The Washington Post reports that WMATA’s Interim General Manager, Mr Dan Tangherlini, is pressing for the appointment of an Inspector General with oversight of Metro operations, including MetroAccess.
The article states that the WMATA Board is in favour of the plan, and we agree - independant oversight of WMATA operations is necessary given the way it has been managed in the past. It will need an independant eye kept on it as it struggles to make up for past mistakes, which last year alone according to the post resulted in the loss of over $1 billion in railcar and elevator contracts alone.
DC ParaTransit Info is concerned however as to the extent the new OIG will have oversight of MetroAccess. In many ways, WMATA has distanced itself from MetroAccess, with such stances as excluding MetroAccess complaints from being handled by the Metro Ombudsman, instead keeping them outside of the regular customer complains chain. Such separation we believe is partially responsible both for the current state of affairs and the lack of faith in WMATA by the MetroAccess ridership, and we are intensely interested to see if the proposed OIG will break this separation.
One thing we note was Mr Tangherlini’s comments about MetroAccess quoted in that article:
He promised that the MetroAccess service for disabled riders will continue to improve, and he said the agency is looking into providing same-day service. Currently, riders must schedule trips one day in advance.
DC ParaTransit Info is quite frankly astonished that WMATA is even considering looking into same-day service at this stage. WMATA would be better served, we feel, in trying to fix the next-day service first, before trying to expand the service. Adding a new service onto a broken one will by default also be broken.
We don’t understand how this logic can have escaped WMATA’s notice, and so we are left with the feeling that these plans to investigate same-day service are another example of WMATA’s bread-and-circuses policy, used successfully across Metro projects to deflect and defuse criticism of the failures in both fixed-route and MetroAccess services when the pressure on WMATA has been intense.
We hope that this is not the case; If it is then WMATA has seriously misjudged the tenacity of the MetroAccess ridership and their determination to demand a working service, no matter what format it takes. We have been subject to WMATA’s bread-and-circuses before, however this time it’s obvious that the community is unwilling to fall for it again.
WMATA must look to rectifying the deficiencies in the existing service, concentrate their efforts towards that goal, before adding on cosmetic goodies that look good on paper. It would be, DC ParaTransit Info believes, impractical and irresponsible for WMATA to consider adding a new service to MetroAccess at this stage, as it would simply add to both the burden placed on MV when they need to be working to resolve the existing issues, as well as creating more issues to be resolved.
