Metro Fires and the Cost of Anti-Tax Extremism

So I’m taking the Red Line to work this morning, at around 8:50 AM, travelling from east to west between Gallery Place and Metro Center. We’re in the tunnel and I’m all the way up at the front of the first car, just behind the driver, when suddenly there’s a WHUMP and the car lurches upward and then back down again, followed a fraction of a second later by a bright shower of orange sparks in the tunnel outside.

The car shudders to a halt and I can hear the driver radioing in to central dispatch, we have a situation, there was a loud noise, we may have hit something, please advise. Other trains barrel past in the other direction. The people in my car are calm but I can hear passengers from cars further back on the intercom in the driver’s cabin behind me, calling to her, there’s smoke in the tunnel, smoke, what should we do?

The driver, professional and calm, keeps calling back to dispatch. More trains rush by. You can smell the smoke a little now but nobody seems panicked. Finally the train start moving again, slowly. A smaller whump, and we stop again. Attention passengers, we cannot offload the train in the tunnel, we are crawling to Metro Center, dispatch, please advise.

Finally we get to Metro Center which is already choked with people and suddenly the crowd is twice the size. I make my way downstairs to the Orange line and eventually get to work. Later in the day I read that “the cause of the smoke at Metro Center this morning was a fire that broke out after one of the train’s collector shoes, which are attached to the third rail, fell off.”

The Washington, DC metro system was built in the 1970s, mostly with federal funds.  It is the second-busiest public transit system in American and ridership is at or near an all-time high. But now it’s aging, as things tend to do when they get older. It is literally falling to pieces.

But despite the fact that Metro is obviously a vital public good wanted and needed by millions of people, particularly given the area’s population growth and jam-packed highways and surface streets, and despite the fact that Metro is literally falling to pieces, our local governments cannot agree on a dedicated source of the revenues needed for services such as, to take a random example, affixing collector shoes to the bottoms of trains in such a way that they don’t fall off under my feet and go WHUMP and set the train on fire.

And why is there no dedicated revenue source? Because between the 1970s and today a whole political movement rose to power dedicated to the proposition that revenue sources—that is, taxes—are evil, in approximately the same way and to the same degree that Charles Manson is evil, i.e. satanic, depraved, to be opposed with all the righteousness and fervor one can muster.

Those actions had consequences. Sometimes they’re just a little scary and inconvenient. Sometimes they are much, much worse.