Posts about RAC

The meeting is tonight, Thursday, April 11 (or last night for those reading the daily email), 6-8 pm at the Carnegie Library in Mount Vernon Square, L'Enfant Map Room.

Learn about forts: BF Cooling and Gary Thompson, founders of an effort to preserve DC's civil war circle of forts, will give a talk about the forts and their history on Monday, April 15, 7-8:45 pm at the Tenley-Friendship Library.

Get parking right: Next Wednesday, the Coalition for Smarter Growth (CSG) is hosting national parking expert Jeff Tumlin to talk about ways cities are fix parking policy to match supply and demand and build a system that works better for everyone. Sam Zimbabwe, DDOT planning head, will talk about how DC might use Tumlin's ideas.

The forum is April 17 at the Center for American Progress, 1333 H St. NW. There are refreshments at 6 and then the program from 6:30-8:30. RSVP here before it fills up!

Be green around Earth Day: Saturday, April 20 is Earth Day, and there are a lot of great events to celebrate and learn more about how to help the environment. The Anacostia Watershed Society is having a cleanup and celebration, first helping clean up the river at 20 sites from 9 am to noon, followed by a celebration at Bladensburg Waterfront Park.

The Town of Vienna is having a Green Expo on Thursday, April 18, 6:30-9 pm to show off ways to make your own home and life more sustainable, while Loudoun is having a festival on Sunday, April 28th.

Be happy in Arlington: CSG and the Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization are cosponsoring a happy hour in Arlington on Monday, April 22 from 6:30-8:30 pm at William Jeffrey's Tavern, 2301 Columbia Pike. Ask questions about what's going on down the Pike or just meet people and have fun!

Improve the public realm: That same day, NCPC is hosting a speaker from London, Helen Marriage, to discuss ways that city is making its public spaces better. A panel afterward will talk about how some of the ideas could come to DC. That's also 6:30-8:30 pm on Monday, April 22 at NCPC, 401 9th Street NW, Suite 500 North.

The RAC is listening: The WMATA Riders' Advisory Council wants to hear from more riders, especially about how upcoming Silver Line service and changes to buses and trains will affect riders. To that end, they're holding listening sessions outside WMATA HQ, starting with one on April 24, 6:30 pm in the Charles Houston Rec Center, 901 Wythe Street in Alexandria near Braddock Road Metro.

Walk and tour: CSG's spring walking tour series kicks off April 27 with a tour of White Flint, followed by 14th Street, Fairfax's Route 1, Wheaton, and Fort Totten in May and June. Space is limited, so RSVP for your favorite tour now!

Green said that Rush Plus has seen some success. There has been a slight decrease in crowding on the Orange Line and passenger loads declined on the Yellow Line, but are still unbalanced on the Blue Line. In the morning, Blue Line trains are carrying between 86 and 98 passengers per car, and in the evening they are carrying between 96 and 120 passengers.

WMATA even offered riders an incentive to try out the yellow line with a complimentary $5 travel pass. Approximately 140 people participated in WMATA's "Hello Yellow" campaign.

Rush Plus has received largely negative reviews from riders, and RAC members passed on the message to WMATA.

"All my neighbors and friends hate it," said Barbara Hermanson, a representative from Alexandria. "People are upset now with the level of Blue Line service, and they're going to be even more upset when it decreases further with the Silver Line service," said Ben Ball, a DC representative.

In response to riders' complaints about longer wait times on the Blue Line, Green announced that WMATA is adding an 8-car Blue Line train during rush hour. Beyond that, she said that the system is "maxed out" in its capacity to send more trains through Rosslyn (the limit is 26 trains per hour). "There isn't any extra space," Green said. "It's all being used."

RAC members hear updates on labor negotiations, on-time performance

Despite a natural focus on Rush Plus during the RAC meeting on Wednesday, attendees did discuss more than just the early returns on Rush Plus.

Earlier in the meeting, Denise Mitchell, a senior labor relations officer at WMATA, announced that contract negotiations are ongoing with Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, the largest of the 5 unions to which WMATA employees belong. Contracts have concluded for 3 of the other unions, Mitchell said.

Overall, things are going well at WMATA—at least according to WMATA. Its Metro Scorecard feature shows that both Metrorail and MetroAccess are exceeding the "on-time performance" ratings set for it, and Metrobus falls just below it, as of June 2012.

