It seems that there have been a good number of changes during our hiatus, some good, some bad, and some that the jury remains out on.
Of this latter category is the news of Dan Tangherlini’s impending resignation as the Interim General Manager. He walked right into the firestorm that was MetroAccess at the beginning of his tenure.
If his being at the helm of Metro was responsible for the improvements we saw at the start of the year, then we can only hope that his replacement will prove to be as capable
This is, however, something we’re likely to need convincing of, given that the replacement named by WMATA to take over at the start of November is Jack Requa, who has been the Chief Operating Officer of MetroBus since 1998 - Anything from the days of Richard White has to be viewed with caution at the beginning, we think.
In the good news and bad news category is an article by Lena Sun in the Washington Post dated October 23rd, entitled “Disabled Transit Data Was Misstated - MetroAccess Audit Shows Performance Numbers Inflated”.
This is good news because it proves that the concerns DCParaTransit Info were raising about the statistics Metro was publishing were valid. It’s bad news because it took an independant audit (and how much did that cost we wonder?) for anyone to finally admit it.
The article contains several other mea culpas, such as this gem:
“I think we have come to realize that the contract we bid and the service we want to provide are two different things,” said Dan Tangherlini, Metro’s interim general manager. “The original deal was focused on cost reduction, not service provision.”
It took nine months, a community up in arms, and an unprecedented level of advocacy for WMATA to get the clue?
One item of concern in the article was:
In some cases, the auditor found that missed trips by taxis were being improperly recorded. They showed up in MV’s database as on-time pickups because MV dispatchers had scheduled new trips to replace missed ones. In other instances, trips that appeared to be “missed” showed up in the database as “no-shows,” unfairly marking passengers and jeopardizing their future service.
These practices are no longer in use, Yaffe said.
They might have discontinued those practices with taxicabs, but Kathi Spray, one of the founders of DCParaTransit Info, recently logged a trip that casts doubts on this. As Kathi reports:
It was October 10th, and I had a round trip (2 rides) booked. The original pickup was excessively late, and MetroAccess were “unable to contact the driver”. As a result, the original trip was cancelled and it was added to another manifest to be completed.
I called through to MetroAccess, and finally got in touch with John Smolenski, and asked if the original (cancelled by metroAccess) trip would be recorded as cancelled or late/missed, and whether the add-on trip to replace it would be recorded as “on-time”.
I pointed out that the “trip” in total (i.e. the original schedule) would in no way be considered “on-time”, and that it was disingenuous to log the add-on trip as being on-time.
Mr Smolenski informed me that the add-on trip would indeed have been recorded as being on time, although he also noted that the original trip being cancelled out was in error.
So Mr Yaffe’s comments in an article on October 23rd are difficult for me to reconcile with practical experience.
The Grand Tour issues seem to have made a reappearance once more, we note, but Mr Yaffe makes an interesting remark towards the end of the article:
They don’t have time or proper training to do difficult types of scheduling
Is this where we point out that this isn’t exactly supposed to be our problem? We’re not talking about complicated and convoluted routing here, we note for the record - we’re talking simple common A-B-C sense. If MetroAccess claims they need more time and training to do that, may we suggest elementary geometry, map reading, a mathematics be a good start? This has to be one of the lamest excuses for the Grand Tour issue, an issue that was supposedly resolved already.
We do like WMATA’s idea for the “First regional service directory for people with disabilities”, but DC ParaTransit Info would note that we actually did that long before WMATA did, and whilst we notice that they say it’s their first directory, the title of their article is kind of misleading.
Kind of like MetroAccess statistics perhaps?.
On the subject of creative press releases that are slightly loose with the facts, we also notice this little gem buried on MV Transit’s web site:
During the first month of service, complaints skyrocketed as WMATA and MV strictly enforced the transit agency’s curb-to-curb shared-ride policy.
Many customers were unaccustomed to sharing their rides in vans with other customers, which ultimately increased ride times, and others were unaccustomed to waiting at the curb for their rides. Early service complaints were about missed and excessively late trips, primarily a result of inaccurate rider addresses and contact information received by MV from the previous contractor.
We thought that the shameless and exploitative attempts to curry to base and pernicious discrimination by characterizing the total mess we faced at the start of the year, that complaints were simply an implied issue of objections to a loss of “privileges” had been addressed when WMATA tried that particular method to deflect criticism?
Shame on MV Transit for trotting out this tired and worn attempt to gloss over their failures, and double shame on them for pandering to prejudice towards the communities they make such high-falutin’ claims to be serving in an attempt to cover their own asses.
We hate to bring this up, but the problems were not of the ridership’s making, and it was the massive inability to get any sort of reliable transportation to begin with that we were irate over.
It’s unfortunate that the spotlight was taken off MetroAccess so early, and even more unfortunate that it seems it needs to shine on this vital service to the disabled community of the Metropolitan DC area once more. WMATA and MV Transit need to remember February 2006, because if things continue to go downhill, they’re going to end up with the same backlash - but this time the community is going to remember the axiom: Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me.
