> One local figure spoke to Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld and urged him to make sure Amazon got to ride on one of its newest, 7000-Series trains. Wiedefeld, who says he can’t recall whether the official was from Virginia, Maryland, or the District, responded by explaining that public transportation doesn’t work that way.
Wiedefeld, incidentally, is a total bad-ass. He was hired at the end of 2015. In 2017, the first year they started measuring end-to-end travel time, on-time performance was a dismal 66%. In Q2 of 2019, it was 87%. In 2016, he shut down the entire system for days, and entire lines for weeks at a time, for emergency repairs. He's steam-rolled over NIMBYs, dramatically shutting down entire stations all summer so crumbling platforms can be completely rebuilt: https://ggwash.org/view/72561/metro-reasons-loud-yellow-and-.... (Accomplishing in three months what took years of delays and disruptions during prior, partial shut-downs.) He's brought the hammer down on the WMATA union, controlling costs and resisting calls to overtax the system by extending service: https://wamu.org/story/17/04/27/transit-union-turns-back-met...; https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2018/09/18/metro...; https://wamu.org/story/16/11/03/wmata_board_struggles_to_rea.... Not all heroes wear capes.