RobotRisk Autonomous Systems Incident & Risk Register
RobotRisk / other / WMATA

WMATA

Products: n/a. Risk band: Low   RobotRisk index 14.1/100 (incidents/exposure, time-weighted) · 45th percentile of 62 other companies.

Analyst brief

The record spans three entries across a sixteen-year window: a fatal 2009 Fort Totten Red Line collision attributed to an automatic train control track circuit failure (severity 5), the resulting 2009 systemwide suspension of Automatic Train Operation (severity 5, regulatory), and a January 2025 entry of 217 station overruns following ATO reactivation on the Red Line (severity 2, malfunction). The record combines one historical fatality-and-regulatory-response pair with a recent, lower-severity operational recurrence tied to the same automated train control function. The 45.2 percentile and low band reflect a mixed severity profile dominated by an older high-severity event rather than a sustained high-frequency pattern.

Entries by year and severity

012025 S2: 1125
S1S2S3S4S5

By incident type

By severity

RobotRisk index vs other alternatives

Comparisons over time

RobotRisk index over time

Yearly entries vs category average

malfunction over time vs category

fatality over time vs category

regulatory over time vs category

Incident log (3 unique incidents)

SevDateTypeLocationIncidentSource
S201/2025 malfunction Washington, DC, USA217 station overruns after ATO reactivation on Red Line · 217 overrun events, Red Line fleet Railway Track and Struct
S506/22
2009 · 16:58
fatality Washington, DC, USAFort Totten Red Line collision (ATC track circuit failure) · 2 trains / 1 fatal collision NTSB
S506/2009 regulatory WMATA suspends Automatic Train Operation systemwide after Fort Totten crash · fleet-wide, ~15 years Railway Age

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