Paul's Comments

I have spent a few hours doing some fascinating reading of the 200 page Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's 2009 budget and I have found out some interesting things. Basically, in the case of bus service, the number is almost exact, based on number of trips, revenue, and cost of service, each bus customer is paying $1.52 for their trip, which costs WMATA $5.00 to provide! I'm averaging the numbers for simplicity as regular rides are, at most, $1.35. (They go into some technical details which say something similar, that with transfers from Smarttrip passes, each user trip produces about 85c in revenue and requires $3.50 in subsidies.) They receive about $152 million in farebox and other revenues and run roughly 100 million bus trips, but it costs about $500.1 million to operate bus service.

As is the usual factor, bus service is able to return about 30% of its cost through farebox revenues. The cost surprised me; regional buses cost $150 an hour to run, local routes cost $102 an hour. So for the F14 bus that runs near where I live, it operates 20,197 hours a year, which means it costs Metro $2.06 million a year. For one bus!

Rail service does better, for each dollar that it costs to run the trains, farebox and other revenues return about 83c. So it "only" costs them about $3.49 to provide service that the customer pays $2.33. These are straight off their own document, the average subsidy per trip is about 74c.

What got to me, however, was my own interest, Metro Access. Now, I had read the contract between WMATA and MV Transit, the company that runs Metro Access, and basically Metro pays them in the neighborhood of $62 million a year to operate the service.

What got me though was the trip numbers. Metro Access provides something around 1.1 million trips a year. Do the math: it comes out that every time Metro Access runs a trip for someone, they pay $2.50 but it is costing them $60 to provide the trip! (Numbers from the budget: Revenues from Metro Access: $3.1 million; expenses: $65 million so it averages out to something around $59 and change per trip.)

At these kinds of costs, it would have been cheaper for Metro to give people cab rides than what they are doing right now! Someone please tell me how come providing trip service for handicapped people costs about $60 per trip?

I remember how one time I took a trip out to Fairfax and Metro Access was overbooked so they sent me a cab which was wheelchair accessible for the return trip. The back of the van opens up and I just roll in the back. I pay the $2.50, the Cab company collects the difference from Metro Access. When I got home the meter read $27.50, and I give the cab driver the $2.50. And I thought that was steep, not realizing then that despite the fact Metro Access is going to pay - I think it was Yellow Cab - $25.00, they're billing WMATA for an additional $30 above this. Nice work if you can get it.

When I first heard that Metro Access got $62 million a year for the trips they provide, I figured the subsidy level was about equivalent either for the cab ride I took, e.g. that Metro Access provided about 4 million trips a year, or that my case was an exception, and probably the subsidy was around, say, $5 a trip, meaning that Metro Access ran about 8-10 million trips a year. I had no idea the contract was as lucrative as it is.