Metro officials, who have been largely successful in improving on-time train performance over the past several months, are gearing up to get the agency’s famously unpredictable buses to run on schedule.
Assistant General Manager Gerald Francis said he will present Metro’s Board of Directors with preliminary plans next month to raise the quality of bus service.
“We’re going to make a gallant effort to get out there and see what we can do about schedules,” Francis said.
Measures could include making better use of the GPS system that is already installed in buses and giving dispatcher authority to bus supervisors, he said.
Bus supervisors respond to accidents and make sure the correct number of buses are on the streets but are not responsible for altering buses’ schedules when traffic causes buses to bunch up and arrive at stops two or three at a time.
“On the 30s line, when the President goes somewhere, 16th Street gets blocked and the buses bunch up until the barriers move,” Francis said. “Because of the complexity of the city’s traffic patterns, right now it takes us two to three hours to recover from a [major traffic] incident. We want to get that down to an hour.”
If they had the ability to dispatch buses, supervisors would be able to immediately respond to bunching by reversing some buses or sending some forward, Francis said.
“We want them to be more proactive,” he said, noting that the agency will also look at adjusting schedules on routes that have persistent problems.
General Manager John Catoe has requested four additional bus supervisors in his proposed fiscal year 2009 budget.
Metro has 1,500 buses and 25 or 30 supervisors in the field during peak periods, Francis said.
Metro’s erratic bus service has long been the No. 1 customer complaint in the system.
In November 2006, the agency launched a pilot program called NextBus that used GPS tracking and advanced computer technology to analyze traffic patterns and predict when a bus would be arriving at a stop.
The program proved popular with customers, who could call a phone number to hear when their bus would arrive, but was discontinued in October 2007 when Metro found the $2 million-a-year program was accurate only 80 percent of the time.
Officials said they might bring the program back in a year or two if NextBus Inc. can show a 95 percent accuracy rate.
