The Post has sallied forth on MetroAccess again today, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021201185.html. The article makes an interesting point, that there’s been over 2,400 complaints registered about MetroAccess so far since MV took over the contract.
Given the doubts we’ve raised about WMATA’s method of tabulating the number of complaints received recently, we wonder how reliable this figure is.
On the subject of which though, we have a question for the Washington Post itself. The article states:
But some riders said in interviews that they have been unable to log complaints and don’t trust MV’s statistics.
We don’t disagree with this, but we’re curious as to why the Post hasn’t looked deeper into the statistics issue. We know that the Post is aware of this site (Lyndsey Layton, one of the regular reporters on MetroAccess issues, was emailed twice when the site was re-launched), and we’ve been bringing up the basis for the concerns behind the statistics on a regular basis - but the Post glossed over it with that one-liner.
Given the past history of MetroAccess-related statistics, you’d think that the Post would have pounced on trying to ask the same questions of WMATA and MV that we have in that regard, or even better ones.
Quoting again from that article:
In the first few weeks under MV, complaints flooded Metro’s customer service line daily
WMATA’s statistics on the number of complaints received is high, but not what you’d call a “flood”. That WMATA isn’t even publishing the number of complaints received before January 28th 2006, at least on the publically available Performance Indicators page of the WMATA web site, seems unfortunately to be something unworthy of mention in the article.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Washington Post has already asked WMATA about the statistics, they certainly seem to have come up with the number of complaints figure using a source that we here are not (yet) privy to. We would hope if that’s the case that the Post will use that source to provide some of the answers the community is looking for.
