesses, was going at a normal speed which, for that area, is about 58 mph. It was also reported by witnesses and in the media that the train that hit the stopped train was stopped on the track just prior to the crash and an announcement was made to the riders that said they were stopped because there was a train in front of them that was stopped (again, because of the delays). A few moments after stopping, the train started to move again, traveling at normal speeds, and just mere moments after starting, it hit the train in front of it.
The tracks between Fort Totten and the station before it are relatively straight. The tracks are outside and do not have sharp and blind turns. It was a clear day. Even if the system failed, the signals failed, communication failed, the automated system failed, or whatever it was, there was no reason that the driver of the train should not have seen the train in front and been able to apply the breaks. Passengers say that they felt no brakes before the crash. They also say that they could even see the train in front of them as they were approaching but because of the message the driver had given, they thought nothing of, thinking that the driver knew what she was doing and was paying attention. Obviously she was not.
Metro trains are also equipped with a device known as the dead man that is lever like thing that the driver has to hold down, whether train operations are automatic or manual. If this lever or button or whatever it is, is released, the train will shut down. It was put in these trains to prevent a train from crashing if the driver drops dead or faints or something, hence why it is called the dead man.
Therefore, the driver could not have had a heart attack or fainted or anything like that because the train would have completely stopped.
The system that signals when a train is too close to another has failed in the past and the drivers, even some in tunnels where visibility is low, were able to see the train, know that something was off, and apply the breaks which stopped the train, avoiding any collision.
This was not done yesterday for whatever reason.
Perhaps some repliers where right, maybe she was on a cell phone, talking or texting, or listening to an Ipod. Or perhaps she was just zoned out, relying on the automatic system to just do its job, it is said that many drivers do this because they feel there is no need to pay attention when the system is automatic and all they have to do is open and close the doors at the stations despite what their training teaches them.
Who knows what really happened. All we can do is speculate, pray for the victims, pray for their families, and pray that this does not happen ever again.
I hope everyone can learn from this experience and live every moment like their last, not worry about the small things, love to fullest, laugh until they cry, and try to make the best of any situation because you NEVER know what could happen or when you last moment may be.
I hope you all have a nice day!
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
thanks, Jessican, for the details. I can’t say whether what I was experiencing at Dupont at 5:20 had the same causes as what you experienced there at 5:00. My remarks stand about the communications from the operator of the train I was on — his messages clearly had to do with consequences of the wreck and not earlier problems near Tenleytown. I don’t think that Metro or similar organizations should worry about racing with twitter feeders in circumstances like those of yesterday.
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 pm
[...] agree with Matt Yglesias that “it’s a bit ugly to talk politics in the wake of a tragedy” but, like him, I [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
It seems there is something systematically wrong at Metro.
No kidding. As someone mentioned above, the red line seems to be single-tracked regularly on at least one section at least once a week. The relevant metric is not how many accidents occur on metro given the number of trains they have. The metric is how many accidents they have in a single track situation. I suspect the number is much higher, and that metro puts itself at much higher risk than other rail systems because they’re forced to single-track themselves so often.
Apparently the reason the operator didn’t see the train on the tracks is because right at the point of impact, the train was going around a curve, so the line of sight wasn’t very good. Also, the reason for the severe telescoping and jumping up on the other train was because the moving train was a much older model without a set of safety features designed to prevent those problems.
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Looking at the pictures it’s pretty astonishing how few died. Last I heard it stood at 4? Or maybe 6. Still. It looked pretty horrendous
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Judging from events around the nation, I’m guessing cell phone or texting.
By the *operator*? That should be a fireable offense. One of the benefits of mass transit is that only one person has to pay attention to the road. But that one person has the safety of all the others resting on his/her attentiveness. (Speaking of which, I wonder if the operator was at the end of a 12 hour shift or something like that?)
Anyway, it seems highly likely to me that what we have here is the high cost of low taxes. Why is the equipment old and/or the operators poorly trained? Because the system is underfunded, like bridge maintenance in Minnesota. Why is the system underfunded? Because of the existence of a political party that would rather cut taxes and badmouth government than give a government agency the funding to actually do its job.
Anytime you hear someone call for the government to reduce spending, remember what happened today. Safety upgrades get kicked down the road because there isn’t enough money to do them immediately, and there’s a possibility that someone will die in the interim. Starving the beast, public transportation edition.
(I wonder if there’s anyone stupid enough to have actually gone on record against funding for newer, safer train equipment, or mocked it like volcano monitoring. Probably.)
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
This is going to cost upwards of $200 million dollars, in spite of the safety and accident prevention money already spent. You can have a lot of car crashes for that kind of money. Trains are trains and they do one thing very well. Cars and trucks do everything else, so this isn’t an either transit or autos proposition, but a question of how to best spend our money to get the best transportation system possible, using all avaialble modes.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
“over 37,000 people died last year from automotive accidents last year. ”
This means nothing by itself. You have to consider how many people traveled how many miles, and made how many individual trips. You need to consider the cumulative value of the trips made. If it is just lives, then trains and airplanes are safer, based on passenger miles, but not necessarily per trip. We need a more comprehensive and equalized system for measuring performance.
