How to Save DC's Metro

Summary

Podcast Summary: Statecraft – Episode: "How to Save DC's Metro"

Introduction In this episode of Statecraft, hosted by Santi Ruiz, the focus is on Washington DC's Metro system, officially known as WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority). Santi Ruiz engages in a comprehensive conversation with Randy Clark, the head of WMATA, to delve into the remarkable improvements and strategic initiatives implemented under Clark's leadership since he took the helm in 2022.

Advancing Multiple Priorities Simultaneously Randy Clark discusses how he managed to enhance several critical aspects of the Metro system concurrently without compromising one for another. Notable achievements under his leadership include increased train speeds, reduced fare evasion, boosted ridership, enhanced safety measures, and the rollout of tap-to-pay functionality using credit cards.

"Frequency and reliability in transit are the most important things and they're not even close to anything else." [02:14]

Clark emphasizes that while frequency is a top priority, safety remains a non-negotiable element, underscoring it as a core value rather than a trade-off.

Balancing Trade-offs and Prioritization When questioned about making hard choices amidst tight budget constraints, Clark elaborates on the importance of disciplined prioritization and a clear strategic vision. He highlights the necessity of focusing on fundamental service improvements to provide a superior customer experience.

"Your time is the most important thing in your life. And when we can give you more time back in life, that is a massive value added to society." [04:05]

Clark attributes the Metro's success to a dedicated team, a supportive board, and a strategic plan that minimizes distractions, allowing the organization to focus on essential service enhancements.

Enhancing Public Safety through Fare Enforcement The discussion transitions to the relationship between fare evasion enforcement and public safety. Clark explains that while not all fare evaders commit serious crimes, there is a significant overlap between fare evasion and more severe criminal activities. The comprehensive approach includes upgraded fare gates, increased police presence, advanced video surveillance, and transparent reporting on enforcement actions.

"We have a seven-year low of crime on the system and we're on pace to the lowest crime year in the history of Metro." [07:31]

Clark quantifies the revenue generated from fare enforcement, noting that the Metro has recouped approximately $27 million in the past year, contributing significantly to the system's financial health.

Financial Management and Budget Allocation Addressing the Metro's budget, which stands at approximately $5 billion for the upcoming fiscal year, Clark outlines the allocation between operating and capital expenses—each receiving $2.5 billion. Operating funds cover daily operations, including service delivery and administrative functions, while capital funds are dedicated to maintenance and modernization projects.

"We have two and a half billion on operating, two and a half billion on capital, generally speaking." [12:14]

Clark discusses the challenges of managing without major new construction projects, emphasizing the complexity of maintaining and modernizing existing infrastructure.

Political Challenges in Maintenance vs. Expansion The conversation touches upon the political hurdles in securing funding for maintenance as opposed to high-visibility expansion projects. Clark emphasizes that while maintenance may not be as politically appealing as new extensions, recent crises have heightened awareness and support for sustained maintenance efforts.

"People don't want to go back to that situation." [16:02]

Path to Financial Sustainability Looking ahead, Clark outlines the steps necessary for Metro to achieve financial sustainability within the next five to ten years. This includes significant cost-saving measures, such as eliminating merit increases and reducing reliance on consultants, alongside strategic fare adjustments and improved financial planning mechanisms like a revolving bond program.

"We've identified $500 million of cost savings or cost avoidance which is a full operating capital." [19:39]

Future Projects and System Modernization Clark introduces the concept of the "Blue Loop" (Bloop), a strategic initiative aimed at addressing capacity issues through system modernization rather than expanding the rail network. The plan includes transitioning to a fully automated rail system with advanced signaling technology, which is expected to enhance capacity, reliability, safety, and cost-efficiency.

"Our number one focus is how to move the rail system to CBTC which is communications based train control platform screen doors into a fully automated rail system." [22:09]

He emphasizes the importance of aligning new projects with productive land use to maximize the benefits of heavy rail investments, advocating for dense, activity-centered development.

Reducing Dependency on Consultants Clark criticizes the overreliance on consultants within the transit industry, advocating for more in-house expertise and streamlined decision-making processes. He highlights the inefficiencies and increased risks associated with prolonged consultant engagements and underscores the need for Metro to empower its staff to take greater ownership of projects.

