ENO CENTER FOR TRANSPORTATION
Executive Summary
Public transit maintenance is not often headline news. Yet with high profile closures and disruptions to rail systems in major metropolitan areas like New York, Baltimore, and Washington, the condition of this infrastructure is very much in the public eye. These systems all need major track maintenance overhauls, but the real overhaul needs to be in how agencies conduct their asset management and maintenance programs.
Together, major rail systems in U.S. cities move millions of people every day, and the lack of regular maintenance and upkeep has direct effects on the efficiency of personal mobility and regional economies. While local elected officials and voters time and again approve proposals to raise revenues for new projects, reinvesting in existing systems is too often ignored. But the more maintenance is deferred, the more it will cost to return to a state of good repair in the future, and the less reliable the service will become for riders.
This study examines rail maintenance program needs and practices through dozens of interviews with public and private stakeholders and experts around the country. The consensus was that asset management practices in the United States are inadequate to meet today’s maintenance challenges. The first step that agencies need to take in their efforts to run a consistently well-maintained system is to dramatically improve their transit asset management. While the federal government has stepped in to require transit agencies to pay better attention to maintenance, the industry still lags international best practices.
True plans and processes based on the actual observed condition of the infrastructure— predictively repairing or replacing them when conditions and timing warrant—is needed. Such an approach requires structural and cultural change, and significantly more initial investment to coordinate data from sensors, monitoring devices, and human observation. Track inspectors and front line workers are the most keenly aware of the long term problems with deferred maintenance, but face legacy work rules and limited budgets to invest in modern asset management systems. Agency leadership and boards prioritize system expansion over the needs to keep the system in a state of good repair.
The paper also explores the use of private contractors for some or all of track maintenance, which is often proposed as a solution to maintenance challenges. Older rail systems in the United States rely almost exclusively on in-house staff to conduct basic infrastructure maintenance and upkeep. But when there are extraordinary needs, they will also contract with private firms for that work. New systems are turning to private contractors for even the most basic of needs.
Once agencies have a firm grasp on asset management, they can consider alternative approaches to rail maintenance, including whether the agency uses in house staff for a particular project or contracts it out to private companies. Contracting out does not necessarily offer a better approach to rail maintenance but, if done carefully, it may create a different set of incentives and accountability than some agencies rely on today. If considering a contracted approach, an agency must act to minimize negative effects on the existing workforce. When contracting, agencies need to carry out a fair and functional procurement process, write an effective contract, and manage it effectively.
There is no single “cure-all” policy or mechanism that will fix all the problems that are resulting in the infrastructure failures and deferred maintenance that plague many U.S. transit systems today. However, agencies must start by creating a culture of maintenance prioritization through effective asset management. The goal must be to go beyond complying with baseline federal rules and put in place state of the art practices in condition-based and life-cycle maintenance. Contracting represents a way for agencies to test alternative methods, but they need to publicly track, test, and benchmark the alternative approaches for transparency and accountability, which in turn also aid in garnering and maintaining public trust.
Introduction
Public transit in the United States is in a maintenance crisis. The condition of many rail transit systems is alarmingly poor. Partly as a result, ridership is declining, budgets are strained, and public opinion of rail transit is wavering. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported to Congress that the poor condition of the nation’s rail systems (subway, light rail, streetcars, and commuter trains) represents a “major challenge” and pegged investment needs to bring them to a state-of-good-repair at $140 billion.
These crises are not just an inconvenience for travelers and workers in metropolitan America, but also threaten the economic health and very functionality of our global cities. After a derailment last year at New York’s Penn Station, the governor of New York warned of a “summer of hell” for rail riders on one side of Manhattan while on the other side, a century-old subway line would close for 15 months for major repairs.2 In Washington, the entire subway was shut down suddenly one weekday when officials there deemed the system unsafe for passengers due to its poor condition. Baltimore’s subway system was completely shut down for weeks after safety inspections determined that parts of track “deteriorated to the point where no train movement is allowed.” Outside the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail system suffered major delays after a 2017 derailment on the line connecting downtown San Francisco to the airport.
The maintenance of rail infrastructure is an expensive and complex endeavor. As new rail systems have proliferated and agencies continue to defer maintenance, the total that U.S. transit agencies spent on rail maintenance more than tripled from 1991 to 2016 ($13.2 billion to $45.1 billion), far outstripping the rate of inflation, the increase in track mileage, and ridership growth during that period. Yet systems continue to fall behind: needs for new maintenance dollars include $9 billion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) subways in New York and $15.5 billion for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation (WMATA), both of which far exceed the resources available.
Part of the problem is the lack of long-term accountability for maintenance. Many agencies’ board members are appointed by local elected officials and lack in-depth knowledge of rail maintenance. Top-level management and leadership priorities are often affected by the outcomes of state and local elections. A greater emphasis on reinvesting in the existing system—an inherently political challenge—is a first and necessary step to solving the problem of deferring and compounding maintenance costs. In New York, one investigation recently found that “officials knew for years … [about] sections of deteriorating track,” yet the efforts to maintain them were delayed “to give work time to a nearby passenger hall renovation” backed by the governor. Maryland officials contend the transit agency knew its rail infrastructure was substandard more than a year before its recent closure.
These examples highlight a pervasive problem: agency leadership often prioritizes capital expansion and other improvements over track maintenance. These challenges have given rise to concerns about the lack of an institutional “culture” for state-of-good-repair at several transit agencies. A series of industry roundtables convened by the federal government pointed to the need to make the upkeep and management of existing assets a core agency process.
Given the fiscal, political, and institutional challenges agencies are facing, public transit needs a wholesale reform in the way it monitors, plans for, and executes maintenance. The goal of this report is to explore how public transit agencies can be more cost-effective, improve outcomes, and increase accountability for upkeep, maintenance, and modernization of their existing rail systems. Using existing data sources and off-the-record interviews with dozens of stakeholders, it also examines how different agencies perform maintenance work now, including the role of private contractors in public transportation maintenance. The report concludes with recommendations for better track maintenance with constrained resources.
Download full version (PDF): Managing Rail Assets and Leveraging Competition
About the Eno Center for Transportation
www.enotrans.org
The Eno Center for Transportation (Eno) was founded in 1921 by William Phelps Eno (1859-1945), who pioneered the field of traffic management in the United States and Europe. Mr. Eno sought to promote safe mobility by ensuring that traffic control became an accepted role of government and traffic engineering a recognized professional discipline.
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