Why Washington Metro’s leader is ‘bullish’ on post-pandemic transit

When Randy Clarke took the job of general manager and CEO for Washington, D.C.’s transit agency two years ago, he faced a long list of challenges: persistent safety lapses, ridership drops and staggering financial shortfalls.

The issues were familiar to anyone in the transit industry, but many of them were especially difficult in the capital area. 

When the coronavirus struck, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, saw one of the biggest drop-offs of riders in the country. Even during the recovery, the region topped almost any list of metro areas for the percentage of residents working from home. And addressing what would be a $750 million budget shortfall required getting officials from three different jurisdictions—the District, Maryland and Virginia—to pony up extra funds to keep the subway trains and buses running.

Remarkably, Clarke and his team have navigated each of those obstacles while also generating buzz around the country about WMATA’s approach to an uncertain post-pandemic future for transit.

They responded to dire warnings about fiscal cliffs and empty downtowns by offering more and better service.

“We’re helping to lead the conversation that transit is not a 9-to-5 office commute only ballgame,” he said in an interview with Route Fifty. Clarke, who is recovering from knee surgery, said transit should function like it does in New York City. “It’s there for everybody all the time, on weekends and for special events and for midday doctor's appointments. Someone like me who is going through PT every single day is equally as important as somebody who goes from the house to the office, just to avoid traffic.”

Part of that approach meant expanding off-peak service for both bus and rail trips. In fact, the 48-year-old agency is running more trains now than ever before.

A Better Customer Experience

The agency has also made plenty of smaller changes in recent years. It simplified its fare structure, started using all-door boarding for buses, made it possible to pay fares with smartphones, improved signage at its stations and retired its oldest railcars (after resolving safety issues with its newest trains). It installed new fare gates that have reduced fare evasion by 60% and introduced transit ambassadors to help with customer service and safety. The agency has focused on hiring more operations staff, and Clarke mandated that all administrative staff come back to the office full-time. Even the subway system’s famously long and breakdown-prone escalators seem to be working a lot more these days.

“What drives ridership is really simple: frequent, safe, reliable service,” Clarke said. The other improvements, he said, “are cumulative and compounding. They work independently and together for a better customer experience.”

He said it’s like a restaurant: People come for the food, but they also appreciate good service and clean facilities.

Clarke has more improvements in store, too. The agency is close to unveiling a redesign of its bus routes and is installing new bus shelters, at a tenth of the original cost by using standard rather than custom designs. It is starting work on adding platform screen doors in rail stations, a process that will require its trains to go back to automatic control. 

If anything, he’s impatient with how long it takes transit agencies to make significant changes. “It shouldn’t take 10 years to build five stations on a rail line,” he said. “We are taking too long to do the things we know work. The thing that I’m optimistic about is that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that this takes too long, it costs too much, and we should actually sometimes just get out of the way and do the good thing that people want us to do.”

With the flurry of improvements, WMATA’s ridership has recovered to about 75% of pre-pandemic levels, higher than many of its peers, like the CTA in Chicago, BART in the San Francisco region or MBTA in Boston. (New York is at about 84%.)

Clarke acknowledged that downtown business trips are down. But he pointed to other neighborhoods where ridership has actually surged since the pandemic. Apartment buildings are sprouting up in a previously industrial area known as the NoMa neighborhood just north of the U.S. Capitol, prompted by the opening of an in-fill WMATA rail station there. People are coming to work at George Washington University and its hospital in Foggy Bottom. Visitors and residents are taking the new Silver Line to flights at Dulles Airport. And King Street in downtown Alexandria, Virginia, is a vibrant weekend hangout, he noted.

“It’s going to constantly shift and move, and I think the key is we’ve got to just keep running really good service,” Clarke said. 

“But we do need to keep helping to work with our partners on land use. We need more density,” he added. “There’s tons of room for opportunities in our region that are untapped. You can go to Cleveland Park [a wealthy neighborhood in Northwest D.C.] on the Metro, and a block off of Connecticut Avenue there are $3 million single-family homes.”

Funding Challenges

Many of WMATA’s recent improvements, though, came as Metro’s expected $4.8 billion budget faced a massive shortfall of $750 million. Like other agencies that depend heavily on fare revenue, WMATA avoided cuts during the pandemic and in the years since because of federal aid that big transit agencies could use to cover operating expenses. But the last subsidy package passed Congress in 2021, and agencies like WMATA faced a “fiscal cliff” as that money ran out.