"If we don't have any audit findings at all, we probably actually have buttoned up too hard." [31:44]

Risk Management and Organizational Culture The discussion delves into the organizational culture at Metro, where excessive risk aversion has led to bureaucratic complexities, referred to metaphorically as a "lasagna." Clark advocates for a balanced approach to risk, encouraging innovation and flexibility while maintaining essential safety standards.

"After seventeen layers, you're like, oh my God, how did we get here?" [28:12]

Conclusion Randy Clark's leadership has steered Washington DC's Metro through significant improvements in service reliability, safety, and financial health. By prioritizing essential service aspects, reducing dependency on external consultants, and fostering an organizational culture that balances risk with innovation, Clark aims to ensure the Metro system remains sustainable and efficient for the future.

For full access to the transcript and more interviews, subscribe at www.statecraft.pub.

Transcript

[Santi Ruiz]

Hey, I'm Santi Ruiz and you're listening to Statecraft. Today we talk to Randy Clark. He's the head of Washington DC's Metro system. The acronym is WMADA for those of you who are not regular riders. For long periods of my life, I have been a regular commuter on Washington Metro. And what Clark has done over the last few years there has been pretty remarkable. We'll get into some of the details here.

[Randy Clark]

But.

[Santi Ruiz]

But what stands out to me and why I wanted to record this conversation is that Clark's managed to advance a bunch of his priorities at once. From the outside, it can seem like he hasn't had to make any trade offs at all. Between safety and speed, catching fare evaders and keeping costs down. How has he pulled it off? We get into it here. One note. Clark recorded this conversation from his office, which fittingly is next to a major train line. I hope you'll pardon the interruption in the audio. And as a reminder, the transcript for this conversation and for many others is at www.statecraft.pub. that's Statecraft Pub. Randy Clark, thank you for joining Statecraft.

[Randy Clark]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Santi Ruiz]

Before we get into the substantive questions, I should just say my family lives at the end of the Orange Line. I'm here in New York, but when I'm back in town, I'm a regular Vienna to Metro center to my office commuter.

[Randy Clark]

Excellent. It's good to hear. The Orange Line, also known back in the day and kind of coming back as Orange Crush.

[Santi Ruiz]

Is that right? I'm out of the.

[Randy Clark]

So many people take the Orange Line and rush hour's just be known as Orange Crush. We are starting to feel Orange Crush a little bit back.

[Santi Ruiz]

Since you came in at the head of Washington Metro In 2022, you've done a whole lot increased speeds, reduced fair jumping, increased ridership, increased safety. You guys are rolling out tap to pay with credit cards. Often when I talk to other political leaders or other folks in transit, they talk a lot about the importance of trade offs and prioritizing. But you can't have everything. And as you've said, you have to prioritize service and frequency over other things. You would prioritize frequency over everything else, but you've managed to get through a long list of achievements with some tight budget constraints. I'm curious, just to kick off, have you had to make hard choices and how do you think about prioritization?

[Randy Clark]

Yeah, listen, that's the ultimate of public policy, right? And it's not just transit, it's. It's everything. And maybe not even public policy, your life policy. Trade offs is, is the thing. It's hard. Right. Prioritization and having the discipline around that, but also having enough, I think vision and energy. When you say frequency is probably the thing I would pick the most. Yes. Except I don't want someone to then play into the concept of safety. Safety to me is not a trade off. That is an absolute and it's just a core value. So I brought, I really bring that perspective, I think to all my work and our team. Then you add from that. Right. And I just want to make sure I initially say that because I don't want someone to be retweeting later and say you care about frequency and not safety. It's like we're run service, it has to be safe after that. Yeah. You need to have frequency reliability. And I am worried that we get caught up into a lot of other things that don't move the needle. Frequency and reliability in transit are the most important things and they're not even close to anything else. So we got a lot of marketing and we got a lot of amenities and we got a lot of stuff and they are all important, but they all end up being additive to just really good service. And that's what we're laser focused is from the second someone enters a bus to getting off a bus or enter a station, whether it's an escalator working well to, to good customer service, to the fare gates working well, to great signs that tell you when the next trainer bus is coming. And then obviously trains not offloading, doors working, air conditioning working. Good announcements. Honestly, it sounds weird. We want you in and out as fast as possible. So lots of places would say no. Our job is to keep people from a customer mindset. And we're like, no. The best customer service for us is in and out. Your time is the most important thing in your life. And when we can give you more time back in life, that is a massive value added to society.

