10 ms·

I lived in the DC area for 20 years (1999-2019) and commuted daily on the Metro for many of those years. The things you say are true, but they were also true 15

• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  DC shouldn't be a state, it would give that "state" too much power and also make politicians there outsized politically powerful and we have enough of that already with states like rhode island, wyoming, and the dakotas
  • Bud 5y ago
    • dnautics 5y ago
      It would be the only state with no agricultural interests, the only state with no ports, the only state where the majority of the residents work for the federal government... The last one alone is pretty scary and a bit of a conflict of interest.
      • lmm 5y ago
        > the only state with no ports Huh? What about, IDK, Idaho?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • dnautics 5y ago
          https://itd.idaho.gov/poe-locations/ https://itd.idaho.gov/poe-locations/
          • lmm 5y ago
            I think those are weigh stations, not ports in the usual sense of the word.
            • dnautics 5y ago
              Ports of entry are surprisingly important regulatory entities at the state level, and DC doesn't have any. Don't deflect from your ignorance.
              • lmm 5y ago
                Here is a list of usual definitions of the ordinary word port: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/port https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/port . If you mean some term of art which is opposed to the usual everyday meaning of the word, it's your responsibility to be explicit. Don't deflect from your poor communication.
  • bobsil1 5y ago
    DC residents should get one-person-one-vote, like most things. We should get rid of 1700s planter superuser backdoors like the disproportional Senate and electoral college.
    • bobsil1 5y ago
      Then we should rebrand away from the slaver-drafted constitution to the Free States of America, a fourth founding after the original, post-Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. That would match what we actually have, a multiethnic democracy welcoming global talent. Giving residents of Wyoming 70× the Senate voting power of any Californian is a joke.
      • imgabe 5y ago
        Not a joke. It was the intent that populous states should not be able to steamroll less populous states in the Senate.
        • MagnumOpus 5y ago
          In other words, rigging the Senate towards people in empty states. (Land ownership shouldn't matter in a democratic republic, people should.)
          • imgabe 5y ago
            There’s this whole other part of Congress called the House of Representatives that is proportional to population. Land ownership has nothing to do with anything. Everyone gets to vote for their Senators (except people in DC). We did away with the requirement to own land a long time ago.
        • UncleMeat 5y ago
          It is important to define the term "steamroll." If California broke up into 200 states, would they need 2 Senators each to protect themselves from being steamrolled? If so, then why don't Californians already need 200 Senators?
  • imgabe 5y ago
    That's not how this works. We create a government and decide what rights citizens have. We did that, wrote a whole constitution about it. Then we make sure every citizen has those rights. If there are imbalances in the design of the government, that's a separate problem that we fix on its own. Depriving some subset of citizens of their rights is not the answer.
    • torstenvl 5y ago
• jdavis703 5y ago
  > Whatever problem there was with the automatic braking system, they decided to just give up on it instead of fixing it. It's minor, but it slows things down. This is just not true. Partial control was restored years ago [0], and my understanding is they still want this capability on other lines. But WMATA has probably been busy addressing numerous other NTSB complaints that impact the ability to provide basic service (see the 7000 series recall), so smooth braking just isn’t that important. 0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/computer-driven-trains-returning-to-metros-red-line-five-years-after-deadly-rail-crash/2014/09/20/68790a32-3e04-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/com...
  • imgabe 5y ago
    One of my friends in DC was just complaining the other day about how the conductor wasn't able to manually stop the train properly and caused a delay (that led to a missed connection). Clearly it's still not back 100%, even 12 years later. I mean, if they cared about fixing it, they'd fix it by now. Any halfway competent system should be able to figure out something like that after more than a decade.
    • GlenTheMachine 5y ago
      Follow the (lack of) money.
• jaybrendansmith 5y ago
  So ... do any of you follow politics? One of the two major parties has given up on governing the country, and has not done so for ten years. This 'grand' old party seems to be toying with the idea of giving up on Democracy next. And we are confused as to why the DC Metro system cannot be fixed?? Here's a tip: Fix that party, and you will find that suddenly the DC Metro has money to fix the automatic braking system.
  • wbl 5y ago
    The DC Metro has plenty of money. They just don't have competence.
    • pas 5y ago
      For how expensive the US is. No they don't have enough. (And yes, on top of it they are likely not the best in the mass transit game. As it's simply not a priority in the US anywhere else either.)
  • joejerryronnie 5y ago
    [flagged]
    • vkou 5y ago
      I'm not sure one can have a productive discussion if they believe that the democratic party of 2021 is anywhere near Karl Marx.
    • actually_a_dog 5y ago
      > ...ramming through a purely partisan agenda via reconciliation and changing the rules when they don’t like the outcome of the game. You can say this regardless of which party you consider to be the "other" party, except that one party started it a long time ago. Because obstructionism has been the name of the game for so long, these tactics have become necessary in order to get anything done. It's a perfectly rational response to how the rules of the game have changed, IMO.