Sweet Caroline is right, the system is reaching maximum rush hour capacity and we see this as increased delays when headway betweeen trains is reduced and there is no “slack” to make up for minor delays which cascade backwards in the system, same as a traffic jam backs up on the highway.
———————————–
“We are not going to be able to get more people to use public transit, nor muster political support for improvements if we don’t have a credible plan for attacking the perception (which may in fact be founded) that this system is not as safe as it should be. ”
And why should we, if it turns out (objectively) that the system costs more to use, provides fewer destinations, carries less freight, and is only marginally safer, all things considered? Even if it is excellent at providing peak hour capacity, which it does very well. Maybe there is a reason why we have to pay two thirds of the price of the ticket in order to get people to use the system. And even at that we STILL don;t think the system is getting enough support.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:29 pm
O baloney. When you figure fatalities against passenger miles, trains are several orders of magnitude safer than cars or even buses.
Consider the “cumulative value of the trips made”? Ok, I get it- “Engineer” is the latest transportation troll assigned to the MY beat by some Daddy Warbucks. Some things never change.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:34 pm
In response to Catowner at 8 (”Judging from events around the nation, I’m guessing cell phone or texting.’)
Chris responds at 26: “By the *operator*? That should be a fireable offense.”
———-
Er.. who do you think was at the FRONT of the train traveling at 58 MPH which hit the rear of the stationary train?
Although I’ve know some bosses who would look for the grease spot — formerly known as Jeanice McMillan — and yell: “You’re Fired!”
The Reporters covering this are doing a really SHITTY job — a close in photo makes the track look curve but overhead satellite photos suggest the track is pretty straight in the line 300 yards prior to New Hampshire Avenue. Although it seems to curve to the right and the fucking fence they have between tracks may have obscured McMillan’s view.
Point is, any decent reporter would be showing the approach to the train wreck — so riders can judge if the wreck should have been avoided — but none of the fuckwits on the national newspapers have done so. We already know, of course, that national TV reporters are blow-dried dumbshits.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:37 pm
The LARGER issue, of course, is whether Metro is running trains TOO FAST for conditions. I.e, running them at high speed through sections where a reasonably alert human operator does not have enough time to throw the brakes.
One of those “management decisions” — to increase carrying capacity at rush hour by depending on a fallible computer system to throw on the brakes and running the trains too fast for conditions.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
“When you figure fatalities against passenger miles, trains are several orders of magnitude safer than cars or even buses.”
Absolutely trains are better in that regard. If they are so good, by that measure, why don’t we use them for everything? Because it is a dumb idea.
In real life we consider convenience, destinations available, comfort, cost, freight capacity, as well as peak capacity which is the one thing Metro does well. How would you even pay for Metro if it wasn’t heavily supported by people who don’t use it?
We need to be more objective about considering all the costs and all the benefits for each mode of transportation, in order to figure out the best mix and how to pay for it. Instead we get a lot of single issue advocates.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
From 1993 through 2003 US trains averaged 0.71 deaths per billion passenger miles. Excluding the most dangerous rural roads, Autos averged 0.99 deaths per 100 million VEHICLE miles on all other roads. Still a lot higher than trains, but thats because we desgn train systems so that they theoretically cannot collide.
I think the way it actually works out isthat you are 37 times more likely to die in a car accident (late 1990’s figures) than in an airplane and about ten times more likely than in a train.
One source claims that on interstate trips cars get 65 passenger miles per gallon and Amtrak gets only 53.
A lot depends on how you pick your numbers: whether you are making an argument, or seeking an answer.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:01 am
First off, Metro is worth every penny plus some, for 2 reasons:
1.) It keeps some people off the roads and off the buses meaning that rush hour will be that much more tolerable.
2.) Parking downtown is the BIGGEST pain in the rear and it is SUPER expensive! Especially during tourist season…you’ll get an anurism just for trying.
ALSO, investagations show that the “mushroom” was depressed and there was blueing on the tracks/wheels indicating that the emergency brakes were put on. For whatever reason (probably because they were 2 months past being replaced) they did not work. Passengers reported that they did not feel any brakes go on at all but I’m not sure if the brakes completely failed or if they were just not in good enough condition to be able to stop the train in time, or if the driver just didn’t put them on until the last second.
What I don’t understand is why, after that train had been stopped because of the delays, started to go again in the first place. The train can’t go after being stopped with a clearance signal…someone has to give it the all clear make it go.
If there was a false signal, wouldn’t the operator have known and tried to stop the train as soon as it started? Did the driver go with out a signal? Did all the systems really fail at the exact same time for this 1 train? If the communications/system failed, there wouldn’t have been a clearance signal…someone had to have known that that train was not supposed to be moving so someone should have noticed and been able to stop it in time…a train can’t accelerate fast enough to crash on top of another train in less than a second. I mean, the tracks are broken up into sections and only ONE train is permitted in a section at a time, the drivers know this as do all opperators…so as soon as a second train came into view, it could and should have been stopped…there must have been enough time…
could it really have been just because it was an old train?
could this really have been just a perfect storm of malfunctions?