Metro Cruelty

WHO WOULD ignore the panicked pleadings of an 82-year-old blind woman mistakenly delivered to a totally unfamiliar area and later stranded in the evening hours waiting for a ride home from a doctor's office? Who would coldly tell this woman -- well into an eight-hour ordeal with barely any food -- that getting home was her problem? Who would leave an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair, waiting seven hours for a ride home from her dentist's office? Or strand another disabled woman at her office every night for more than a week? Who would kiss off the calls of a blind lung transplant patient for a ride home -- four nights in a row? And just who would dismiss hundreds of similar calls for help every month from disabled people?

Metro.

Over the years, the misnamed MetroAccess transportation service for the disabled has piled up a horrible record of responses to requests for help -- the result of mismanagement by the contractor it hired and Metro's own miserable oversight. Metro has been callously content to blame its contracted firms and to ignore obviously flawed response and deployment procedures. The agency has even claimed that documented reports in this newspaper have included information fabricated by disabled riders. Metro officials also have dismissed many cases of callers left in the lurch as "exceptions." Yet Post writers Lyndsey Layton and Lena H. Sun continue to uncover heart-rending stories of shoddy treatment.

After changing contractors last month, Metro board members grilled officials of the new firm, MV Transportation, about the continuing problems. Jon Monson, the company's chief executive, blamed inaccurate data inherited from the previous firm, Logisticare Inc.; the failure of Metro to provide enough phone lines; and his own firm's reliance on new drivers getting lost on their missions. "We're chasing people who aren't there," Mr. Monson said, "because they're dead or they've moved or they haven't ridden MetroAccess in a year, and we're not getting people who are waiting for us because we don't know about them."

Adding to this pandemonium, Mr. Monson said, is a Metro policy calling for curb-to-curb service, which means drivers are not permitted to help passengers get into the vehicles. Thus blind passengers and others waiting inside buildings do not know if a vehicle has arrived. When it does, the driver idles for the required 10-minute waiting period and then leaves.

Metro signed a four-year, $210 million contract with MV after The Post reported in June that the system was riddled with problems and that Metro officials did a poor job managing the Logisticare contract. The newspaper's investigation also found that Metro officials even handed out bonuses to Logisticare based on questionable performance data.

Running this kind of program properly is neither easy nor inexpensive, but fixing phones, providing directions for drivers and improving pickup policies is elementary management. Regularly stranding disabled people for inordinate periods is inexcusable cruelty at taxpayers' expense. Logistical meltdowns and "mistakes were made" explanations have got to end. Dan Tangherlini, who takes over as Metro general manager next Thursday, rightly lists this program as a top priority. By federal mandate -- and by any standard of humane service -- MetroAccess must operate better.