RAC member’s resignation a symptom of WMATA’s opacity

On November 7, WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council member Christopher Schmitt tendered his resignation to the WMATA Board. Schmitt resigned after being frustrated at the failure of a series of information requests. This leads to some hard questions about transparency and oversight at WMATA and the role of the RAC.

Schmitt first requested information of the agency early in 2011, seeking detailed Metrorail performance data, as well as information on the safety of and changes made to the signaling system in the wake of the 2009 Red Line crash.

WMATA’s reasons for denying both requests are flimsy at best, and signal a continued unwillingness to permit oversight of the agency’s operations.

In the case of Metrorail performance data, Schmitt sought the raw data used to calculate the summary metrics provided in the agency’s Vital Signs Report, including on-time performance. The agency claimed that the data—about 40,000 records per day, or 29 million for the 24-month period covered by Vital Signs—were too voluminous for them to produce.

Dan Stessel, the agency’s spokesman, told the Examiner that WMATA objected to “mining 29 million data points”, but sought to fulfill the request in other ways. Unfortunately, when it comes to computing on-time performance, there’s no substitute for the raw arrival and departure data.

WMATA’s fear of the volume of data also betrays a lack of good data management practices on their part; while 29 million rows might seem like a large quantity of data, in this era of “big data” and petabyte-scale databases, it sounds more like a smokescreen.

Schmitt also requested information about the Metrorail signaling system, its safety, and changes made in the wake of the 2009 Red Line crash. Here, WMATA denied the request due to the agency’s involvement in ongoing litigation connected to the crash.

Yet, as Schmitt noted in a message to the RAC, a great deal of information on the subject has already been released to the public, through NTSB reports and other publications, and the agency’s response is indicative of an unwillingness to sort out information which actually must be protected from disclosure from other information:

In the case of the ATC data, assuming for the sake of argument that a PARP exemption does apply, WMATA has a duty under its policy to segregate exempt from non-exempt information. WMATA has made no effort to fulfill its duty, and it is not credible to claim that every item of information regarding ATC and collision avoidance in WMATA’s possession is subject to exemption. At the least, considerable information maintained by WMATA is already in the public domain, such as via NTSB reports. If information is publicly available, it cannot be withheld as exempt. Therefore, WMATA’s position is unreasonable on its face.

Regardless of the reasons for the agency’s denials, they are merely symptoms of a much larger, more serious problem: an ongoing lack of transparency and meaningful oversight at WMATA.

WMATA’s board is unable to provide independent oversight, and, under the agency’s “performance-based management” program, receives only summaries of performance data. The WMATA Office of Inspector General conducts audits, but the recommendations in their reports seem to go mostly unheeded. The Tri-State Oversight Committee, a group which became prominent only after the 2009 Red Line crash, is independent of WMATA, but lacks the staff and funding to conduct the most detailed of investigations; beyond that, their remit covers only safety issues.

After an accident, the National Transportation Safety Board has the jurisdiction to conduct an investigation and issue a report; their criticism of WMATA is routinely scathing, yet the accidents continue. The NTSB cannot compel compliance with their recommendations, and so the same recommendations to WMATA appear in NTSB report after report.

That leaves the Riders’ Advisory Council, the group Schmitt sat on. The RAC lies somewhere between being merely a glorified focus group and an actual oversight body; they lack independence from WMATA and, in the wake of these events, apparently have no real investigative powers of their own.

In his resignation letter, Schmitt criticizes the RAC for having gotten too cozy with WMATA and for failing to press hard enough for real transparency. He’s perfectly right to do so, and yet at the same time, there’s no way that a group created by an act of the WMATA board, operated and funded by the agency, can ever have real independence. As Schmitt notes in his letter of resignation, however, the agency desperately needs independent oversight:

Taken together, the denial of the information requests, the resultant loss of the RAC’s independence, and the unwillingness of the RAC to defend its own interests mean that there is no institution within Metro dedicated to transparency and aggressive pursuit of information that is of significant rider interest.

Despite some limited improvement, Metro remains a deeply troubled agency, rife with problems that demand accountability and transparency, and which are too numerous to enumerate here. I hope that in the future, a greater dedication to meaningful information access will develop. This would be a starting point for necessary reforms, as well as for establishing the RAC as an independent, robust voice on behalf of riders.

Given that the organizational structure of the RAC effectively precludes meaningful and independent oversight, transit riders in the region should consider forming a completely independent oversight and advocacy group akin to the Straphangers Campaign in New York City.

The campaign, a project of NYPIRG, independently advocates on behalf of New York City’s transit riders. But more importantly, the Straphangers are able to conduct their own investigations, including a survey of announcements in the subway and a survey of payphones in the subway.

Though the Straphangers Campaign performs political advocacy, similarly to groups like the Action Committee for Transit and Greater Greater Washington do locally, it also has the ability to collect its own data and form its own judgments, rather than being limited to carefully-selected and carefully-screened presentations like those the RAC gets now.

This means that the campaign is able to independently assess the performance of the transit authority over time, rather than being dependent on the agency’s own (potentially flawed) data.

As an agency formed by interstate compact, WMATA is subject to even less scrutiny than the average transit authority in this country. While an independent riders’ group would be no more able to compel action than the RAC is now, they would have the advantage of being able to conduct their own investigation and advocacy work, independent of WMATA and its constituent jurisdictions.

Christopher Schmitt sought for the RAC to become “an independent, robust voice on behalf of riders,” but riders may be better off finding their own voice.