[Santi Ruiz]

Sure. But I guess my question is I could imagine somebody coming in, in your shoes in 2022 and saying after safety we're going to have a ruthless focus on frequency and that's going to be like you're saying our gold standard. That's what we're really measured on at the end of the day. And to that end we're going to leave aside some of the nice to haves like the, you know, the whole customer service experience. We're not going to worry about fair jumping as much because that's another priority. We get in the way that that was not the approach you've taken. So I'm curious, like how do you think about that given that you have a clear set of priorities and a clear prioritization but you've gotten a lot else done too.

[Randy Clark]

You got to kind of sacrifice a lot of the rest of your life a little bit, which is sad in a whole different way. And you got to surround yourself by great people. And I'm really lucky. We have a great team here. We got a good board that really cares about the organization. We got a strategic plan that the board approved. So we have focus around that that helps get rid of some other distraction. But to me we came in as, I don't want to say shotgun because that might make people think it wasn't focused but a focus shotgun. So we knew we had X amount of things. Summer 22 when I got here we people forget we were not running train service really. Our 7000 series trains were grounded in a lot of ways that was priority one. We had to get our trains back. But just next to that was we had some safety issues in the system. And I don't mean necessarily system safety, I mean public safety. That we had serious crime in this region. We have way too much crime. I think we had six homicides in my first year. Like there were shootings, there was stabbings. Right now we have a seven year low of crime on the system and we're on pace to the lowest crime year in the history of Metro. You know Fairgate, we had to get the law changed in D.C. we had to up our police, we had to get special police in here. We had to fix our video systems. I think it's fair that we have been relentless on this customer experience. So I think what we've done is we've taken a group of people been able to really drive collaboration and teamwork. My first week I told everyone back in the office a lot of people don't like that or didn't love it at the time. I think that is actually one of the reasons we produce so much. The other thing is I just, I'm a no nonsense kind of person. I love the people I work with but. But I'm not in for a lot of delay on making decisions and some listen decisions are never going to be perfect. And the key is do your trade offs cost benefit. Let's figure back and forth. But time in one way is the most important thing we got. Especially the higher up you get in the organization to make decisions and then help give the People below them, the chance to be empowered and move things forward. So I think what we've done is a relentless pursuit of truly the customer experience. But from the, from the point of what can we effectuate as an organization? And then we'll figure out the bigger stuff. And now we're just getting to that which is this long term vision of full automation of our system, massive regional bus push. Some of these other things that we would never have been able to do if we couldn't have got the bread and butter back to where it needed to be.

[Santi Ruiz]

Before we move on to some of that stuff, I just want to go back to the relationship between public safety and you guys cracking down quite hard and successfully on fare evasion. You guys installed both the technical side of new fare gates are much higher and trickier to jump over and as you've mentioned, a bunch of coordination with police and transit police. How much in your view does the cracking down on fare evasion have to do with the public safety side on Washington Metro?

[Randy Clark]

