Photo by T.D. Ford

The Examiner’s Kytja Weir reports today that six of Metro’s top executives and 116 Metro employees have access to a pool of take-home vehicles, some of whom use them to get to and from work, others not.

According to Metro spokesman Dan Stessel, Metro General Manager Richard Sarles “regularly” ride the Yellow Line to work, while deputy general managers Dave Kubicek and Carol Dillon Kissal, Assistant General Manager of Bus Services Jack Requa, and Chief of Staff Shiva Pant “occasionally” use the take-home vehicles.

Certain Metro employees are allowed to have access to the agency’s pool of cars for work-related trips, including 88 mid-level managers and superintendents. “They are given to essential workers who must be able to respond anywhere in the agency’s 1,500 square-mile service area, according to Metro, as the supervisors may need to travel before the system opens or to reach construction sites or tracks that don’t have direct transit service,” notes the Examiner. The number of employees with access to the vehicles comes in under one percent of the agency’s total workforce.

All told, there’s not much controversy here, at least if put in historical context. Back in 2005, then General Director Richard A. White was forced to scale back on driving privileges for a large number of the 135 Metro employees that drove agency cars. Additionally, he moved to limit free parking for members of Metro’s board, some of which — including Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) — admitted that they didn’t ride the system all that often. The year prior, White himself fessed up to using his Metro-issued SUV (jokingly referred to as the Black Line) to get to and from work most of the time during his four-year tenure.

Moreover, certain employees need to get around more flexibly than Metro can allow them to. Yes, it’s a wonderful system, but it’s big, and as many riders know, not always on time.

Still, there’s certainly something to be said for senior Metro officials and board members using the system they’re charged with operating and overseeing. For long periods of time, the District’s representatives on the Metro board didn’t regularly use Metro; only Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) made a practice of regularly using the bus before he was removed from board as part of a council committee re-shuffling. When Councilmember Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) took a seat on the board in July, she pledged to use the system more.