D.C. Metro: No Fare Hikes! Crash it, then a do-over as a Regional Authority

Metro's troubles are legend. Whether it's raising blood pressures, or murdering its passengers outright. Only hick tourists think it's wonderous, most feeding off the archaic notion that the negative benchmark is the NYC Subway. News flash--I'll take the unheated, uncooled, tiled tunnels and screech of the 1 and 9 lines in Brooklyn than the crap I've experienced since 1976. Perhaps it's yet another in the legion of metaphors for Washington as a orphan child of the republic since 1800, a prison to everything from parochialism to racism, as compared with the grand capitals of the rest of the world.

Just as Metro's Board considers yet more fare hikes, the notorious Red Line suffers another bit of drama today: a fire.

Fare hikes, a higher subsidy from Maryland, DC or newly Confederate Va. isn't going to work. The only answer is to start over, create a Regional Transportation Authority with an individual taxing functionality for a collection of counties and towns in the D-M-V. Bust up MARC and VRE and fold that in, just like the Port Authority of NY/NJ. The buses, too. All of them.

Of course that sounds like too much "change." Even wingnut McDonnell of Ol' Virginny needs some government largesse and fiefs to convey.