I'm not sure I could give it a percent or a grade as much as in one way it's very significant. In one way it's partial and I know that sounds weird to say so there is some truth to a, a larger societal people want to see other people follow rules. And the more that people follow rules, everyone kind of follows rules. So if you watch someone get on a bus and there's a line of five people getting the bus, the first person pays. Most everyone pays if the first person doesn't, a lot of people don't. And so it creates almost like an ability for people to say well I didn't know or I thought it was broke or whatever, whatever. There's a group societal think that there's a part to. The second part is, and we were very clear is not everyone that fare baits commits crimes, but almost universally everyone that commits serious crimes. Fairbanks not many people are going to tap in and then go like do armed robbery. It's just not generally the same. One, the people that do that generally. And two, if you were smart enough, you would not have the evidence that you tapped in. Now mind you, we're watching with 30 plus thousand cameras so you're going to get caught anyway. I really do think it has had a big impact on the serious crimes. And then when you add in all of the now layers of security of we have people walking trains, literally all we have is people walking trains platforms, bus inspection teams. We never had a bus unit forever. We brought the police bus unit Back and video stuff and being very transparent that we publish. Like last week we had a day with a bunch of fair enforcement. We had six or seven people arrested for future, for justice, outstanding warrants with two guns off the street. And we talk about that. And that further brings deterrence to the system. So I would say it is a compendium or, you know, a multifaceted approach to get it. But fair enforcement was a certainly a significant element. The other thing is it creates the revenue that we could do stuff. And I think that's lost on people. And I know there's a lot of people that go, no, no, no, everything should be free. Well, great. That's a larger public policy conversation. But right now it's not that money that people pay. Those user fees are incredibly important, especially at large agencies like Metro to run this system, to have frequent, safe, reliable service, but also to have police officers and station managers and gates work. Right. So it's kind of, you know, it's a really important recipe of all of it together.

[Santi Ruiz]

Will you give me just a kind of a back of the napkin calculation of how much revenue Metro generates from cracking down on fare evasion?

[Randy Clark]

Listen, the hardest part is there's not a one to one, you know, correlation. There is an obvious trend or comparison to where we've cracked down. We're getting more revenue, but again, is it the gates? Is it the police? Is it the deterrence campaign? Is it ridership increase? We also increased fares last year. We're getting more people from larger distances versus short. And the way our model works, we were losing tens of millions of dollars of revenue and we've quickly gained back tens of millions of dollars of revenue. So there is clearly a pretty good connection there. But it's really hard to say. All of our efforts around fair enforcement this year led to $27 million, but it's certainly, I would think, tens of millions of dollars gained back to the system in the last year and there's still tens of millions left, especially on the bus side.

[Santi Ruiz]

Well, maybe you'll give me the same answer to this question. But I'm curious, you guys have had almost 50 months now. I think maybe it is 50 months of increased month over month ridership, the system, which is fantastic. Do you know how much of that or do you have a ballpark of how much of that you can chalk up to people who were riding anyway but weren't paying? And now you're measuring them because they're paying in the system.

[Randy Clark]

Again, this we don't. So what we really have is the ability to track fare evasion rates versus now. And so we believe since two summers ago, we've reduced fair evasion on the rail side, generally somewhere between 80 to 85% on the system. That is a pretty significant change. On the bus system, we are seeing change nowhere near that. Bus is just so much harder to actually do for obvious reasons. And we left it too long here as an agency, we didn't enforce for so many years. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. But we're working on that really hard. But yeah, I think that's a general idea. We think somewhere 80, 85%. And you know, again, back to the societal thing, the more everyone sees everyone paying anomalies stick out, it's easier to enforcement and then that further reduces it even more.

[Santi Ruiz]

Great. Let me ask you about the budget and I'll just say for context, some of our listeners will absolutely be transit nerds, but I think the majority are not going to be your typical Randy Clark stands. So you may, you may have done this down for me a little bit.

[Randy Clark]

That's good.

[Santi Ruiz]

Okay, so Washington Metro has more or less $5 billion to spend over the coming fiscal year. If I have that right, what will that go to? And then I want to talk about where that money comes from.

[Randy Clark]

Sure. Put two and a half billion on operating, two and a half billion on capital, generally speaking. So on the operating side, you know, pay for service more or less. So that's metro access, it's bus service, it is rail service. And then obviously all the administrative services, you know, whether it's accounting, human capital, it, all of the back of house stuff to support that. So that's generally operating police is in there too, all that kind of stuff. On the capital side, it's everything from, you know, state of good repair and wonky term to more or less called modernization. So things like replacing escalators, making sure our. We replace track every day of the week, every day of the year, signaling systems to make sure they're working, rail and bus rehab mod, you know, that kind of stuff. Basically the, the house itself, how are we making sure the house stays pretty good? We have a little bit on some planning and some other stuff, but uniquely for an agency, we have nothing in design and construction on a new line, new station, new extension. So ours is two and a half billion, taking the assets that we have and modernizing them.

[Santi Ruiz]

Tell me about that. You mentioned it's pretty unique not to have any new lines in construction. I'm guessing it's easier to Manage the transit authority when you've got no major new projects outstanding?

