The first meeting of the Washington Clients Care Group convened this past Saturday morning, March 18th, at the Wheaton Community Center. This meeting represented the first meeting of MetroAccess riders to meet at a location that was not at Metro Headquarters.
The meeting, organized by MetroAccess riders for MetroAccess riders, had a turn-out of over 60 riders, caregivers and drivers. Mike Antique, representing WMATA’s MetroAccess Department; Inez Evans and Nikki Frenney from MV Transportation; as well as Aaron Rich representing Montgomery County’s County Executive Douglas Duncan; and Ms. Karen McManus from Congressman Chris Van Hollen’s office and were also in attendance.
Carolyn Bellamy, one of the organizers for the meeting, indicated to DC Paratransit Info that Congressman Van Hollen’s office has been very supportive in resolving issues reported regarding problems with MetroAccess service. Ms. McManus, tasked with handling many of the complaints, has been very helpful and instrumental in fascilitating solutions to rider concerns.
Retired Army Colonel Alan Hoffman moderated a discussion which included riders and their caregivers recounting their experiences of being stranded, discourteous treatment by drivers and the phone center, and their frustration at the rate of improvement in MetroAccess. Many of the incidents that were related had occurred between March 1 and March 17. MV Transportation had two of their customer care personnel to circulate amongst the audience in order to collect specific information in order to research riders’ concerns.
Three of the people who attended were drivers - two employed by a subcontractor to contracting company MV Transportation and one driver from a local cab company. The drivers from the subcontractor recounted problems with pay, manifests that made no sense, and adverse working condition issues. The cab driver related problems with getting vouchers issued for MetroAccess rides reimbursed, stating that it was taking several days to receive the money. This time delay is creating a hardship for cab drivers since the expenses for operating a cab (gas and the rental fee from the cab company) come out of what a driver collects in fares on a daily basis.
Ms. Bellamy closed the meeting by noting that the meeting in Wheaton should be looked at as the first in a series of ongoing meetings for the MetroAccess ridership. The issues facing the customers of MetroAccess are ones that have been in existence for a long time and we should not expect that they will all be resolved overnight. By working together with the various groups that makeup MetroAccess, providing feedback and suggesting solutions, progress can be made.
It was good to see representation from “on high” present. Given the way that the WMATA Board handled promoting the Budget meeting recently, we have good indicators that they would prefer to be able to ignore the ridership as much as feasible. They can’t, however, ignore elected representatives.
If WMATA has returned to “the bad old days” of dealing with MetroAccess riders, trying to ignore us until we get discouraged, give up, and go away, then such representation is all the more critical. The Board isn’t elected, it has no electorate to answer to; It doesn’t want to answer to the MetroAccess ridership, taxpayers all. It must answer to those we elect, and might end up wishing it had paid attention to us instead.