Data on customer satisfaction is a bit out of date. The figure stood at 79% for both Metrorail and Metrobus in June 2011, but the agency is scheduled to update these figures this fall, according to their website. WMATA will be conducting additional surveys this fall.

One point of concern: between April and June of this year, the customer injury rate, measuring injuries to any customer caused by some aspect of Metro's operation that require immediate medical attention away from the scene of the injury, increased for the first time in 5 consecutive quarters.

Visiting students compare RAC to its equivalent back home

Over 30 people were in the audience for Wednesday's RAC meeting. That is higher than normal, owing largely to a contingent of visiting urban and regional planning students from Ryerson University in Toronto.

Michael Lin, one of the students, highlighted a difference between the meeting and a similar one back home. "It seems less argumentative," Lin said about the meeting, even though it began with Chris Barnes, a member of the public who criticizes the RAC each month, calling the council a "failure" and asking for the chairwoman to resign. "Even though there are arguments, there's more respect and integrity to the process," he said.

Sarah Smith, another student who survived the 2-hour meeting, called it "interesting" but wondered why attendance is normally sparse. "If there are so many issues, why aren't people here?"

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.

Broken rail-car air conditioners have been thrust into the spotlight thanks to the rabid persistence of an IT whiz known on Twitter as @fixwmata. The 32-year-old Atlanta native, who asked not to be named because he insists the story shouldn't be about him, began riding Metro last April.

Over the summer, he noticed complaints about hot subway cars on Twitter and decided to put his analytical skills to good use. He created what's known as the #hotcar list, a crowdsourced database tracking rail cars with broken AC.

At first FixWMATA got no response from Metro. Then, Dan Stessel showed up, and started communicating back, which FixWMATA loved at first. But then, Stessel couldn't give him details of which air conditioners were being repaired.

FixWMATA, who has about 1,300 followers on Twitter, isn't buying it. And now he believes that the rosy media coverage of Metro's latest PR effort is harmful. He called the Post "an advertising arm of WMATA" when the paper covered Stessel's social media frenzy last month.

"Not having a response from Metro last year actually worked out a little bit better," he says. "Because Metro last year also wasn't really talking to the media. So we had the media on our side last year, and we had a lot of reports—both on TV and on the Web—from journalists interested in what's going on."

He's not the only one who thinks the local media have fallen for Metro's tricks. The journalist behind the Unsuck DC Metro blog—complaint central for disgruntled riders since 2009—calls Stessel's effort "Band-Aids on the public image" for a reactive agency that lacks accountability. He thinks Metro's campaign is better than nothing but doesn't address the malaise he says afflicts the agency's middle management.

"People do seem to respond to Dan saying, if somebody tweets, 'Oh, this car's hot,' Dan tweets back, 'We're on it' or 'We're checking it out. We'll check it out tonight,'" says Unsuck, who also asked to remain anonymous, because he says he's received threats from Metro employees. "That seems to convince some people that they really are. You decide for yourself if they really are. I know they're not."

What does FixWMATA mean by "our side"? Is it the side of fixing things? Because there are a lot of people at Metro who also want to fix things, though there are also folks who stand in the way. Or is "our side" those who just want to throw barbs at WMATA, no matter what?

For a long time after the 2009 crash and even to this day, there are those on Twitter who periodically call for just "blowing up" the whole Metro system, whatever that means.

I disagree with FixWMATA's view of the change in the press. To me, the press went through a period of overly sensationalistic "gotcha" reporting. Ann Scott Tyson's coverage at the Post, in particular, made a large headline out of any piece of data that put Metro in a negative light, regardless of whether there was a larger context.

That had the disappointing effect of making some WMATA employees even more reluctant to talk to anyone about anything, a trend that has thankfully started to reverse with Stessel and his bosses, Lynn Bowersox and Barbara Richardson. Yet when anyone praises these tentative steps toward openness, some claim that it's "advertising."

One of the biggest pieces of context is that Metro has been drastically underfunded for years and treated as a political football. It still is, like when House Republicans tried to cut its repair funding and Bob McDonnell stonewalled for months about asking his party colleagues not to destroy Metro.