Many transit agencies have looked for state support to avoid major service cuts, with varied success. For WMATA, though, that meant getting funding from three different jurisdictions, not just one.

Clarke said the agency’s strategy—which its board members from the various jurisdictions supported—was to demonstrate to the public and to local officials that money spent on WMATA would be well-spent.   

“The strategy was: We have to show value to our region and our jurisdictional partners. We can be back to being the best system in the country … and make people here really proud of their Metro system. And I think we did that,” he said.

WMATA could have started off by cutting service, but that would have harmed riders and not addressed the structural issues that were causing the shortfalls in the first place, Clarke explained.

“I put the onus on the team that we have to be as efficient as possible, and run the service that the community not only needs but deserves,” he said. “It’s up to us to be efficient, not put it on the customers and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to sit back and have a little extra cushion, but you’re not going to get the service that you can rely on so you’re going to drive or not use us.’”

Metro secured $480 million from the three jurisdictions it serves, enough to avoid major service interruptions, but not enough to avoid a 12.5% fare increase. It’s only a temporary fix, but it will buy the agency time as local leaders decide how to address Metro’s longer-term challenges.

With all indications that commuting patterns have changed for the foreseeable future, Metro will need to find money to make up for lost fares. “Farebox revenue is never going back to what it used to be,” Clarke said. “That game’s over.”

While local leaders consider how to address the new structural shortfall, they might also tackle the elusive issue of providing Metro a permanent funding source. Unlike most transit agencies that can depend on, for example, revenue from a local sales tax or a property tax levy, WMATA relies on year-by-year contributions from each of its member agencies.

“I think people are tired of this lack of predictability,” Clarke said. “It’s not just bad for Metro, it’s not good for the local governments or the state governments—our jurisdictional partners. We have no ability to do service planning, which impacts your fleet planning, which impacts human capital, and then ultimately, your capital planning. All because we don’t know what our funding is going to be in year five or year 10.”

Long-Term Strategy

Clark Mercer, the executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional organization, said his group formed a joint task force with WMATA to explore options for long-term revenue sources, as well as to better coordinate the various transit services in the region. He added that WMATA’s focus on service improvements will help the agency as it looks for a permanent funding source.

“Unless the service that’s being provided is excellent, you can’t gather these folks around the table to have these hard discussions,” Mercer said. “They can’t make the hard decisions unless they have total confidence that the system’s being run well.”

WMATA also built credibility with local leaders by letting them review its finances before it announced the size of its budget gap, Mercer said. The “trust but verify” process not only helped the agency find some ways to save money but also allowed outside officials to confirm WMATA’s numbers and understand what went into them.

Mercer also credits Clarke for bringing “real positive energy into WMATA and into transit writ large.”

Clarke came to WMATA from transit agencies in Austin and Boston, and having an outsider at the helm of Metro “has been a breath of fresh air,” Mercer said, because he doesn’t bring cynicism brought on by decades of regional debates with him. Plus, Clarke has focused on reaching out to the public, through traditional media and a robust social media presence.

“I think if we’re going to get [transit] on a solid foundation moving forward, we’ve got to have someone running the system that is infectiously positive and can articulate a vision of what we can be,” Mercer said.

The local political leadership might finally also be ready to find a funding arrangement that puts Metro on a more solid foundation. Since a fatal crash in 2009, the agency has been under fire almost constantly for track fires, dispatch problems, construction delays and overruns, and flagging ridership. The litany of problems is well-known to local leaders. Many of them have been addressed under Clarke or his predecessor, Paul Wiedefeld, who is now Maryland’s transportation secretary. But a secure source of funding still remains elusive.

“There’s almost a level of exhaustion of studying it,” Mercer said. “I think our electeds have reached the point now where they’re ready to take some bold actions, whatever those may be.”

Clarke said he’s “bullish” on transit coming out of the pandemic, particularly at WMATA.

“By the end of this year or in the early part of next year, there’s going to be a real, real chance to drive long-lasting change that can be good for everybody, not just Metro,” he said. “What I'm really excited about is all of these elected leaders and business leaders and others seem to all say, ‘You don’t have a chance to be a better region unless more people take transit.’ So that to me is most everyone acknowledging we need more people in transit.”