The Latest Metro Mess

This system is mired in disrepair and neglect with it’s aging equipment and poor safety management culture that results in cronic breakdowns and delays. The agency and governing board lacks a solid record of institutional safety consciousness, with a maintenance history of incompentence and management/employee negligence, that should but apparently has not, driven demands for immediate structural changes. As the system is constantly expanded there is no realistic financial plan in place to provide a long-term dependable source of financing. It’s become a fragile, undependable, highly financially leveraged transportation infrastructure that will lead ultimately to calamity and potential mass causalities. This is NOT a question of “if” but rather WHEN a truly serious failure will occur. Yet many with direct responsibility for the system continue to debate and dither.

I was living in the King’s Cross area of London short term in 1987 when a fire broke out on Wednesday the 18th of November 1987 at St. Pancras tube station, a major interchange on the London Underground. The fire killed 31 people and seriously injured 100 others.The fire started on an escalator serving the Piccadilly line and 15 minutes after being reported the fire had spread rapidly underground filling the tube with heat and smoke. Issues regarding poor maintenance, inadequate levels of funding and management neglect were all well known and discussed in the London press of the day but as we see with the Metro today nothing was done to rectify the situation. The time for actions is not after innocent people have lost their lives due to problems that can be addressed now but are easier to just ignore.