Comments on Metro opens doors, closes data - Greater Greater Washington

Comment by Mystery, Inc

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:11:10 EDT

Public agencies need to make data sharing part of their mission. Kudos to WMATA for at least giving us the GTFS data, which I've used to create an animated map (http://www.mvjantzen.com/blog/?p=1319).

What I'd like to see is more usage data. I made a bubble map using 2007 data but wish it were easier to get current data (http://www.mvjantzen.com/blog/?p=1334).

Comment by MLD

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:20:53 EDT

My inside information is that they spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over whose bucket each failure should be put.

Definitely. There are huge institutional issues at WMATA and transit agencies across the country. The industry has had to feed on scraps for so long that there has been little left over for innovation or ingenuity in how they are structured. There are chain-of-command challenges in transit systems just like there are in any old company like IBM, GM, etc. You need a radical at the top whose goal is to completely reinvent and reinvigorate how the organization works if you want things to change.

As for why agencies feel the need to hide information like this? They are used to getting hammered from all sides. They have no real system in place for dealing with or fixing things they are criticized for (see institutional dysfunction) so they just hunker down and get rid of things that people will criticize them for. I would say it's not a coincidence that the reports stopped appearing after your article - someone probably saw the article or passed it on to someone else.

Someone who's really interested in fixing things would put all the data out there in the public in the hopes that they would get free analysis out of it.

Comment by TomQ

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:01:47 EDT

Not as important or even particularly important but WMATA used to publish their ridership numbers on the website regularly and that practice ended a couple of years ago in the midst of the debate over the last fare increase.

The bus numbers were useless as they were always the same (though did WMATA really not know how many people were riding the bus on a given day?) but the rail numbers were always interesting I thought.

Comment by @SamuelMoore

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:50:33 EDT

Does the ATU keep any internal data? Like the MPDC FOP? I would expect the union tracks useful data that I'd love to see GGW analyze...

Comment by Michael Perkins

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:09:05 EDT

My inside information is that they spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over whose bucket each failure should be put.

Comment by Davin Peterson

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:02:28 EDT

Metro used to publish a Daily Disruption report on their website, but it goes discontinued when the new management took over.

I think they should bring it back and make it simple like this:
Blue Line Train #--- Delayed 10 minutes due to door problems
Red Line Train #--- Delayed 20 minutes due to signal problems

Comment by Jack Love

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:39:23 EDT

Maybe it's time to have a deep house cleaning at Metro? Some Formula 409 sprayed throughout those executive office suites?

Comment by Michael Perkins

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:38:05 EDT

@Kurt: This from the man that tweets service disruptions using station codes.

Comment by Kurt Raschke

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:36:13 EDT

Correction: "all at" in my last sentence should read "all that".

Comment by Kurt Raschke

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:34:38 EDT

What's not simple about the first disruption report? A train at Vienna had an ATC fault and therefore no propulsion; presumably the overspeed alarm would have been sounding continuously. Because trains with ATP cut out cannot run in revenue service, the train was not dispatched.

Okay, okay. I get that all at makes no sense to most people, but WMATA should still release this data, along with archived train position data from AIM.