Lena Sun of the Washington Post writes that the Metro Board has approved a plan to spend up to $1 million hiring “professional” mystery riders, who will go out and assess MetroRail and MetroBus services.
This isn’t a new idea. As the Post notes, it’s been done before, albeit using trained volunteers - and is something we at DC ParaTransit Info has mentioned before.
Done properly, it can produce relatively unbiased metrics about the service, as opposed to the idea of using customer feedback. Customer feedback tends to only concentrate on negatives - how many people actually take the time to call or write to WMATA to tell them they’re doing a good job?
There is, however, one glaring omission in the story, and in WMATA’s own press release about the new “Mystery rider” process.
MetroAccess.
If customer feedback is insufficient for fixed route evaluation, it’s not likely to be that much more sufficient for MetroAccess evaluation. Yet the Metro Board seems to have made absolutely no mention of MetroAccess being evaluated along with fixed route.
Given the ERC vs WMATA lawsuit, and the commitments WMATA is making towards making MetroAccess more viable as a service for the disabled community in the DC Metro Area, omitting any mention of MetroAccess seems peculiar.
It may be that monitoring of the proposed settlement in the lawsuit against WMATA is being seen as sufficient assessment, but if that’s the case, we think it would be a mistake. The demands for monitoring compliance of the lawsuit will be focusing on specific current deficiencies in the service, and WMATA’s commitments - that doesn’t necessarily mean the level of service itself will be monitored.
Additionally, evaluating the service from a legal standpoint misses out one vital issue of transportation parity - Last time we checked, no-one has ever claimed fixed route transit should only have to meet the “minimum standard” required by law, whilst that defence has been used in the past by WMATA regarding MetroAccess.
So if monitoring MetroAccess as part of the proposed settlement agreement is being used, it’s measuring the service against that “minimum standard” required by law - not practical levels of service.
We sincerely hope that WMATA plans on providing parity of evaluation of service, in order to ensure that it can assess its moral obligations to provide parity in transport options to members of the disabled community.
Since it seems to believe rider opinions are less reliable for fixed route transit than “professional” evaluations, it should apply the same logic to ensuring it’s meeting the needs of its disabled ridership too.
It’s that, or we’re far better at giving reasoned feedback to WMATA about MetroAccess than the general ridership is with regards to fixed route - in which case, perhaps they should ask us to evaluate fixed route for them as well?
Categories: In The Media , MetroAccess , MetroBus , MetroRail , WMATA | Tags: Lena Sun, MetroAccess, MetroBus, MetroRail, mystery rider, paratransit, Washington Post, WMATA | By: .
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December 3rd, 2009 at 11:34 am
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