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Disabled Transit Data Was Misstated
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After MV took over the service in January, Metro was flooded with complaints about missed or late trips and rides that zigzagged across the region because reservationists typed in the right street addresses but the wrong towns.
The company was assessed $227,500 in penalties from April to July for missing performance goals in several areas, including missed and late trips, customer complaints, and telephone response times.
Metro and MV replaced key staff, and an advisory group was established to recommend changes, some of which were put into effect. Over the summer, some riders said service had improved noticeably.
But in recent weeks, with increased fall ridership and high staff turnover at MV, riders are again complaining about missed and late trips and routing that defies common sense.
A few weeks ago, Nancy Hartgrove was picked up from her Silver Spring home and taken past her office at 17th and M streets NW to drop off another passenger in Southwest Washington before being taken to her building.
"Whoever is programming these computers doesn't know how these areas are set up," said Hartgrove, 59.
Scheduling remains a problem, Yaffe acknowledged. Metro is working with MV so that trips are scheduled so "the human rules the computer," he said. But, he added: "It's not going to happen overnight."
MV's five schedulers typically manage 70 to 125 "runs," or the list of a driver's trips. That amounts to double or triple the industry "best practice," industry experts say. That means schedulers spend most of their time dealing with the basic task of getting someone a ride. They don't have time or proper training to do difficult types of scheduling, such as looking for patterns from one geographical area to another that can then be grouped together more efficiently, Yaffe said.
