Paul's Comments

I had the opportunity to meet with four people on April 3 from the transit authority regarding my complaints as I noted in my blog entry from 3/3. I spent about an hour there, to some extent repeating the highlights from my letter of the incident that date, as well as hearing their explanation of what happened. I also had a very tasty sandwich for lunch from the Burger King across the street from the transit authority headquarters.

It seems there was an error in the systems and operations which occurs when someone orders their trip on Metro Access. When I booked my trip I specified I needed a time after 10. The agent may have misheard me, and started to enter 10, then corrected it. However, the system requires additional keystrokes to confirm this, and the agent apparently failed to do so. Thus the order was reset automatically back to the original 10:00 arrival time rather than the 10:29 time it was promised to me.

They actually thanked me for my complaint, because the only reason that they found the error was because I reported it. They implemented some new policies to catch this sort of error so that it should not happen again.

Also, it was pointed out to me that WMATA (the transit authority) is running a number of services that are much more advanced than some even larger (and older) transit authorities. They've been visited by executives from other transit authorities including New York City and Philadelphia who were amazed at some of the things that the transit authority here has done such as the on-line booking system for Metro Access, apparently it's considerably more advanced than some of the other systems have been able to accomplish.

When I was preparing to go to the meeting I thought it might not be a bad idea to include some suggestions on how to solve the problems that I noted, because making complaints simply is grousing about the problem, it doesn't necessarily help the situation. So I also gave them a list of suggestions to help with what I complained about. I'll show the list at the bottom of this message.

I thought that it was one of those times when you have a meeting and you really do get something productive done. So I think it was worth going.

Here's the list of suggestions I made (comments about them are in a box below each suggestion):

1. Metro Access rescheduling appointments: Consider increasing capacity customers have for booking trips on-line. Only places customers have been to before can be selected. Perhaps use USPS or Mapquest to validate an address. Areas that might be outside of Metro Service area can be checked against zip code. This would allow any address that is in a zip code where all of it is serviced by Metro would be bookable through the website. This would reduce mandatory call-in requests for new locations in zip codes where Metro Access only partially serves.

   Problem with this idea is addresses need to be "geocoded" because they have to make sure an address is correct so they can route vehicles to the location as well as the routing between any specific point and another. Additionally, the system not only takes orders, it also schedules Metro Access vehicles and tries to organize trips to increase passenger load. That makes sense, so that if you have two people going to the same location or where one is along the way to the other, it can take both of them in the same vehicle. I have some suggestions I am thinking of since then, which I'm going to send along to them as more suggestions.

2. Closing Door Too Soon: Have metrorail operators "double flash" doors when departing stations; hit the close button, then immediately hit the open button. This would add about 5 seconds to the time at the station but would allow anyone in the door more time to get clear as opposed to the too-fast close that can cause people, such as wheelchair riders, to be trapped.

   This was thought to be a good idea.

3. Pressing wrong elevator call button: Put either a painted circle or some form of circle, in color blue, on the correct call button on every elevator. Then you can simply print a sign and show it anywhere in the system:
   • To Call Elevator, press the blue Dot: O

   I had considered a green dot, except that green and red are the two most common colors that people are color blind. However, if there is no other dot on any of the elevator buttons then a green dot would be okay.

   It was interesting that when I mentioned the idea of putting a blue dot on elevator call buttons as opposed to a green dot (because green and red are colors more likely for people to be color blind to), I was informed that one of the managers I was introduced to is himself color blind!

4. Elevator Maintenance: Split up crews and add trainees so that instead of two elevator technicians, have one journeyman technician and perhaps 3 or 4 trainees, possibly paid something just above minimum wage or whatever the requirement is. The elevator repair person would be showing the trainees how to do elevator repairs. Trainees could also do some of the less difficult tasks such as lubrications and cleaning or whatever is required. Over the appropriate period of time that it takes to train someone. Also, would make it easier for the current technical people since, if they have any smarts, the first thing they'll do is train the people to do the worst parts of the job. Also they'll have more help and it should make their job easier (and potentially faster and less stressful).

   I'm thinking since the purpose is not to cut the number of employees the union should not have a problem; in fact, since you're training people they may end up having some of them as members. Also, it would train some people to go into this work even if they don't end up working for Metro, you're not paying them that much.

   I have a suspicion that Metro has even worse problems with its unions in that I got the impression that they didn't necessarily think that this idea would really be all that acceptable. But I pointed out, these were suggestions; maybe they aren't all workable but even if not, they might give them ideas that they might not otherwise have thought of.