The Chronicle‘s Rosanna Ruiz reports that METRO has commissioned a required performance review of itself:
An inside look, including customer complaints, at how Metro manages itself is now in the works. The board awarded a $225,000 contract to Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc. to conduct a state-mandated performance review. The same firm has done at least two previous audits of the transit agency.
The last audit, in 2005, found that passenger fare revenues plunged more than 14 percent during the previous four years while operating expenses per passenger rose 35 percent.
Passenger complaints increased significantly last year — a majority concerned driver behavior. The audit also found ridership declines, which it said needed to be corrected and not hidden in adjusted statistics.
This year’s figures, recently cited by Wilson, were also fuzzy. He offered ridership numbers that were adjusted to make up for failures with noncalibrated electronic counters on some buses. And he also provided nonadjusted figures.
Metro says ridership increases are not in dispute and points to a surge in ridership thanks to the cost of fuel and more Park and Ride users, although some of those numbers can be attributed to Metro’s two new Park and Ride lots.
Let’s see which ridership numbers the auditors choose.
That will be an important factor, but what will also be important is a detailed breakdown of the fare revenues by types of service (rail, bus, Park and Ride, etc.). Let’s hope that METRO will be more forthcoming with the audit firm on those figures than it sometimes is with mere citizens who try to obtain them.
Elsewhere in the column, Ruiz describes METRO’s Chairman David Wolff’s defense of the organization’s costly fuel contracts to the Chronicle editorial board. It’s too bad Chairman Wolff’s visit with the generally supportive editorial board wasn’t recorded and posted online, but maybe one day the editorial board will make better use of technology to inform and engage the community.