[Randy Clark]

I wouldn't say that at all, actually. I think it's hard to deliver a capital program when you don't have a big Goliath that sucks up a lot of the money, a lot of the focus. So that means you got to execute really well across a thousand things instead of like a couple things and one big thing. There's added pressure to make sure, you know, because it's easy to say like, oh, that one escalator project or this power upgrade at a power substation. But the reality is a basic stuff is the most important stuff all the time. And what we've lost our way a little bit not to get too crazy or a soapbox on policy is we've really turned into a ribbon cutting society on everything. And a Twitter announcement. And don't get me wrong, I do a lot of this kind of stuff and I think it's super important. We sell the value of government and the value of great public institutions and assets that are community focused and take accountability when they're not. But the little stuff is the big stuff when it's put all together. So in a lot of ways the system is hard to run that way. But big stuff is really complex too. It's just everything in society is complex to do now because everyone, let's be honest, everyone thinks they can do it very well. And it's also complex and it's very hard to understand cost management in a world that is, I would say completely out of control, but very hard to really do forecasting on almost anything right now on revenues or expenses with the way the world's going right now.

[Santi Ruiz]

Before we keep going, I'm getting some background noise.

[Randy Clark]

That's a train running behind me. So the back of my office is the main line of CSX ere and Amtrak. And I could see reflection, the window. That is a big heavy freight CSX train running behind me.

[Santi Ruiz]

Right, fantastic. Okay then, I'll take that as a.

[Randy Clark]

Whole theme here, Corey.

[Santi Ruiz]

Perfect. We're staying on trend. Well, let me ask you about the politics of this maintenance versus big new ribbon cutting project. You've got a good relationship with the board, but I've heard from other folks we've interviewed in this series. Stephanie Pollock, Peter Rogoff. It's just politically it tends to be more difficult to get politicians and state legislatures to pony up for maintenance than it is to kind of convince them to sell them on a big new project. Has that been true in your experience?

[Randy Clark]

Yeah, I Think in a lot of places that's true. So I've worked at the Boston system. That's how I know Stephanie Cap, Metro. I was the leader down there and then here. So here maybe not as much absolute like that. Because Metro went through an incredibly different difficult time in the teens. Derailments, fire issues, the infrastructure was crumbling because we didn't really have a preventive maintenance program to really do state of good repair.

[Santi Ruiz]

What do you mean you didn't have a preventive maintenance program?

[Randy Clark]

Well, I think this place got built very much like, hey, here's this beautiful system. We're going to build it all. But not really thinking through. This place has no dedicated funding. So we go to three jurisdictions, D.C. maryland, Virginia every year, plus the feds on the operating budget. We need to basically annually go to each state and make sure our budget's going to get funded. No one historically has ever wanted Metro to have its own funding to do its own planning and accountability around that. That leads to not having a really significant amount of money to do state of good repair modernization, which has led to a couple crises. So there was a crisis at one point, here's some money, then it goes away. But as the system grew, it was not funded proportionally to do the maintenance in a level of good enough quality. So you get into the early teens, kind of mid teens, this place, the age showed and we started having insulator fires on the track multiple times a day and ventilation problems and train problems and you know, just on and on and on. And so what happened is this region really learned that the hard way. Someone died in 2015 in a bad incident, remember, really, really shocked the region, I think of the deterioration of the asset base. And it led to a lot of funding driven in 2019. And that was really important. A problem with that funding, it was not indexed. There's no growth in it. So $500 million is a lot of money. There's no getting around that. But $500 million today is not 2019. 500 million and it certainly in 2035 is not the same. So one thing we, we've been working on this big initiative. All the regional electeds and our board and others, we got almost everyone unified that that was a failure, not because of an individual person, but failure, just governance and regionalism. And now people want to baseline that and drive it in an index way going forward so we don't repeat that mistake. And that has been really successful to get everyone's mind around that. Because unlike the ribbon cutting, people don't want to go back to the place falling apart. So I think there is a maturity level here and part of what's unique in the DC market, we are the wonkiest of wonk towns. Right. And so the amount of people that understand things, that's not to say other towns are the smart people, but here we analyze, you know, today's Friday and we'll spend like, you know, how many committees and workshops to figure out how, how to name Friday. Right. We're just a unique town that really is into very studying and analyzing things. And this has been a topic for a long time. People don't want to go back to that situation. So in one way, getting funding for maintenance here is probably easier than most places because of what happened. With that said, there's also lots of people that know we need to do more. But I think that also the challenge is some economic headwinds right now. Whereas if you're in other markets, most people don't care about maintenance at all. And let's be honest, most elected officials are incentivized within a two year congressional cycle or a mayor or something else is to constantly do new things. Right. They're not incentivized to say, hey, great, the, I don't know, the elevator of Vienna, the Metro station you said is going to be like an uptime of 98.8% versus 92%. Most people are not going to win the election on that, but they do like getting, hey, we're going to add two more stops to the extension.

