DC ParaTransit Info was present during the DC Council Budget meeting on February 22nd 2006, both to report and to offer testimony.
To be honest, there was nothing really came out that was earth shattering, although both Councilmembers Schwartz and Graham had many questions to ask the WMATA representatives, including the newly-appointed Interim General Manager Mr Dan Tangherlini, as well as the Board Chairman Mrs Gladys Mack.
At one stage a little piece of verbal misdirection, whether intentional or accidental, managed to derail a question by Councilmember Schwartz on the subject of complaint numbers. This wasn’t followed up on because of a comment by Mrs Pamela Wilkins, Acting Assistant General Manager of Customer Contract Services who oversees the service, made, that “MetroAccess riders have the number memorized”.
Mrs Wilkins is correct, we do have a number memorized, and for the same reason she pointed out - because we use it every day. However the number in question is the number to reach MetroAccess, not WMATA’s customer service line. It was disingenuous to imply the latter, even if it did stall any further questions regarding the accuracy of WMATA’s published complaints statistics.
MetroAccess riders call MetroAccess when their ride is late, or hasn’t shown up, or in general, and we assume that making a complaint through the MetroAccess number is in fact registering a complaint about the service with Metro - that whole “Metro” in “MetroAccess” might account for the assumption.
We can finally confirm however through Mrs Wilkins’ answer that WMATA is only tabulating those complaints that are received by WMATA directly - ignoring any complaints made when calling MetroAccess itself, and that they are indeed being selective about accounting for rider complaint statistics, choosing to publish the number of complaints received by what is in effect, to the ridership, a third party, at a number not frequently called or memorized, rather than accounting for the number of complaints received at their most logical place to be registered, the service call center itself.
If WMATA can be caught cherry-picking their statistics on this metric, we cannot have any faith in assurances that any of the other statistics they make publically available are not also being selectively chosen from a data source that is favourable to WMATA’s image.
There was more interesting “slant” in other statistics-related areas. When asked about the 9% of rides that do not go off according to plan (by WMATA’s numbers), Mrs Wilkins said that the numbers could be broken down into three groups.
- Late trips
- No shows by MetroAccess
- No shows by riders
Councilmember Schwartz asked Mrs Wilkins about the breakdown of those groups. It became interesting when Mrs Wilkins gave the figures between no-shows by riders, and no-shows by MetroAccess. She gave the statistics, within that 9%, for the past 4 weeks for MetroAccess no-shows as being at around about 3%. She then gave the statistics for no-shows by riders, but for the past several months - 8%.
The Council missed this shift in the baseline used for the figures being given, but any statistical comparison between one set for 4 weeks and another set for several months is totally irrelevant, it would be about as accurate to compare apples to aardvarks.
When asked about the total increase in MetroAccess rides provided, WMATA gave their answer as a percentage, but failed to state if there had been any change in the size of the ridership itself, or the percentage of rides against the total number of active riders. Once more, it provides figures without context, making them irrelevant for any real calculation.
The overall impression we came away with was that WMATA’s answers were not so much answers as they were soundbites - they sounded good, but were semantically null.
One of the interesting things to come out of the meeting was Councilmember Graham’s remarks to WMATA regarding one of their 
press releases. The text of the press release includes this section:
“Some customers have pointed out to us that they used to get an advance telephone call from drivers of MetroAccess vehicles when they were on their way to the pick-up location,” Ms. Wilkins said. “This service was not required of the previous contractor but a friendly gesture on the driver’s part, and those types of calls make some sense, but using a cell phone while driving is illegal in the District of Columbia and Metro does not permit its bus operators to use cell phones regardless of the jurisdiction in which they drive, so we are working with MV to develop an automated call notification system.”
Councilmember Graham pointed out that this was factually incorrect, that in reality the legislation within the District bans the use of cell phones without a hands-free device, legislation that the Committee chair, Councilmember Schwartz, had been instrumental in creating.
Unfortunately, Councilmember Schwartz was out of the chamber at the time of this little interaction, it would have been interesting to hear her response.
Councilmember Graham instructed WMATA to rectify this inaccuracy on their web site, however the WMATA representatives present didn’t even seem to know this section existed, and as of the time of writing this, that section is still up on their site.
We have to admit, if WMATA doesn’t pay any attention to instruction from a member of the DC Council to remedy an inaccuracy on their web site, what chance does the disabled community have of getting WMATA to fix MetroAccess?
Categories: General , In The Media , WMATA | Tags: | By: .
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