When the Metro Riders’ Advisory Council first sought applicants in 2005, a seat on the 21-member citizens board was four times as hard to gain as admission to Harvard University. A decade later, interest in the body that represents Metro riders inside the system has withered, with fewer people seeking seats, panel members expressing dissatisfaction and the transit agency showing indifference.
As of May, the Metro employee who since last fall had been in charge of carrying the council’s concerns to agency managers was out of the role. Metro’s assistant general manager, Lynn Bowersox, would take over, but her schedule was so full she wasn’t able to attend monthly meetings.
Since that shift, two of the advisory council’s most vocal members — John “Major” Nelson and Chris Barnes — have bolted, and other current and former members say they are unhappy that the group’s influence is ebbing.
“We can talk a big talk, but when the rubber hits the road, there was no point to being there,” said Nelson, 49, the group’s vice chair for Virginia, who resigned in June.
The waning of the council, along with a failed effort to establish a riders union, has left Metro commuters without a unified voice as the lives of thousands are disrupted by Metro’s massive rebuilding projects.
Activists on the council say members should be fierce, unapologetic advocates for riders — as the founding members were — while pragmatists argue that it is important to work with Metro brass.
The council chair, Barbara Hermanson, a former business analyst for The Washington Post, said she devotes 20 to 30 hours a week to advisory council business, juggling relationships with Metro leaders and council members with whom she doesn’t always agree.
“There’s a need to maintain good relationships with staff and the [Metro Board of Directors] that creates a tension between that and our need to be advocates at times, sure,” Hermanson said.
That tension flared publicly this summer when two council members resigned a half-year after they had joined it.
“Why advocate when LITERALLY no one is listening to the message?” Nelson wrote in his resignation letter. “We exist to be a facade that says [the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority] cares about the riders when they don’t.”
Attempts to make changes were impeded by bylaws and debate over procedure, or changes took a long time to achieve, the pair said, pointing to the example of the years-long process to get Metro’s approval of a social media presence for the council.
Chris Barnes, firebrand and Twitter personality @FixWMATA, who founded the now-disbanded Metro riders union, said council meetings became a waste of time.
“Metro doesn’t give the RAC [advisory council] the ability to be anything functional,” Barnes said in an interview. “They don’t support it. They don’t go to it for questions. They’re just not interested in what the RAC has to say.”
The pattern of optimism, frustration and, finally, burnout isn’t new. Dennis Jaffe, the group’s first chair, said it operates in a cycle: Change-minded leaders join the body with an enterprising spirit and big ideas and, confronting the systemic hurdles, lose their enthusiasm.
“They get burned out from the effort involved to get the agency to change,” he said. “For an agency whose purpose is to move people, it is notably hard to move the agency to change.”
But in its earliest iteration, the advisory council was a haven for activism. At Jaffe’s first meeting as chair of the riders group, members put forth a motion to hold a public forum on MetroAccess, which at the time was under fire for poor service because of problems with a contractor and Metro oversight.
In Jaffe’s recollection, there were attempts to block that forum.
But under pressure from media outlets and the advisory council, Metro later formed an ad-hoc committee, co-chaired by Jaffe, to hear directly from customers about the service. The Metro board chair later publicly apologized for the poor MetroAccess service and ushered in changes recommended by the committee.
Jaffe said that as Metro makes critical decisions affecting commuters, a strong rider voice is urgently needed.
“At a time when Metro has proposed permanent elimination of late-night Metro service, it’s especially critical that riders have ways to organize and influence the decisions that are made,” he said.
David Alpert, founder and editor of Greater Greater Washington, who served on the council for three years and was D.C. vice chair in 2010 and 2011, resigned his seat in 2012, believing there were more effective ways to spend his time. The efforts of “ change agents,” he said, are limited by the fact that the Metro board ultimately picks the group’s representatives.
Board members, in general, “don’t want to appoint someone like Chris [Barnes] or me or whoever because they’re going to be trouble,” Alpert said. “They would rather appoint a quieter voice. It perpetuates itself.”
Officially, the council reports to Metro’s Board of Directors. Hermanson, the advisory council chair, delivers monthly briefings at board meetings. Metro’s board chairman, Jack Evans, was unavailable Tuesday for an interview about the council.
Some council members said they need more access to Metro staff members to make meaningful suggestions and that eliminating the senior staffer who had access to top officials was a step in the wrong direction.
“The role of Metro staff is limited to technical assistance and logistics,” Metro spokeswoman Sherri Ly said in a statementexplaining the change, adding that the needs of the riders could be supported by existing staff.
Metro declined an interview with Bowersox to discuss the state of the advisory council. In response to several questions concerning Metro staff’s role and the records it keeps on the council, Metro answered with one sentence: “It’s a board matter.”
Several top staffers have shown a willingness to work with the body in recent months: General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld, Chief Safety Officer Pat Lavin and Bowersox have all made appearances.
And the council has achieved some objectives. It was the council that first recommended a grace period for riders to exit stations without being charged, a change that would be especially welcome during long service delays. Metro also agreed to be more open with its train-location data this year following media coverage and a push by council members.
New advisory council members were pushing for change as the makeup of Metro’s board was changing.
“There was a great deal of enthusiasm and anxiousness to turn things around,” said member RAC Colin Reusch, 32. “I think that there was also a lot of pent-up demand for change at that point.”
New members urged Metro to relieve Blue Line crowding, to make refunds to riders after major service disruptions and to waive peak fares during SafeTrack when service would be significantly reduced. In the absence of a riders union, the council sought to be the advocacy arm.
But the two council resignations, Reusch said, were “a setback.”
The council also became entangled in internal bickering after Hermanson chided members in May for leaking to news reporters a letter from the council that asked the Metro board to reconsider charging peak fares during SafeTrack.
“The fact that this leaked out is a strike against the RAC,” Hermanson said at a council meeting, “because we can’t be trusted to deal with things with protocol.”
But the leak also exposed the fault lines over what posture the advisory council should take.
“I spend whole days downtown trying to build relationships with both the board and the staff,” Hermanson said. “Because we don’t have the authority to tell them what to do, we need to be able to persuade them that our knowledge is good, and we have good intentions, and we have good advice. And I felt like that leak burned my relationship with those people.”