3 kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics

Not that I think bus service can't be improved, but the short in yesterday's Examiner, about how RideOn bus service in Montgomery County receives the most complaints of all county services, is incredibly misleading.

(Note, I can't find the article through the Examiner search function. It appeared on page 5 of the Sunday edition. It stated that RideOn had 1,551 complaints from June 17th through October 31st, with the next highest number of complaints being 128 for housing-related matters.)

On a day in day out basis, the RideOn bus service serves about 80,000 people/day, far more than any other county service.

Of course it is going to have more complaints on a volume basis.

The issue is whether or not the level of complaints, the problems with service, are out of line compared to other comparable services.

According to this report, Overview of Local and Regional Transit Systems Serving the Washington Metropolitan Area, from MWCOG, RideOn delivers 29,280,000 trips/year (see slide on page 8).

That ought to put 1,551 complaints over 4.5 months in perspective.

I'm not trying to provide excuses, merely provide some context for the data.

(It kind of reminds me of the column by Robert McCartney complaining that there aren't many articles about the education functions of colleges and universities in the region, but there are plenty of articles in the paper about college sport teams. I merely pointed out that the Post assigns writers to cover the sports teams of the regional colleges, but that they don't assign writers to cover these institutions as institutions of higher education. Hence, only occasional articles about their non-sports functions.)