One of the biggest complaints levied against WMATA is that it fails to adequately communicate delays and other issues to customers, lessening the reliability and usability of its buses and trains. In response, the transit agency implemented a realtime look into its its bus schedlues Thursday, adding to its existing live tracking of trains.
This realitme information, however, has found a disturbing yet well-known trend: 70% of all busses are late, and nearly a third of those tardy arrivals are late by over 6 minutes.
These delays serve to amplify each other: if one bus is late to one stop, for example, it will arrive at the next stop later, and the next one later still, and so on. On some routes this may lead to wait times approaching thirty minutes, and also contributes to the common (and infuriating) phenomenon of bus-stacking, in which multiple buses on the same route arrive at the same stop simoltaneously, often after a prolonged delay.
Metro is stepping up its communication efforts with the creation of new mobile phone and iPod applications that allow the user to check bus and train arrival times, delays, and escalator outages. WMATA is also holding a competition for software developers, challenging them to develop the most useful application for providing information to handicapped customers.
Stay tuned to WRGW the coming year for all of your Metro news.
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