Navigating Metro's Financial Future

Today we talked to Randy Clarke, the head of DC’s Metro system, WMATA. If you’re a transit nerd, you probably know about Clarke — he’s become something of a celebrity for his public presence and disciplined improvement of a transit system that was facing disaster in the aftermath of COVID (and the decision to allow large swathes of federal employees to work from home).

I’ve been a regular WMATA rider for long periods of my life, and what Clarke has done over the last three years has been pretty remarkable. We’ll get into some of the details here, but what stands out to me — and why I so wanted to record this conversation — is that Clarke’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 tradeoffs at all: between safety and speed, catching fare evaders and keeping costs down, etc. How has he pulled it off?

You can read the transcript for this conversation (and others) at www.statecraft.pub.

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