Photo by Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie.

By the looks of it, the discourse at today’s meeting between the National Safety Transportation Board and WMATA’s board of directors is proceeding in a much more mutual fashion than the smackdown that the NTSB handed the transit agency back in July. Sure, the NTSB, including Chairman Deborah Hersman, are still hammering the safety board’s extensive recommendations resulting from the investigation into the June 2009 Red Line crash. But things appear to be moving in a constructive direction, with WMATA board members asking for practical suggestions from the NTSB members on fixing the problems.

NTSB board member Robert Zumwalt, though, made one of the most interesting observations we’ve heard in some time about Metro at the meeting: “There’s no mention of safety in Metro’s charter,” he noted.

Wait, really? That seemed a little crazy. How could the most important document of such a vital agency not contain one single mention about its responsibility to keep its riders safe from crashes and other mechanical disasters?

But we did a little reading, and Zumwalt’s actually right. The only mentions of passenger safety in WMATA’s charter are located in the section of the charter which establishes the Metro Transit Police (Section 76) and the part of the document which exempts WMATA from regulation by the federal government (Section 77). There actually is nothing in WMATA’s charter that says that the agency has an obligation to keep their riders safe. To be fair, the agency’s mission and stategic framework include numerous sections on safety.

Still — you’d think that WMATA’s founders might have slipped something into the document about keeping customers safe.