Maintenance Work to Disrupt Washington, D.C., Metro for a Year.
'Over the next year, riders on the Washington Metro would cope with sparser service, earlier closings and some station shutdowns under an ambitious plan to clear an enormous backlog of deferred maintenance on the accident-prone, increasingly unreliable system, officials said on Friday.
For years, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has tried to limit maintenance work to nights, when the system is closed, in order not to curtail service. That approach has failed, officials said, contributing to the Metro falling steadily deeper into disrepair.
“We need to do something different, and dramatically different,” Paul J. Wiedefeld, the authority’s general manager and chief executive, said at a news conference. He called the plan “a massive undertaking” that would disrupt the commutes of hundreds of thousands of people, but he added, “I don’t think any customer wants us to continue this process where the service is unreliable, unsafe, because we’re not doing the basics.”
Jack Evans, the authority’s chairman, made headlines this year by suggesting that the system might have to take entire lines out of service for months. The plan unveiled on Friday does nothing so drastic, and officials said that Metro would continue to offer service on every part of its system, but much less of it at times.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/maintenance-work-to-disrupt-washington-dc-metro-for-a-year.html?
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