Performance for MetroAccess, which thousands of elderly passengers and people with disabilities depend on to get around, has hit its lowest levels in three years, new data shows, leaving some of the region’s most vulnerable without a reliable means of transportation.
The latest performance reports show the number of late trips has surged, nearly doubling from August to 28,784 in September. “Super-late” trips — extending 20 minutes past the delivery window — nearly tripled, rising to 7,715 in September.
September marked the program’s worst month of service in more than three years.
“They have a lot of problems but it has drastically gotten worse for me since this summer,” said Steve Polkinghorn, 55, of Burke, who has multiple sclerosis and has been using Metro’s paratransit service for nearly a decade. “It would be a rare occasion that I would see anything that came close to two hours in those eight years. In a week, I’ve probably had half of my trips take two hours.”
Polkinghorn said that as his MetroAccess trips began to stretch longer and longer over the summer, he filed a steady stream of complaints. But service only worsened.
Often, vans would arrive at the end of the 30-minute pickup windows and trips would last more than two hours — longer than Metro’s estimations for the commute between his home in Burke and his job in Crystal City. Then Metro lowered its expectations, Polkinghorn says, and his trip times ballooned.
The performance decline can be tied partly to the region’s transportation woes and its aging population. The combination has sent an influx of passengers to MetroAccess, and the transit agency has grappled with five-year ridership highs that have proven too much for its contractors to handle.
Riders say the unreliable service has made them late for work and meetings and forced them to reschedule things such as doctors appointments. Further, they say they’re at the mercy of the service, which in some cases is their only way of getting around.
[Investigators say MetroAccess contractor billed agency for picking up customers who had died]
“So many of these people don’t have an alternative — like if somebody is looking at fixed-route [transit] and they say, ‘Oh, God, the train is late, I’ll just take Uber,’ ” said Heidi Case, an advocate with D.C.-based Project Action, which fights for the rights of the disabled. “The sort of implicit message is ‘Your time doesn’t matter,’ you know?”
Metro spokeswoman Sherri Ly said September’s service decline was the result of multiple factors, but emphasized that the vast majority of nearly 200,000 trips were on time. She said MetroAccess’s “reasonable trips durations” are based on the comparable time it would take to commute via rail or bus, factoring in walking time and transfers — meaning declining service on other parts of the system could lead to inflated MetroAccess trip times.
MetroAccess “ridership is at the highest level since 2011,” Ly said. “The sharp increase in ridership has put a strain on the resources of MetroAccess contractors to accommodate additional trips . . . Metro is taking steps to add capacity and is working to make more efficient use of resources.”
MetroAccess provides about 2 million trips annually at a cost of about $121 million.
Over the summer, Polkinghorn noticed that his estimated travel time — what the transit agency calls its “reasonable trip duration” — lengthened from an hour and 46 minutes to nearly two hours and, finally, to 2 hours, 11 minutes. And still, he says, trips occasionally exceeded even the worst of estimations: One recently took 3 hours, 20 minutes. That marathon took him within sight of his house at one point, but with a van full of passengers, he wouldn’t be dropped off at home for another hour and 15 minutes.
Months of steady service declines came to a head in September — the most recent month for which data is available — when on-time performance fell eight points below the target, to 83.82 percent. Before that, the lowest mark had been in February 2015, when on-time performance was 89 percent.
[MetroAccess is a public-transit lifeline for people with disabilities]
While it’s difficult to gauge the direct effect of SafeTrack, the year-long maintenance program that has meant delays and inconveniences for riders on Metro’s rails lines, Ly said MetroAccess customers “factor in service reliability” the same way other customers do. And increasing demand may also be driven by the service’s affordability, compared with other modes of transportation.
Riders agree that cost isn’t the problem.
“If it’s too long, they say, ‘Yeah, things’ll be better next time — in fact, we won’t charge you for the ride,” said Polkinghorn, who pays $12 to $14 for round-trip service between his home and Crystal City, where he works in the office of the federal chief information officer. “I don’t give a damn about the seven bucks. I give a damn about you delivering me on time.”
Ly pointed to potential relief. Next spring, Metro is planning to transfer thousands of MetroAccess trips to cheaper options such as Uber or Lyft through a program called Abilities-Ride. The program, billed as an alternative to MetroAccess, is expected to generate millions in savings for the transit agency. It also will give riders the ability to make their subsidized trips in a ride-sharing vehicle.
[Metro moving forward with plan to use Uber, Lyft for paratransit services]
Meanwhile, declining service has led to an outcry from advocacy groups and officials, who say relief can’t come soon enough.
“As a supporter of Metro who has also been critical, especially regarding shortcomings in basic customer service, I am concerned by reports of unreasonable increases in the duration of MetroAccess trips,” Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) said in a statement. “MetroAccess is a means to make transit more accessible to everyone in our community and shouldn’t become an unreasonable burden on riders.”
Denise Rush, a MetroAccess user who serves as vice chair of Metro’s Accessibility Advisory Committee, says she has noticed a sharp increase in trip times. One recent ride took 2 hours, 45 minutes as the van picked up passengers in different parts of the District — heading in different directions — before continuing to her home in Suitland, Md. MetroAccess is supposed to optimize trips to avoid such scenarios.
“Since SafeTrack and God knows what, it has been pretty bad,” said Rush, who is blind. “It’s no different than when you’re on the Metro and the Metro breaks down. It’s the same thing. . . . The only difference is that we’re sick. Some of us are more sick than others.”
Said Polkinghorn, “It’s absurd that these people have medical issues and they’re jerking them around in vans for two hours.”
Kara Jones, 30, of Silver Spring described her recent experiences on MetroAccess as “horrible.” Jones, who has cerebral palsy and uses a motorized wheelchair, was 40 minutes late for a recent volunteer job at a convention downtown. She had set an appointment time for noon, an indication of the deadline for her drop-off. But the van arrived 10 minutes outside the pickup window that morning, and other drop-offs added to the trip time.
“They’ve been horrible. Routinely they’re often at the end of the window or a couple of minutes after — just as I’m ready to pick up the phone, then they show up,” said Jones’s mother, Joan Christopher.
Rush, the AAC vice chair, was confident that services such as Abilities-Ride would provide some relief. But she worried about the impact on elderly and disabled passengers in the meantime.
“Maybe that’ll help some, but that’s not gonna be in place til in the spring,” she said. “So we’ve got a long winter coming.”