[Santi Ruiz]

Let me ask you about financial projections. A couple of years ago, Metro was in a really big financial hole to the tune of what was it, 750 billion or million? It's smaller now, but you're still running at a deficit. What would have to happen Metro to be on a sustainable financial trajectory five or ten years from now?

[Randy Clark]

Yeah. So that's why we created this thing called DMV Moves. It's the Council of Governments and Lamada Board, first time ever, got us together, formed a task force. It's mostly elected officials around the region. We've been meeting for over a year. We're going to wrap it up in the fall. We got everyone grounded around this problem statement I just mentioned. And we want to really modernize our system. Go to a fully automated rail system and some things of that nature. Better big investment in regional bus. So on the operating side, we've actually, I don't say we resolved it, but we feel pretty good about the operating side at Metro. So one, we got an influx of some money with our three state partners last year, not enough, but cost 400 some million. Metro then took it on its own to save a fair amount. In the last two and a half years we've identified $500 million of cost savings or cost avoidance which is a full operating capital. That's a huge amount of money. And that includes like every employee at this organization took no merit increase or zero, took a zero last year including all of our unions, which is a big deal. That alone was worth I think 38 million as an example. But everything from trimming some consultant stuff to IT stuff and just doing business kind of a little bit smarter then revenues have gone well with ridership increase and we did a fair increase last year. And I think what we need to do is like every maybe three years we do a fare increase that's very inflationary, like so it's not big but it keeps people aligned and then Metro has to live within our means. Right. If we say it's X, then we got to live within that and not just have handout but we need alignment with the region that says we all agree what the, what you get for that money. The capital side for us is the big issue. So in 2029 we have a projected we're going to run out of debt service financing and that's going to drop our capital program probably by 6, 7, 800 million in one year, maybe even more. So that is the big effort to make sure that ideally next year because capital programs take years to plan out, that we have that continuous funding and for the first time ever we get into to a revolving bond program that means we self finance. So as our bonds expire 20 years, 30, 40, you know, then we rotate into new bonds and that way we never have a problem with maintaining the structure of this organization go forward.

[Santi Ruiz]

What would have to be true financially? Among the things that you mentioned for Metro to consider, to seriously consider a big new line or extension. There's been these ideas about the Georgetown Blue Line. You guys have other models in the works. What would have to be the baseline state of play for that to begin?

[Randy Clark]

We had this idea, this bloop thing that's been kicked around for a long time.

[Santi Ruiz]

Just explain the bloop for those of us who are not D.C. natives.

[Randy Clark]

