Metrobus Peer Review Report

Connecticut and R Streets NW.

The headline from today's Washington Post article about Metrobus, "Review Finds Metrobus in Decay: Outside Experts Say System Needs Investment" strikes me as belaboring the obvious. In a region that doesn't invest enough money in transit, where the funding of the WMATA system is not dedicated, but subject to annual decisions of each constituent jurisdiction (counties from Maryland and Virginia, the state governments, the District of Columbia), I hope that no one is surprised. Not to mention that bus service traditionally is used most often by lower-income folks, and bus service tends to lose out in favor of more "glamorous" transportation such as the subway.

The article is centered around the peer review report of the system, conducted via the American Public Transportation Association, the national professional organization for the industry.

I complain about WMATA's not putting documents online, but I discovered that part of this is more a matter of information architecture and organization, not a lack of disclosure. If you click on the Board of Directors tab, and then the agenda, and drill down further into that, lo and behold, you can access the report. Instead of doing all that, just click here.

Note to WMATA: work on how you organize and offer this information to the public. Plus, put up more planning documents (such as origin and destination research), and if you aren't going to reorganize this information to make it more searchable and accessible so that it is (more) useful, keep the Board agenda packets available in an online archive, organized in a year-by-year fashion.

According to the Post article, guess what, "The bus panel found room for improvement in the equipment, operations, driver training and maintenance of Metro's 1,460 bus fleet" and

"White agreed with the panel's findings and said that while Metrorail has gotten attention and dollars, the bus system has languished. "It has really taken a back seat," he said. Part of the problem is that several suburbs that help pay for Metro service also operate their own bus systems, and their allegiance -- and financial support -- is divided, said D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who represents the District on the Metro board of directors. "We don't have a unified approach for bus, as we do for rail," he said.

The review, which I haven't read yet, calls for:

- adding bus route supervisors to limit bunching;
- supervisors to ride each route at least three times/year to assess service and systems;
- daily pre-run inspections of each bus;
- a full-time fleet of bus drivers;
- developing a facilities plan and reviewing maintenance and repair practices;
and a whole lot more.

Other resources to review when considering bus service include WMATA's Regional Bus Study, the report on Transit Waiting Environments from the Urban Design Center of Cleveland, and this resource guide on Building Bus Ridership.