State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Washington Metro May Finally Fix Its 40-Year-Old Funding Problem

Governing: After years of rapidly deteriorating service, Washington Metro, the transit agency that serves the nation’s capital and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, has been slowly making improvements. It fixed problematic tracks, added some new railcars, improved its financial book-keeping and started offering customers refunds when trains were excessively late.

But those are mostly short-term fixes. What has eluded Metro for decades – since it was founded in 1976 – was a dedicated funding stream that it could bank on when doing long-term planning. It’s something that’s standard for nearly all transit agencies, but in the Washington region, officials from the District, Maryland and Virginia couldn’t agree on how it would work.

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