Unsuck wrote, "As many long-time readers may know, Unsuck lived in Japan a while back. My experience with Japanese mass transit is a major reason I am so critical of Metro." One thing they do in Japan is they actually have money to maintain their mass transit and build more lines.

Underfunding doesn't excuse bad practices, but we need to understand the root of a problem in order to fix it, and not just heap the blame on those most visible.

John Hendel sums it up on TBD:

The contrarian view is that Metro is a perpetual screw-up—that the trains are always late, that the communication efforts are hardly ever enough and are often off-base or obtuse, that the system deteriorates, that the reform efforts are maddening, that the idea of "strategy" at Jackson Graham is the equivalent of a fairy-tale myth. The attacks are often biting, caustic, and frustrated, and the intense bitterness that characterizes some of the jibes lacks as much realistic perspective as constant Metro cheerleading.

What we need to do to fix WMATA for real is to tease apart those problems which just stem from insufficient funding, and those which come from actual bad management practices, bad employee behavior, problematic union work rules, or other non-funding problems.

Take the hotcars. What is really going on? How often do these units break? How quickly do they get fixed? Does management really know when they're out? For that matter, how much should Metro prioritize fixing them over fixing escalators or replacing "track modules," the signal components that allowed the 2009 Red Line crash?

Looking through the capital priorities list and discussing tradeoffs is a lot less sexy and doesn't fit in 140 characters, but it's far more vital to the task of actually fixing WMATA.

In other words, if you were Richard Sarles, what would you do? Lining everyone up against a wall and shooting them, which some people on Twitter suggest, does not fix the problem, by the way.

Nor is WMATA management a monolith. From far enough away, it looks that way. But get closer, and you discover a wide range of quality among the executives. Same for the individual employees.

Public pressure is good, but also can be bad. If an agency feels little pressure, there's not enough impetus for change. But too much criticism, and it just demoralizes the good people. I found it frustrating enough to work inside a large, sometimes-bureaucratic organization (Google) where the press constantly showered praise, much deserved, some not. I have to have enormous respect for those change agents who stick it out inside the organization and fight hard to make things better despite working for an organization that garners such vitriol.

Get to know those change agents, and they'll tell you they're frustrated too. They have coworkers who play politics instead of focusing on what to do. They have employees who aren't productive, take up budget, but can't be removed. They have an organizational culture that resists change. They don't have enough money to do much. They get shot down by their own board. Local jurisdictions fight their ideas. Local elected officials criticize any move they make. Bloggers and tweeters have endless nitpicks.

When I started criticizing WMATA, I went to a board meeting, and Jim Graham said, hey, why don't you be on the Riders' Advisory Council. The RAC has a certain ability to ask staff to make presentations on detailed topics that a random person can't necessarily get, and to ask questions of staff.

Being on the RAC hasn't magically fixed everything, but it helped me push for open data, and more importantly, get to know the good people at WMATA so that I could help them bring about even more change. It's slow, and maddeningly frustrating, but that's how change usually happens.

It would be great to have FixWMATA and Unsuck on the RAC. There's a vacancy in DC right now, and likely one coming up in Maryland; plus, every year 1/3 of the members come up for renomination. I don't really buy that FixWMATA needs to be anonymous to make the conversation not about him, or Unsuck because of threats (Unsuck also was anonymous from the start as well, and also said it was to keep the conversation from being about him).

If they want to really fix WMATA, it's time to come out from behind the keyboard and start engaging directly with the agency. Join the RAC; I'll lobby hard for either to get appointed and would welcome having their energy to delve into problems. Try to figure out what's really wrong, deep down, instead of just what outcome is problematic. Then we can all lobby for whatever changes are necessary, whether it's funding, management fixes, labor work rule changes, or a combination of all of those.

The reports provide a monthly overview of key performance indicators (KPIs) for Metrorail, Metrobus, MetroAccess, and the Metro Transit Police Department. The report contains not only the KPIs themselves, but also explains, for each KPI, why the information is relevant, why the performance has changed since the last reporting period, and shows the steps being taken to improve performance.

This is all valuable information, but should not be the only glimpse the public gets into how the transit system is doing.

An example of the current framework's shortcomings is that the public lacks access to statistics on the performance of the most heavily-used escalators, such as those at the seven transfer stations in the system. Burnside's response to the RAC was that the Vital Signs Report was only intended to convey system-wide statistics.

