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What are you talking about, WMATA is a great program! One of the best metro transportation systems in the United States, and it works pretty well. The trains are always on time, the stations are relatively clean and safe, service is reliable.
WMATA specifically is bounded by a few unique concerns that make it a poor fit for UBI (which I'll get back to):
WMATA serves Washington DC, the nation's capital. It was never designed to run a profit. Nobody cares if it runs a profit. WMATA is entirely designed to serve the needs of a few hundred thousand government employees. Out of the resources of the entire nation. This is like complaining that the Washington Monument runs at a loss. There's no limit to what the government is willing to spend. Ok, maybe there is a limit, but it's way higher than what the free marker, or the resources of a less important city, would allocate.
WMATA doesn't have a dedicated funding stream. The DC metro in general is split between DC, Maryland, and Virginia, who all jealously fight for every scrap of infrastructure spending, on top of which the federal government sits. You can't build anything in the DMV without everyone keeping score and making sure they get their cut. To get around this, WMATA is not funded with a direct tax or other revenue source. DC, Maryland, and Virginia simply agree to allocate so much money to the system, which is never enough, and then every year WMATA threatens to cut services until the states cough up more dough or the federal government steps in.
WMATA isn't even designed for the convenience of the DC Metro. It's designed for the convenience of federal workers. The original WMATA grid plans (rather famously actually) didn't build stations where population density was greatest. It was deliberately designed to change the landscape of the DMV. An example of this is that WMATA lines extend way, way far out into suburbs no other urban metro line would ever serve, past any sort of free-market calculus. The silver line out to Dulles, for example, added ten miles through mostly empty-suburbs just to connect to Dulles Airport. But it was felt that the nation's capital needed a metro connection to its second major airport, and that this was more important than all other considerations and constraints.
This is not a program that could have been modest but was blown out by patronage graft. WMATA is not expensive because it funds generous sinecure do-nothing jobs. WMATA is expensive because it is throwing the resources of the entire federal government at a strictly local program, with no care for constraints. This is not like UBI at all. The guys who maintain the nuclear button probably also gets a lot of sloppy wealth redistribution, but nobody cares when it's considered important enough.
Besides all that, the metro is fairly well-run. WMATA GM Randy Clarke has been expanding service and WMATA has recovered the best from Covid of any American metro outside New York.
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