Washington area residents spoke out against cuts in Metro rail and bus service while urging local jurisdictions to increase their funding to help Metro fill a $189 million budget gap for the fiscal year that begins in July, according to a Metro summary of public comment on the budget.
WMATA posted an online survey, which reportedly received 3,633 responses.
I looked over the questionnaire. The questions relating to MetroAccess were very limited, and essentially boiled down to asking about ways to cut back services.
What we didn’t see on the survey were some very hard choices for WMATA itself – As far as we recall, not one single question on ways to reduce costs involved WMATA itself having to cut back.
No mention of salary and hourly wage cuts, benefits cuts, reductions in the vehicle fleet, or any of WMATA’s ancilliary costs.
Essentially, the questions WMATA presented all involved sacrifices the riders could make to reduce costs, while WMATA stays inviolate, management and unions shielded from having to share the pain during the budget crisis.
The overall response from the riders who responded, according to the Post, was (happily) an acceptance of fare increases over service cuts in fixed-route. Unfortunately, the Post didn’t make any comment with regards to survey responses to the MetroAccess questions.
The Post also mentions WMATA’s take on the results of the public meetings WMATA held a few weeks ago – Around 79% of people were apparently against service cuts.
They also mention the feeling at those meetings (and in the online survey) that local juristictions should increase their funding of the system – a stance I personally fully endorse with respect to ParaTransit in the region.
The surrounding juristictions pass the buck for provisioning paratransit service in their areas on to WMATA, using that to save them the costs of having to operate the same service (although those counties do have, for the most part, their own paratransit services in-place for those jurisdictions only).
WMATA provides a service to the entire region, and the subsidies paid by those jurisdictions should reflect the use of residents in those jurisdictions of the system. Those residents are turning more to public transport as provided by WMATA, and it should be reflected in the subsidies being paid. Yes, the States and local governments are also facing budget crises recently, but if their residents use the system it should be paid for.
Personally, I wish WMATA had the guts to turn around to Maryland and say “Fine, you don’t want to pay for the service, Metro* now stops at the state line until you do”. It’ll never happen, unfortunately.
MetroAccess users are being accused of getting a “free ride”, but come on, Maryland right now is looking like it effectively wants the entire State to get one. Where’s the uproar over that?
I wish the Post had analyzed the results of the handful of questions about MetroAccess more in their write-up. That it’s not even mentioned doesn’t surprise me however.
I did get a laugh from this though, from the WaPo article:
Because the public hearings and online survey included only the views of people who decided to participate, the results are not considered scientific and are not an “accurate gauge of the opinions of Metro customers in general,” according to the executive summary of a Metro staff report on the public input.
Which could either be WMATA-speak for “We’re going to use this as justification to completely ignore the responses”, or a really bad attempt to gloss over the glaringly obvious: If more people could have gone to the meetings, the number of people against WMATA’s position would have been even worse!
It’s an accurate gauge alright – no matter how WMATA tries to spin it.
There are lies, damned lied, statistics, and (as DC ParaTransit Info has torn apart in the past) WMATA statistics.
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