Baltimore's annual Artscape festival should be a showcase for the Maryland Transit Administration.
The annual celebration draws an estimated 350,000 visitors to a site that brings together light rail, several bus lines and the Metro. City and state officials routinely encourage the public to use mass transit to attend the event.
The Metro and bus system rose to the challenge for the July 16-18 event but the light rail system put in a dismal showing and the MTA seems not to grasp how bad it was.
Last week, MTA customers who heeded the exhortations to use light rail stuffed my e-mail box with complaints about service on July 17. In some cases, the riders waited on station platforms for more than an hour in 90-degree heat with no word reaching them that there were problems on the line.
Those problems were serious and probably not the MTA's fault. In midafternoon, a body was reported on the tracks near Lutherville. Though none was found it was understandable that the MTA slowed its trains. Then, about 5 p.m., a branch lying across the tracks near the Falls Road station became caught in the undercarriage of a train. It's unclear whether this was an avoidable accident, but let's give the MTA the benefit of the doubt.
What is clear is that it took the MTA a long time to restore service and that it did a miserable job of informing passengers.
Steve Bove of Crownsville said he arrived at the North Linthicum station Saturday evening hoping to make it to Artscape by 8 p.m. for a concert. He said he and his friends arrived before 7:30 p.m. and waited until past 8:30 p.m. and that none of them heard a public address announcement of problems on the line.
"One engineer southbound did shout out 'we'll be coming back soon,' but that was it," he wrote. "We missed [Government Mule] because of this, and will never travel light rail again."
Andrew D. Freeman had this account:
"My daughter and a friend waited 50 minutes this afternoon at the Mt. Washington station for a southbound train. They've now been waiting over half an hour at the Mt. Royal station for a northbound train – after getting to spend far less time at Artscape than they'd planned."
Freeman said neither recalled hearing any PA announcements.
Robert DeMuth of Homeland arrived at the Woodberry station around 6 p.m.:
"We waited 40 minutes with a crowd that swelled to hundreds of hot & tired festival goers. No word from MTA on why trains were running so infrequently. When the first train pulled into the station, it was impossible to board, as the cars were already jampacked with Orioles fans also returning home. After another 10-minute wait, another train came and there was a mad dash as everyone tried to fit in."
DeMuth said he ended up waiting an hour and 15 minutes for a train he could board and never heard an announcement.
What the three had in common was that they were stuck at stations where the MTA says it has working PA speakers, but none heard any announcements of problems. Some stations have no speakers or nonworking speakers because they haven't been an MTA priority.
MTA spokesman Terry Owens said the MTA made some announcements but that he couldn't say when because the MTA doesn't keep a log of its passenger alerts.
No log? Disgraceful. What if the MTA administrator wanted to know what was said?
In the absence of an actual record, the evidence suggests MTA officials might have made some announcements early in the day but became preoccupied with technical issues and forgot to keep communicating. Quite simply, they forgot the human factor.
Late last week Owens sent this statement to sum up the MTA's evaluation of its work during Artscape:
"As for last Saturday, I can tell you that we moved over 14,000 people on light rail and another 8,000 people Sunday. On a daily basis more than 28,000 people use the service. We move 350,000 people every weekday on all our modes. We're one of the largest transit agencies in the country. Are we perfect? No we are not. Do we strive daily to improve the service? Yes we do. We had some service disruptions Saturday and we responded. How do we plan to do a better job of informing customers when there is a problem on Light Rail? We are investing in a new PA system for Light Rail and our Metro Subway operation. In the meantime we are continuing to make improvements internally that will result in improved service on the street."
The new system will be a long-overdue improvement, but it could take two years to install.
In the meantime, the MTA needs to focus on the customer instead of the hardware. When problems arise, as they will, it must become an obsession among managers to get word to people at the stations as quickly as possible and as often as necessary — even if it means driving there.
Transit customers know that systems break down and emergencies disrupt service. What they don't understand — and shouldn't have to — is being ignored.
An apology would be nice, too, but those seem to be reserved for MARC riders.