Meeting_Body
SYSTEM SAFETY, SECURITY AND OPERATIONS COMMITTEE
AD HOC CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMMITTEE
NOVEMBER 16, 2017
Subject
SUBJECT: OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT
ON REVIEW OF METRO RAIL SERVICE DISRUPTIONS
Action
ACTION: RECEIVE AND FILE
Heading
RECOMMENDATION
Title
RECEIVE AND FILE Report on Review of Metro Rail Service Disruptions.
Issue
ISSUE
The Metro Office of the Inspector General conducted a customer impact focused study on rail service disruptions to consider whether state of good repair priorities should be adjusted to improve the customer experience. Historically, Metro has based capital investments on the priorities of the agency, expertise of asset managers, and age of transit assets and infrastructure. Recently, the agency has begun conducting asset condition surveys, which will allow better capital investment priorities. We understand that these efforts may take several years. Therefore, we conducted this study with the assistance of a rail expert, The Wathen Group (TWG), a small woman owned business enterprise, to first identify and evaluate the top incidents causing delay for each rail line, and then determine if the issues causing delays are being addressed and appropriate state of good repair (SGR) investments are being made to reduce their reoccurrence. This customer impact based study is complementary to the agency’s on-going asset condition surveys as it re-prioritizes its capital repair and replacement plans.
Discussion
DISCUSSION
A primary goal of Metro and its Board is to improve the customer experience. For the Operations Department, this includes developing and improving in-service on-time performance, and implementing efficient and effective transit service. The Operations and Risk Management Departments support this agency goal by implementing an industry leading SGR program that will improve reliability, prioritize the performance of scheduled and preventive maintenance of assets, meet SGR goals, reduce breakdowns, and better meet the daily transit needs of customers.
In 2016, the Operations Department reported 2,585 service disruptions on all rail lines. These delay incidents were categorized into 15 major incident types. This review focused on delay incidents within Metro’s control and related to asset maintenance, and therefore excluded 441 delay incidents categorized as Police/Health. Of the remaining 2,144 incidents that were part of this analysis, the major categories of incidents were rail vehicles, rail operations, traction power, yard control, and signals. In 2016, rail vehicle incidents (e.g. speed sensor, mechanical, propulsion, door) and rail operations incidents (e.g. operator absence or errors, service capacity, no equipment, single track delay) were the two most frequent types of service delay incidents across all rail lines, accounting for nearly 82% of the delay incidents. The third leading category of incident delays was different for each line.
• For the Metro Blue Line (MBL), traction power was the third top cause of delays.
• For the Metro Expo Line and Metro Gold Line (MGDL), yard control was the third top cause of delays.
• For the Metro Green Line (MGL) and Metro Red Line (MRL), signal was the third top cause of delays.
A. Key Findings
The report has overall findings include:
• Metro does not currently have a good system or complete information to identify root cause for service delays. The root cause for many delay incidents was not identified in Metro’s records.
• Metro lacks asset condition surveys for each asset class. These surveys are essential for identifying and rating the condition of each asset and its component parts as a guidepost to State of Good Repair investment decisions.
• In the absence of consistent root cause information and support from complementary asset condition surveys, the ability to ensure that capital and maintenance programs are adequately and timely addressing critical needs is significantly limited. Once a system is established, it should be maintained.
• For various reasons prior management did not conduct midlife overhauls on the P865/2020 cars (40% of the light rail vehicle (LRV) fleet) and the Base Buy subway cars (29% of subway fleet), which are now the oldest cars in their respective fleets. With these cars remaining in service longer than anticipated, they are experiencing more component failures and are kept in service by as needed maintenance. Current Metro management has already begun the overhaul process and is in various stages of completeness depending on the model of the car.
• Operator non-availability, lateness for schedule pullouts, insufficient Rail Operator Extraboard staffing levels were key contributors to Rail Operations service related delays. However, this is not a SGR issue so we did not focus our study on this matter.