City Council Takes on Bus Transit Changes

On Thursday, the Greenbelt City Council held its first quarterly work session to analyze the bus transit changes that took effect on Dec. 20, 2010.

Council reviewed the initial conditions of its support that had not been met as well as those that had, discussing their views with representatives from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) and the Prince George’s County Department of Public Works and Transportation.

“I don’t mean to make this sound like a statistical exercise,” James Hamre, Director of the Office of Bus Planning at WMATA, said, opening his presentation to the Council with numerous figures about ridership numbers and pointing out that exact comparisons were difficult, given bus changes.

He cited the route R12 split, as well as route T16 and T17 becoming four new routes: the G12, G13, G14 and G16. When the Ts existed, their combined ridership added up to 7,300 riders a day, according to Hamre.

Referencing the new G routes, he added, “When you roll all those together under the new configuration, we’ve been averaging a little under 12 and a half thousand riders a day,” so ridership had not gone down, he explained.

According to Hamre, another key effort Metrobus had made was increasing its on-time performance.

To compare the old routes’ performance levels with the new routes’, Hamre selected three recent months that he said had no major holidays or weather days. “In general, we’ve gone from 78 percent on time, across those routes that existed previously, up to consistently around 90 percent on time.”

“What’s considered on time?” Mayor Judith "J" Davis asked.

“Generally it’s zero-minutes early, five-minutes late,” Hamre responded, adding that seven percent of buses, or more, were leaving early.

According to Lawrence Glick, Bus Operation Specialist with WMATA, part of the cause is that while the on-time designations listed in schedules indicate bus arrival times, at Roosevelt Center, they actually indicate leave times. Glick said he has been trying to explain this to his operators.

The problem wasn’t just with them leaving early, Mayor Davis pointed out, “Some of them just skipped the whole part of the route too.”

Hamre fielded her concern, saying that this may have been an issue initially because Metro assigned relief drivers to cover for their regular drivers during the winter holidays.

Melissa Ehrenreich, TRU-G member, said she had not heard recent complaints about buses skipping route stops. To her the trickier issue was timed transfer, which is when buses meet at the Roosevelt Center to exchange some passengers.

“I’ve seen it fail twice this week alone, and I’ve only ridden in the morning twice,” Ehrenreich said.

Hamre told her this sometimes happened when one bus arrived early and waited, but the second bus arrived late, messing up their connection.

“According to these statistics about one out of every 11 times, probably miss,” Hamre continued, “But that means also ten out of 11 times, it does [work].”

“Maybe this was just a really bad week. I don’t know,” Ehrenreich replied, evoking laughter from several council members.

When passengers have a complaint, Glick advised, “We need information from the caller sufficient to identify the operator,” and he requested details like day and time, as well as bus number if possible.

Carl Schuettler, a Division Chief with the Prince George’s County Department of Public Works and Transportation, told Council that when it came to TheBus, “Two-minutes early, up to five-minutes late is considered on time.”

Returning to discussion about passenger feedback, Hamre told Council that one-third of the passenger comments Metrobus received, through their customer services center, were related to driver behavior. He also reported that calls about “trip-earlies” exceeded “trip-late” complaints.

Saying that the comparable information for TheBus was good news, Schuettler reported a four complaint total for January, February and March of 2011, but Mayor Davis was not convinced. She said some people felt that when they called Veolia Transportation, a TheBus contractor, “Those complaints will not get back to you.”

Schuttler responded that Veolia was supposed to pass complaints on, but Mayor Davis was still uncertain. “The fact that there are so few complaints listed raises a little red flag,” she continued, pointing out that "supposed to" and actually passing them on might be different matters.

“I get more complaints from TheBus than I have from anyone else," Mayor Davis said.

Schuettler responded that he would talk to Veolia management on Monday.

This story is the first story in a series of two about the Greenbelt City Council’s April 28 meeting to address compliance with their conditions of support to bus transit changes.