I've spent the last couple hours trying to find statistics on Metro safety and transportation safety overall. It's not all nice and neatly organized, and I've had to do some ballpark estimating based on the numbers I can find.
The reason I have been thinking about this is that there has been a lot of talk lately about Metro's lack of safety and the need to shut it down to make repairs. The new General Manager is committed to fixing things, but at the same time, the Federal Transit Administration has seized control of safety issues and is throwing its weight around threatening to shut things down if the GM doesn't do things the way they want them done.
Everyone is talking about safety. Meanwhile Metro service has taken a nose dive. The FTA has demanded that trains be slowed way down so they draw less current and there will be less arcing. (Smoke by arcing has caused a death in an asthma sufferer as mentioned in the posts above.)
So anyway, Metro sucks now, and it's about to get a lot worse as they start shutting down tracks to work on them. All in the name of safety.
So let's look at safety.
This chart came from a
2009 FTA report on the years 2003-2008. I annotated it to include the two bars on the far right. Those are my back of the envelope calculations based on easily found data on deaths in Metrorail, and the more difficult to find data on the number and length of trips. But I think my calculations are very close to being accurate.
What it shows is that even in the worst year for Metro, when the accident that kicked this thread off happened, riding metro was twice as safe as commuting by car. (On average) And if you widen the sample size to include the years Metro has been having a bad time, the accident and the asthma death, Metro is about 15 times safer than driving.
So when the FTA talks about shutting down all of Metro for safety, they are full of it. It will make passengers more likely to die on the road. They should leave the GM alone and let him schedule the maintenance in a way that is logical from a logistics and efficiency viewpoint. Metro is safer than they would have you believe.