2006 February

February 2006


So far this week I’ve had one MetroAccess trip show up on time.  I go to the same place every morning and return from there every evening, Monday through Friday.  MetroAccess calls this a subscription trip.

The time for my ride was more than an hour past the “late window” and I had called the “Where’s My Ride Line” four times.  The phone bank operators used their “Magic 8 Ball” number generators to give me varying times that I could expect a ride (15 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes) with the last one not even able to determine a time - I was told someone would call me if they found anything out.  More or less par for the course with what has been happening to my homeward bound subscription trips since MV took over.

Has anyone else encountered the mysterious drifting schedules?

That’s where you have your pick-up scheduled for, say, 2:30pm, and your ride is late, but when you call MetroAccess an agent tells you that according to the computer your ride is actually in it as being at 3:00pm, and that your ride isn’t late?

I have to wonder just how dynamic and adaptive the new computer system is … the new Ranger MDT systems that manifests are being tracked on seem quite capable of being re-scheduled on the fly, since add-ons are able to be pushed out to vehicles so fitted.

One of the tricks Logisticare was rumoured to play with trying to hide late pick-ups was the add-ons system.

If a ride was late, or couldn’t be provisioned, the ride would be assigned to a different driver as an “add-on”.  At the same time, Logisticare then changed the pick-up time to the time the “add-on” was scheduled to pick you up at.  If the add-on ride showed up inside the time frame, Logisticare could then classify the trip as “on-time” - even though the ride would be late picking you up because the original transport never showed.

WMATA and MV have claimed that the data they received from Logisticare was incorrect.  They might actually be right, but they were told that there was a risk the data was incomplete or corrupt back in November 2005.

At the start of November, I was due for my recertification for eligibility.  MetroAccess sent a normal car, not a van, despite my being in a powered wheelchair.  Over the course of the next seven hours, whilst trying to get the ride to actually occur with appropriate transport, Dispatch let it slip that my record in the database said nothing about being a wheelchair user, and that they were having minor difficulties with the information, as they were “using MV’s computer system”.

Well, here we are again.

We had hoped that there wouldn’t be any further need for this site after MV Transportation took over the MetroAccess contract at the start of 2006.  Unfortunately, it appears the need still exists.

This time, we’re planning on doing things a little differently, learning from our experience running this site previously.  One of the biggest problems encountered by the community whilst Logisticare had the contract was rebutting the figures they were giving WMATA.  We hope to go some ways towards addressing this issue with the RideTrack system currently under development.

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