In the first Washington Post article about MetroAccess for this month, we are told that MV Transportation has a “grace period” written into their contract - they’re not going to face penalties for the level of service provided until after April 15th, giving them in effect four months to get things sorted out from the date they took over.
The pressure from local governments, as well as Congressman Van Hollen (D-MD) is continuing to be applied, with Monttgomery County Councilmember Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large) joining the calls for things to improve.
The Post article parrots the official WMATA published on-time statistics for Monday (February 27th) as being 93.1%, but fails to mention that WMATA is calling those numbers “provisional”, as is usual. The Post also seems to have not actually checked the figures WMATA has published, which by our calculations (Total trips minus late and excessively late trips multiplied by the total number of trips) comes out to 92.69% on-time performance for the 27th.
DC ParaTransit Info would still like to know the math WMATA is using to determine on-time performance, if it isn’t based on figuring out how many people actually got picked up on time.
BootNote:
DC ParaTransit Info contacted both Lena Sun of the Washington Post, and Christian Kent, the Director of MetroAccess Service for WMATA, to ask about the inconsistencies in data. Both replied, and confirmed there are numbers not being included in WMATA’s published figures (i.e. on the website). We have asked Mr Kent about obtaining all the figures being used in WMATA’s calculations to allow us to more accurately report on their statistics.
Given this information, DC ParaTransit Info retracts the comment about the Post seemingly not having checked the figures WMATA has published. DC ParaTransit Info would like to thank Lena Sun and Christian Kent for their responses to our request for more information on this.
