Huh, DC is good? I keep hearing that the DC Metro is one of the worst in the country. Are you referring to the non-subway aspects?
WMATA was slowly brought to its knees by awful decisions by upper management as well as corruption, incompetence, and looting by the Amalgamated Transit Union.
All those benefits packages, undeserved overtime hours, and bloated pensions start adding up fast. Like, when I found out that more senior workers could increase their level of pension by working overtime, I was pretty pissed. So yeah
labor costs were 74% of the massive $1.74 billion WMATA budget as of 2016.
Of course, the WMATA board has only abetted these rising costs, and because of that, there's very little money for much needed repair work -- work that needed to be done decades ago but wasn't because of incompetent management.
This anecdote sums it up:
A general lack of accountability coupled with structural problems baked in from the beginning have put the Metro in a bad spot.
So yeah, sorry for the krazen-esque outrage about unions, but the ATU 689 is very worthy of berating. And the Metro still works, at least sorta, and when you think about the amount of area and the number of people it covers, it's a pretty valuable commodity for the DC area.