There's a great escalator status page showing current outages, but not their past performance. Having the raw data available would make it possible to analyze things like escalator malfunctions at transfer stations, and generate more specific performance indicators than those Metro unveils in the report.

The benefits of releasing raw performance data are substantial. An enterprising software developer could, for example, build a customized dashboard which would allow riders to view statistics specific to stations and routes they use. This would empower riders by allowing them to better understand the agency's performance in a personally meaningful way.

Unfortunately, WMATA's strategy for reporting performance indicators (pictured above) entails releasing only the least detailed of reports to the public, while the General Manager receives an intermediate level of detail, and heads of individual departments receive the most detailed data.

This makes it impossible for members of the public to independently analyze the data, whether to create their own more localized metrics, develop charts and maps to better visualize the data, or to merge the data with outside information, such as weather patterns or traffic conditions.

Performance data also should to be released more often. WMATA intends to cut the Vital Signs Report's production from monthly to quarterly, saying that many of the actions being taken to improve performance are difficult to measure on a month-to-month basis. Expecting to see results one month after a change is implemented, Burnside said, is unreasonable. However, this change also means that there will be times that the latest publicly-available data will be at least three months old.

While monthly reporting is a good start, WMATA should begin to take steps towards making vital information available on a real-time or near-real-time basis. Many indicators, like bus and rail on-time performance, and the availability of elevators and escalators, are based on electronic records that the agency already uses for operational purposes. So it's only a matter of developing the necessary analysis tools for riders to be able to, for example, examine the on-time performance for each day's service at the end of the operating day.

WMATA released service reports daily until February 15, 2011. These detailed Metrobus and Metrorail ridership and summarized Metrorail service disruptions. Metro discontinued these, maintaining that they were too labor-intensive to produce. Metro should make daily service reports available once again, and they should be enhanced to provide additional valuable data.

San Francisco Muni's exemplary Service Delivery Daily Reports provide a considerable amount of information about the previous day's service: the availability of each type of vehicle in the agency's fleet on that day, operator absenteeism, and precise information on accidents and any incident causing more than 20 minutes' delay to a line. They detail the start and end times of the incident, the location and nature of the incident, actions taken to restore service, and the identities of transit vehicles, staff members, and police units involved in the incident.

As fantastic as Muni's daily reports are, they can't be put to their most effective use because they are released in rigid PDF format. If one wants to conduct an automated analysis of the data, as our own Michael Perkins did with Metrorail disruption reports, one cannot simply load them into a spreadsheet or database without time-consuming copying and pasting of each individual number.

Releasing Metro's monthly Vital Signs Report to the public is a good first step, but it should release information to the public on a daily basis which is already gathered electronically, to encourage different types of analysis. Summaries like the Vital Signs Report, which take time to prepare because of the depth of analysis involved, are best released on a monthly or quarterly basis. But raw performance data, including service disruption reports, should be posted considerably more frequently.

A governance committee, ably led by Mary Hynes of Arlington, has formulated bylaws and procedures for the board which better define its role. This year, after most members turned over and the reports came out criticizing past board actions, the board has indeed started focusing effectively on the high-level decisions that it needs to make to keep Metro running smoothly.

The GAO report says, "These draft bylaws represent a good first step toward addressing some of the concerns discussed in this report but will need to be adopted and then effectively implemented to achieve their desired effect." The report also criticizes past boards for doing a poor job of strategic planning, suggesting the board develop a better plan and then commit to implementing it.

The executives and DOTs of DC, Maryland, and Virginia were waiting to see the GAO report before moving ahead further on structural changes. The Board of Trade report last year suggested removing alternates, giving the governors one extra appointment of their own, creating an added "super-board" above the current board to supervise the board, and changing the jurisdictional veto.

The Riders' Advisory Council, on the other hand, argued that these changes were unnecessary and possibly counterproductive. Its report argued that the problems could be fixed by doing a better job appointing members and by the members developing better policies around these issues. (Disclosure: I was the principal author of the RAC report.)

