IsMetroOnFire.com and Related Article

D.C.’s Metro Catches Fire More Than Four Times A Week

The Washington, D.C., subway system is a mess — chronic delays, malfunctioning air conditioning and, earlier this year, it was shut down for a whole day because it was not safe to ride. The secretary of transportation has considered shutting down the whole system because of safety lapses, and the Metro system’s proposed solution involves shutting down five stretches of track entirely for at least a week (and single-tracking others for up to 42 days). Ride-sharing services are licking their chops.

But the most damning indictment of the subway system may be the existence of IsMetroOnFire.com, which lets commuters check which lines are currently on fire. I studied IsMetroOnFire’s associated Twitter account to see how bad things have been this year, and it hasn’t been pretty:

The good news: Metro’s one-day emergency shutdown may have helped! During the day of repairs and inspections on March 16, workers found 27 power issues, including frayed cables in three different sections of track that were so badly damaged that trains shouldn’t have been running over them at all. Since, for once, these problems were caught before they caused a conflagration, there appears to have been a lull in fires for a little while after the shutdown. But the respite was short lived. Since April 23, there have been 3.5 fires a week.

Overall, IsMetroOnFire logged 85 fires by May 16, or a little over four per week.1 And IsMetroOnFire is more likely to be undercounting fires than overcounting....