It certainly was an interesting evening.
The original purpose of the meeting was apparently to discuss changes to the eligibility requirements, in accordance with the 2003 task force recommendations, but that was deferred to address the “operational issues”. Some people were kind of put out with that it seemed, they’d travelled specifically for that discussion.
We would like to correct a previous posting regarding the meeting times, based on information the board chairman provided. Apparently, the web site lists the official committee meeting time, not the pre-meeting discussion and testimony times (the 4pm meeting). In the end, it started earlier than that (3:30pm).
Even so, there wasn’t much time. There were over 60 people trying to crowd (literally) into the meeting room, and the sign-up sheet for people who wanted to comment ran to at least 52 people, which was quoted when the chairman limited each speaker to 60 seconds to raise their points. Because of the number who wanted to speak, there was no “answer” portion, but Chris Kent was in attendance, and asked for Metro IDs and names, promising to respond to each question later.
The 60 second limit caused the chairman some problems, a few were annoyed at being cut off. The problems tended to fall into the same groups - late pick-ups, the change denying drivers the chance to call ahead to warn of arrivals, trips being wrongly entered as no-shows, the grand tour trips issue.
There were a large number of blind and visually impaired riders in attendance who definately had strong feelings about the call-ahead issue, but that’s supposedly being addressed by the new automated call system.
Not all the people who signed up had the chance to speak, although a fair number did. Chris Kent asked those with more questions to join him in an adjacent meeting room at the end of the meeting, when the Committee had its regular 5:30pm meeting, and about 20 people took him up on the offer.
Mr Monson of MV was in attendance throughout the meetings, he’d been sitting at the back throughout the first meeting, and again in the more private meeting with Chris Kent and others.
I have to say, to appearances, Chris Kent seemed to be taking the comments of the riders seriously at the smaller, second, meeting - asking more questions, asking for specific issues and incidents. The riders at the second meeting seemed to be calmer too, not having the 60-second limit to deal with.
In the end, the second meeting went on until security threw everyone out at 8:30pm to lock up.
One of the points I raised, as Mr Kent was responding to the concerns of a rider who had been missing dialysis visits, was why it took having to go to such a meeting and bug the boss of MetroAccess itself to get any kind of resolution. The reply was, as with most things, an acknowledgement that the service needed improvement.
The issue of my pointing out in November to Mr Kent’s office (and Metro itself) that the database migration was borked was noted, but there wasn’t really any satisfactory answer as to why the warnings went unheeded.
Mr Monson of MV tried to explain the drifting pick-up times to me directly, but we reached an impasse in one respect when I insisted that the pick-up window floated with the times, and he insisted that the times floated within the original pick-up window.
There was also a lot of confusion over the “negotiated” pick-up times, where a rider would say “I need to be there at x time” and MetroAccess would say “well, we can pick you up at x, y, or z time to get you there by then.”
We don’t know if anything substantive came from the meeting, although the Committee sure knows of the ire of the general riders as a result of it. One thing that did happen was a couple of MV staff, I guess some sort of line managers, managed to shepherd the rides waiting for attendees to leave for trips home well - although it’s ironic the system only works as it’s supposed to when there’s managers managing the whole thing.
We gave Chris Kent, WMATA, and Mr Monson/MV an open invitation to participate with the site, if they choose to do so, but emphasized the purpose is to bring up issues as well as collate figures to confirm or challenge the data WMATA is producing on the service’s performance. They seemed to accept that the site will of necessity be adversarial most of the time, and Mr Kent seemed to welcome the concept, although obviously he questioned the premise behind it.
One good thing is that we had the chance to highlight to the MV representatives some names that we have collected so far in the Kudos Korner, relating to staff of the service who do well, including recommending MV keep an eye on some of them and use them as examples of excellent customer service for training others.
The training issue was noted a few times, but again there was no real substantive response other than to accept that “things could be better”.
So, we came away from it with the same concerns, and will withold judgement on the process until we see if there’s any substantive response by MetroAccess to address the concerns raised by all the speakers operationally. In the meantime, from our perspective, the site is still a needed resource that we will continue make available to those who can use it.