The GAO took a similar stance to the RAC's report. They wrote:

Our analysis, however, indicates that most of the recommended changes have trade-offs—there are both benefits and drawbacks to them. We compared the various recommendations to leading governance practices, approaches taken by other transit agencies, and the views of board members and stakeholders. Board members and stakeholders indicated that proposed changes to the board's structure and processes—such as eliminating alternate board members, changing the size of the board, or eliminating the jurisdictional veto—have trade-offs, and we did not find consistent support among leading governance practices or other transit agencies that these changes would improve governance.

The [Board of Trade/COG] Governance Task Force recommended that the signatories and the appointing authorities form a WMATA Governance Commission to make improvements to the authority's governance structure and hold the board accountable for its performance. ... Such a commission was viewed by some stakeholders we spoke with as redundant because it would be comprised of most of the same membership that is responsible for appointing the board of directors.

The GAO paid special attention to the federal government's involvement, which includes the General Services Administration appointing a set of federal members. The GAO says that GSA lacks clear procedures for selecting and appointing these members. The GSA replied that while it's true it doesn't have formal procedures, it doesn't think that's interfered with selecting qualified candidates.

Moving forward, this report confirms what's become increasingly clear: WMATA can be fixed without rearranging the organizational structure. Doing that could fix some problems but create others, and would ultimately be a distraction from the work of actually governing better.

Already, we've seen tremendous progress. The NTSB feels safety is improving. Communication has taken huge steps forward with WMATA now tweeting and generally using two-way communication. The board passed a budget that avoided service cuts and without any major acrimony. Local jurisdictions stepped up with needed funding.

Now, we should let the current board and management keep making the strides they have. The executives and DOTs should let this issue rest.

Governor McDonnell did succeed in using the frustration over Metro to let him take away some power from Northern Virginia, giving him a direct appointment to the board who will likely replace Mary Hynes entirely or move her to an alternate position and bump Jeff McKay. Either way, that will be a big loss for Virginian interests, since both have effectively represented their constituents. The legislature should reverse this hasty decision before the appointments are made or renewed at the end of the year.

If you get asked to appear on WAMU, they offer you a free parking pass, which you can print out and bring to the station. Why not also offer a free Metro ride to Tenleytown as another option? Imagine if an organization could send you an email, which you could open up on your mobile phone and which contains a special code your phone would recognize and use to add value to your stored fare?

Michael Perkins has been promoting adding more flexible passes like those used in the Seattle area. WMATA has said they need to wait for upgrades to the fare payment system to be able to consider this. Will the new system allow the Board to consider a wide range of options like Michael's?

In December, WMATA issued an RFP for the next generation of the payment system, and hopes to award a contract this summer.

WMATA got into trouble with the existing Cubic system because any change requires lengthy RFPs, bids, and custom programming that cost lots of money and took years. That limited their options for fare changes that could help riders.

With this new system, it's important to build in the flexibility they would need. The new contract should anticipate many of the possible innovations, and make sure that the vendor can provide those should the Board choose to pursue them. It should also make it relatively inexpensive and relatively quick to make other modifications we don't anticipate today.

Now is a good time for riders to give suggestions of what they'd like to see in the new system, or what issues might arise with features, usability, and more that staff should keep in mind as they pick technology vendors.

If you want to learn about the details of this process and give rider feedback on the decisions being made, come to the RAC's meeting tonight. You don't have to be a RAC member to ask questions or give comments. The meeting will start around 7:00 pm in one of the rooms at the lobby level of WMATA headquarters, 600 5th Street, NW.

I'd like to know what this is costing and whether there are other ways to spend the money. It's been reported that these are TSA personnel, not MTPD. It was also reported that this money is coming from federal grants. But if MTPD wanted the TSA to instead be patrolling the platforms with dogs to sniff for bombs, or with behavioral profiling experts to look for people that might be about to attack the system, could they use the money for this instead?

And what's the effectiveness? Have such programs in other cities actually deterred any attacks? Did Metro have any data on the value of this kind of program versus others?

Civil liberties advocates have also asked whether these searches are looking for other items that aren't related to the actual safety of Metro. The ACLU points out that searches for "general crime control" are not permitted (and even the constitutionality of this program is doubtful).

DC will soon start to have legal medical marijuana, but that remains illegal under federal law as well as in Maryland and Virginia. What will MTPD do if a rider boarding a station in the District has marijuana? Whose laws are they obligated to enforce?

What else would you like to know? What do you think the RAC's resolution should say?