Yeah. So the number one thing we have to solve the Bloop by the way stands for Blue Loop. We didn't call it that, but local advocates came up with that. So our number one issue here on the rail side is that the system was built with A good chunk of interlining. So interlining for a listener is multiple lines coming together and sharing tracks in a section. So some agencies have that set up that way and some don't. So New York has a fair amount of interlining. We have a budget interlining. The difference in New York is you got local express tracks and we don't have that where in Boston there is no interlining. All the lines are separate. So for us the biggest challenge is a place called Roslyn. And it's first up in Virginia on the blue, orange and silver. We call BOS to Stadium Armory which is the far eastern end of blue, orange and silver. And then the branches go from there and we have a capacity issue in that section which is basically the entire Cross of D.C. and you know the part into Virginia essentially as you connect towards Maryland. And we need to solve that capacity issue long term. At the same time, our signaling system is 1960s 70s technology. Not that lacking of an analogy from the air traffic control system quite frankly. It needs massive modernization. Instead of building a new line, we got some analysis work and then instead we want to modernize our system very significantly and go to a full automated rail system like you'd see in Europe and Asia. And by doing that we will solve all of the capacity needs going through the system. But we'll also get our reliability up to the 98, 99% all the time. Significantly increase safety because it's no modernized. And we come incredibly cost efficient because at the end of the day your, your cost to run a level four automation compared to level two or manual is dramatically. And so that is where we're number one focus is how to move the rail system to CBTC which is communications based train control platform screen doors into a fully automated rail system. That doesn't mean no employees by the way. I'm not suggesting that for one minute it means different types of skills and different types of roles, but a system equivalent, you know your local Dulles airport, you get the people mover, same kind of feel and situation that way. That is where our big focus is. After that there's clearly some potential need for some more infill stations and some people want to do some extensions. So I think we need to have a big conversation of extensions of where they really need to be versus political where people want them to be. Sure. And the land use needs to be the right land use to drive that extension either currently or, or by law to force the land use to be productive for that type of heavy rail investment.

[Santi Ruiz]

When you say productive Land use here. You specifically mean a lot of people living along those lines.

[Randy Clark]

A lot of people are activity centers. Yeah, we're, we're like we shouldn't be building a heavy rail. You shouldn't be building any rail system where that kind of cost to, you know, just a single family cul de sac for obvious reasons. Right. What we need is density and activity centers so people can live their lives with a much significant less transportation cost footprint and it drives the value of that investment. So there's also some infill stations. We want to do some brt. My priority across the region. We'll work with all of our partners on, you know, there's crazy big things happen around this region. Right. Like, you know, RFK and the Commanders massive chance to redo 175 acres at RFK new stadium. How do we fit into that puzzle? There's conversations going on there. We have two second entrance projects going on right now, going to announce another one coming up as early as next week. There's a lot going on here. But to me the biggest focus and I think for me as a leader in the team and the board, it's how do we do the old Athenian code, leave this place much better than when we got it. And one of those things is making sure a system that is starting to age is left in a much more modern way.

[Santi Ruiz]

You mentioned cutting back on consultants as part of the cost savings a little while ago. And in an interview a couple months ago, you talked about the consultant industrial complex. Was your phrase you tell listeners a, what you mean by that and then B, what does that mean in practice for you guys when you cut back on consultants and save money? What contracts are you doing away with? What are you bringing in house?

[Randy Clark]

Yeah, I think I have super into the transit industrial complex because consultants are an important part of our industry. I have many friends that work their way up. I'll need a job one day. Listen, consultants do really good work. I think the key here is you should and I think all the consultants do the same thing. We should be using consultants for A staff augmentation for a period of time until we ramp up the thing we need or B very specialized thing that we do not want to do in house or for a time frame. It's just not valuable to do in house. What we should not do is hire consultants. And 18 years later we have the same firm doing the work that we should have just in house. The second thing is our industry is so risk averse that we generally hire people internally or consultants or whatever, constantly do analysis to do a lot of, let's be honest, there's a lot of people that like to do butt covering and when. And that's not because of them as individual. It's our. It's our incentivized structure, our disincentivized structure all the way from the federal government to governors to mayors, to boards to executives, right? No one in our society really wants to be blamed for something. So if you keep adding layers, it's why we end up where, you know, there's this big fad now. It's kind of a joke. I've been talking about this abundance stuff my entire life now. I screwed up. I should have wrote a book, apparently, make millions of dollars, explain to people that it's just normal to build stuff. We've created so much lasagna that it's impossible to get a lot of stuff done. And that's where I mean by that. It's. Most people actually all want the same outcome. And to me, we gotta be able to think through risk differently and say the risk of not doing something is not usually thought of compared to how we analyze the thing that we're doing. And the opportunity cost really hurts us from a society of not building homes, not building better infrastructure.

[Santi Ruiz]

So I think most listeners will be fans of that at the top level. And I would love if you would drill down a little bit and talk about what pieces of that lasagna, of that, you know, set of demands on you do you experience at Washington Metro. Give us a concrete example here.

