Opinion | Don’t blame employees for Metro’s inept management

By working at home, employees pollute less, consume less and have more time for their families and themselves — instead of rushing off to work, buying more, driving more because they have less time and paying less attention to their loved ones because they are stressed and short of time.

In other words, employees mercifully have gotten off the treadmill and don’t want to climb back on. They, their families and the environment are healthier for it. The Post should salute that return to sanity instead of demeaning it.

Metro’s problems — bad management, failure to force nonpaying riders to pay, lack of maintenance — go back decades. Kindly refrain from blaming employees for Metro’s inept management.

Camille Grosdidier, Washington

Alarm about the Metro system in the July 21 editorial was commendable but incomplete.

Metro needs a campaign urging civic-minded citizens to get out of their cars and Ubers and onto the train. You can’t carp about climate change while refusing to use public transportation. (Count the traffic streaming into the Kennedy Center’s garage every night.) The Post should support such a campaign and encourage businesses to reward employees who use Metro.

Make fare-jumping a crime — punishable by cleaning Metro cars and buses.

Prune middle management. Is anyone convinced that Metro’s staff is fat-free?

Limit single-tracking to two stations. Under then-General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld, single-tracking between multiple stations often forced riders to wait 20 or 30 minutes for a train. And install more X crossings — a simple piece of technology dating back nearly two centuries — between stations to eliminate wait times altogether.

Those who lionized Mr. Wiedefeld probably never rode Metro. Riders could see the emperor was naked. He cut late-night service in a city with a booming population of young professionals. His interminable single-tracking pushed riders away in droves, never to return. And what followed the misery of SafeTrack? A second program of misery: Back2Good. All those millions spent, all those riders burdened, and we weren’t even back to “good” yet.

Don’t make the same mistake with General Manager Randy Clarke. Hold him accountable.