VIRGINIA - It will take the National Transportation Safety Board awhile to determine exactly what caused last week's disastrous Red Line accident in Washington, but there are two factors the board should specifically address: the parsimony with which all levels of government treat public transit and the silliness of the Washington subway system not having a dedicated revenue source.

Had there been enough money at the right time, Metro could well have replaced or substantially refitted the 30-year-old rail car that ran amok, as the NTSB recommended five years ago after another fatal Metro accident.

We still do not know why the train that crashed Monday did not stop automatically. Its operator was among the nine people killed in the accident. But Metro's electronic system, which should have braked the train, has failed before on older cars, and officials said that the car was two months overdue for brake work. Some of this is management, and Metro General Manager John B. Catoe Jr. has been wrestling with deferred maintenance (which is almost always a money issue) since taking the job in January 2007.

"We recommended to either retrofit those cars or to phase them out of the fleet," NTSB member Deborah Hersman said last week. "They have not been able to do that and our recommendation was not addressed. "

I start with the question of money because it has been Metro's Achilles heel from the beginning. The D.C. area is a complex region politically . That Metro exists is a small miracle. Its construction required the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia, the D.C. Council and the U.S. Congress to agree on the same word-for-word, comma-for-comma enabling language. That nailed down the construction agreements.

Construction is fun and politicians love it. Running and maintaining something, however, is hard work, and it is much less visible to constituents, until something goes wrong. As Ted Lutz, Metro's former general manager, once told me, "You never saw a politician cut a ribbon at an asphalt overlay project."