[Randy Clark]

Like everything from how we do city thought process, right? Like, yes, we could get hit with a Cat 5 hurricane. We're not probably going to. So how do we think about like, you know, we had a project when I got here thinking about solar panels on a garage, and we spent so much time and energy worrying about them getting ripped up in like a Cat 5 hurricane, which by the way, the whole building would be basically gone and that kind of stuff. We had bus shelters designed to basically get hit. Like literally part of the idea was if they get hit by a huge truck, they could survive. But we were spending like eight times more to do a bus shelter. So my whole pilot was, well, if it gets hit, which we only have a few a year, just put a new one up, literally. A bus shelter, you're building a bus shelter to be good for like 50 years. But the cost difference of just doing one, they replace a couple times. So we went from like 400 and some thousand dollars in a bus shelter to like 80.

[Santi Ruiz]

And where was that pressure to truck proof them coming from?

[Randy Clark]

I think just culture for a long time, right? Like everyone, everyone has their say in something and then by nature, everyone's going to want their thing to be the thing that, well, I can't have that come back on me or I don't have the maintenance assets later to deal with it. Or what of this or what of that. And when everyone in an organization adds risk, then when you get to the end, you have the lasagna. And that's what I mean by lasagna, right? The first layer is not that big of a deal. Seventeen layers later, you're like, oh my God, how did we get here? So no one is actually bad, or no one's malicious, or no one's being thoughtful of their thing. Sometimes I think as leaders, we have to be willing to create the framework of people. I go out of my way on my management team to say, I'm encouraging you to take more risk. Now, we're not going to change like track gauge. So what would happen? Well, the trains are going to fall off and people are going to die. That's not smart risk, but technology. We procure technology in the federal, in our world, kind of like we're procuring like a station. And so no, we got to be more nimble, more agile about how we do software that changes the time you do a procurement, the software version's already changed. So get more outcome focused on the procurement versus being more specific. Whereas if we have a concrete, you know, mix that might be more specific because it's, you know, you know, the weight, that rating that you're trying to do and just big institutions, especially institutions that have had historic like this place, no place in the world has oversight like us because of where we are. If the same issue happened in Chicago or San Diego, it would just go on here, front page, Washington Post or all over Twitter. Everyone in the world that lives here rides our system. So we have three states that are doing oversight. We have gao, we have fta, we have usdot, a White House, ntsb. We have our own oig. So when you put all that together culturally, most people will always work towards covering themselves. Again, not in a bad way, because there's going to be an audit finding. And what I try to get people to think about is if we don't have any audit findings at all, we probably actually have buttoned up too hard. The key is we don't want significant audit findings that are true failures. If someone found that we had, we Missed an extra copy of an email in a folder. That's different than someone intentionally committed fraud or malfeasance or things like that. And that's balancing risk a little. So just trying to give our staff the ability to say what's the right way to go about stop. Not we did this in 1995 this way as in 1995, it might have been the right way, but in 2025 with say video or AI or other things, we could do things differently.

[Santi Ruiz]

Give me one example of a consultant relationship Washington Metro had that you guys got rid of to save money.

[Randy Clark]

I'm not going to get involved in individual. Yeah, that. I would never do that because that might sound like someone wasn't doing something right. We have an enormous amount of consultant help here because they are team players. They're part of our team. So we might have skinny things this down over here or we might have said, you know what, this, we've been housed. So we did this for three years now. Let's in house this.

[Santi Ruiz]

You don't have to name names, but what kinds of things might you want to bring in house?

[Randy Clark]

We did some kind of community engagement marketing stuff that quite frankly is better in in house because it's part of our DNA. Some staff augg that we had on some project controls and other things, just general project management. I think we've rebalanced that a tad. It's a little bit everywhere. For instance, for a while people are like, well, I can't get a headcount. Okay, now I'm going to give you a headcount. But you are losing it out of your budget the other way. And it makes people think of that trade off. So I think it's a little bit of smattering everywhere. We will always have consultants. Consultants are very important for certain things. But I also want very good staff to feel like they have the ball and they're responsible for things.

[Santi Ruiz]

Sam.