Photo by James Calder.

As he rushed out to attend a meeting of his agency’s Riders’ Advisory Council last night, someone among a small gathering of a half-dozen reporters and photographers teased new Metro general manager and chief operating officer Richard Sarles. The individual said that they hoped that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the day after the last such gathering inside the executive conference room at WMATA’s headquarters, when John Catoe abruptly announced his resignation mere hours after talking transit.

“I hope that curse doesn’t survive,” joked Sarles.

While he doesn’t need to worry about that one, the transit agency he now leads on a permanent basis certainly has plenty of legitimate curses for Sarles to attend to.

“The number one priority is safety. We put in place the groundwork, which is what I intended to do during the interim period,” said Sarles, who is definitely all about building — his time spent in the construction industry was not lost on the roundtable, during which Sarles often used terms like “building blocks” and “rebuilding” to describe the state of the transit system. “My thing is delivering results, not talking about them.”

A large amount of the discussion revolved around bag searches, and Sarles’ affinity for the program. Time and again, Sarles fell back on his experience in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan areas. Despite the fact that he repeatedly referred to himself as “no counter-terrorism expert,” Sarles basically reasoned that if the bag checks worked as a deterrent in New York, they should work on Metro.

“The most renowned police department, in terms of counter-terrorism efforts [the NYPD], does this, as well as Port Authority, New Jersey Transit. The reason they do it — and it’s just one tool — is that terrorists, not all of them, like to plan things out, scope things out, see how things are going to work,” explained Sarles. “You don’t want them, the bad guys, to feel that everything’s very predictable, so that they can come in and do something, and it’s the same thing every day. You don’t want to be static.”