• dnautics 5y ago
  > DC needs to be a state. Alternatively, give back all of the residential parts back to Maryland (like Arlington was given back to VA). For a long time this wasn't politically feasible because DC was rough and MD would not have wanted it, but by now the tax base has to be high enough for it to be a net positive for MD. Of course, the democrats will lose 3 "safe" electoral votes but you could amend the constitution to give them over to Maryland and then take the extra three away over the course of 30 years, or something.
  • imgabe 5y ago
    MD doesn't want that and neither does DC. DC is not Maryland. It's its own place with its own identity.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      I hear this all the time from clueless rich DC residents who get wrapped up in all sorts of granfalloons. You don't think "Arlington" is its own place with its own identity separate from the rest of Virgina? Moreover, anacostia residents probably have more in common with residents of pg county than residents of palisades, who have more in common with bethesda residents than anacostia residents.
      • imgabe 5y ago
        If the residents of Arlington want to form their own state and secede from Virginia, I'll support them. As it stands, they already have representation in Congress. > Moreover, anacostia residents probably have more in common with residents of pg county than residents of palisades, who have more in common with bethesda residents than anacostia residents. Sure, and residents of Manhattan probably have more in common with people in northern New Jersey than they do with people in Buffalo, but New York still gets to be a state. So what?
        • dnautics 5y ago
          My point is: There's no shared identity among DC residents, the most of whom don't even really live there all that long, due to political cycles/fluid flight to the suburbs of MD and VA. Your statement is pure nonsense. The most sensible solution is to give DC back to Maryland (which is where it came from) and thereby give the residents representation, which is your end goal. If you want some other end goal, it has to be weighed against the other absurdities of making DC a state.
• bobthepanda 5y ago
  The difference is that in 1990, the system was still in kind of new shape. Generally speaking, the lifecycle for a transit system's components look like 40-50 years. That puts the expiry date of the first DC Metro lines at 2016 and beyond, which roughly lines up with when things started falling apart. Basically, the entire system has always run on fumes. That only recently stopped cutting it.
• thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > The things you say are true, but they were also true 15-20 years ago when the Metro was leaps and bounds better than it is today. They were true in the 1970s when the Metro was first built. So it can't be the whole story. There's much more to it. It's not just that the Metro is bad, it's that it keeps getting worse and worse. > It's not like public transit in DC is impossible. It used to work, if not perfectly, much much better than it does today. > DC needs to be a state. It's unconscionable that it isn't and the rights of 680,000+ US citizens are ignored because it isn't politically expedient to give them the representation they're due. That would help a lot. Wasn't DC also not a state for the last 20 years, and in the 70s?
• madengr 5y ago
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  > DC needs to be a state. It's unconscionable that it isn't and the rights of 680,000+ US citizens are ignored because it isn't politically expedient to give them the representation they're due. I hope this doesn't sound like a lecture, but whenever a question about fundamental rights emerges, it's often useful to turn to the Constitution and Federalist Papers to understand the rationale and intent behind the system that was created. While it's certainly possible to disagree and change things over time, there's usually a valid historical reasoning behind why things were made the way they were that is lost. As far as I understand the history (I'm open to fact-checking as I'm not a historian and never lived in DC) Washington D.C. was intentionally never supposed to be a state so that no single state would have extra power and influence over the operation of the central government. This makes a lot of sense when you think of this in terms of bureaucracy and power creep that the Founders were trying to avoid. If Washington D.C. was a state from the beginning, its interests and issues would inevitably begin to take precedence over those of other states because the Capitol would be on land it controlled. The Capitol was intended to be completely neutral ground when it came to favoring any state over any other. Now you might ask, were the people of that area supposed to have no representation at all? Not exactly. As far as I understand the intent, Washington D.C. was actually never supposed to have a large permanent residential population. DC was intended for whatever government buildings that needed to exist and that's basically it. I'm not 100% sure how that changed and what historical factors led to DC growing into a larger city, but that seems to be a key mistake. The question now becomes what do you do with these people to ensure that they're represented? I think most people are on the same page here with wanting all Americans represented, but is making them a state the right solution? I'd argue no and I'd like to give a slightly different reason why. A lot of the commenters here are thinking in terms of balance when it comes down to Black/White or Democratic/Republican when it comes to adding states, but I'd argue that the key division in the nation that needs to be balanced is Urban/Rural. A lot of the ways that people in this country think differently come down to whether they're more Urban or Rural-minded. How people think about self-responsibility and living with neighbors comes down to this divide: you can easily see this viewpoint encapsulated when it comes to gun rights and education and how the Urban/Rural divide works there. One big issue with DC that I see (as far as I understand the area) is that it's so small that there's no substantial rural influence possible. Even the bluest of blue states that are dominated by urban politics like New York have some kind of rural areas and constituencies that they have to pay attention to and who hold some influence and mindshare in a state legislature. As far as I understand the area, Washington D.C. can never have any kind of rural influence just due to the density and size. I think adding a state without even a theoretical influence of one factor possible is very questionable and likely going to be incredibly divisive.