Photo by the|G|â„¢ on Flickr.

WMATA will hold its first meeting of the new Safety and Security Committee tomorrow, split off from the previous Customer Service, Operations and Safety Committee. The staff presentation still needs more information to help the board oversee safety, including a sense of priorities.

The presentation lists the status of NTSB recommendations and the cost to complete each. That is helpful, but doesn’t provide any information about what vulnerabilities each recommendation fixes, and what criteria the staff used to prioritize.

The recommended fixes range from the relatively inexpensive ($350,000 for “Improve Internal Communications”) to the cost-prohibitive ($835M for “Removal of 1000 Series Rail Cars”).

Metro also provides information about the operating divisions that have the most days without a lost time injury, highlighting their best performance. It is a good idea to commend those divisions for maintaining safe work practices and keeping their workers safe. But for a board oversight role, it would be more instructive to show the operating divisions with the worst safety record, and show what are the findings from safety assessments or the results of incident investigations into the injuries.

Metro should look at their best performing divisions as a source of best practices to transfer over to other divisions where workers have been injured. Rather than highlight their best performance, Metro and its oversight board should be looking into their worst performance in order to improve it.

In my opinion, the least valuable part of this presentation is a series of 10 bar charts showing the number of various types of incidents in 2009 compared to 2010. Metro shows that the “2009 Average” rail passenger injury rate was 0.47 per million passenger trips, and that the 2010 injury rate to date is much lower, at 0.14.

This allows the casual reader to think that Metro is somehow improving. But the previous year had the worst accident in Metrorail history, and should not be used as a sort of “average.” Instead, Metro should treat every accident as undesirable, and avoid showing averages unless they are based on the long-term average rate over the past decade or a similar time period.

Given these charts showing incident and injury rates varying over 16 months in the past, what is the board supposed to do? There isn’t any analysis given, only data. Are a lot of the injuries preventable? Are they related to the NTSB findings and therefore the money to be spent on fixes would help the incidents Metro is experiencing? Is there some other fix that would help to prevent these incidents?

Metro is showing data about the injury rate, but there is no explanation about why the rates are increasing or decreasing. Maybe this will be part of the discussion, but so far it doesn’t look like Metro has dug into what the problems really are.

Compare this with the discussion about Elevator and Escalator repair. Metro had to call in an assessment consultant to find its problems, and plans to re-hire the same consultant to figure out whether the corrections have stuck. This indicates that at least in some areas, Metro has lost the ability to assess its own performance, and must rely on outside organizations like consultants, the NTSB and the TOC to find its problems and recommend fixes. One of Metro’s goals should be to develop a culture of self-assessment, so that the organization can better find problems itself without relying on outside help.

Michael Perkins blogs about Metro operations and fares, performance parking, and any other government and economics information he finds on the Web. He lives with his wife and two children in Arlington, Virginia.