here to talk about that this morning are stewart freudburg, the deputy executive director. tan i don't span know and robert griffith is the deputy planning director. thank you for being with us on "viewpoint" this morning. >> good morning. >> the tragic smoke incident is one of a number of troubling incidents we've seen here in this area raising questions about safety as well as metro's ability to maintain the system and to continue to handle the capacity 700,000 trips a day. what are your thoughts about that? >> first of all, thanks for having us here this morning, pat. we really appreciate that. metro is an absolutely critical system to the region. as you say it moves 700,000 trips per day. it's essential for our economy and the future growth that we anticipate going forward, and having a safe transit system is absolutely critical. metro has invested a huge amount of money in improving the safety and reliability of the system over the last five years. it's a safe system. it's a very tragic accident. it's under investigation. people will get to the bottom of what happened