Photo by Samer Farha

Like several other local bloggers, I was on hand for a roundtable discussion on Wednesday evening with Metro General Manager John Catoe. My story on the meeting was basically done earlier today, and I had planned to post it just as soon as I gave it a polish after I got back from a lunch meeting. I was by no means expecting to return to my computer to discover that Catoe had suddenly resigned.

By now you’ve read Catoe’s official statement on his departure, but given that he spent a little more than an hour last night sharing some of his personal thoughts and feelings about the current state of the transit system with us, I thought we should just go through the transcript again and see if we can gain any insight into what could have brought about this surprising decision.

Catoe started out last night being fairly candid in his assessment of the current state of Metro, repeatedly taking the time to explain the various factors that have led to the system not performing well since the June 22 Red Line crash. And his outlook for when these problems might improve was not very cheery:

We do have a reduction in ridership. Some of it is a result of the accident in June, and we’re operating in manual mode, and you can’t get the timing down as well as you can in the automated mode. But if you look across the country, it is also because of the economy.

We are expanding the tests in the real-time detection system. It’s still going to take a few months of testing for that to happen. I do not see us going back into automated mode in the next couple of months, I think it’s going to be a little bit longer than that. And we have not received the official cause of the accident from the NTSB. I don’t want to go back into automatic mode and there’s something else out there that I’m not aware of.