Metro Reasons: Are shorter hours really helping Metro maintenance? Here’s what the data show.

Should Metro return to late night hours or keep them to make more time for badly-needed maintenence? As the debate continues in the region, there's been a dearth of data showing how useful the shorter service hours have actually been. But now we have data to help answer that question: they show that shorter weekend hours were a boon for Metro track workers, while the extra half hour of track time during the week has provided only a small benefit.

Metrorail track crews have been able to perform four times as much work on Saturdays and almost seven times as much work on Sundays through the first five months of Fiscal Year 2019 (July to November, 2018) as compared to the same time period prior to SafeTrack, according to new data obtained by MetroHero maintainer James Pizzurro through a Public Access to Records and Privacy Policy (PARP) request.

Metro originally curtailed late-night service during the year of SafeTrack that started on June 4, 2016. That included on weekend service cuts, when trains stopped running at midnight. Then the Metro Board of Directors codified two years of service cuts from 2017 to 2019. Trains stopped running at 11:30 pm during the week (it was midnight before) and at 1 am on Fridays and Saturdays (from 3 am previously).

A Metro press statement at the time said the additional hours would be used for “enhanced preventive maintenance including cable testing to prevent smoke and fire incidents, stray current testing, trackbed cleaning, switch maintenance, torqueing (tightening fasteners, joint nuts and bolts) to eliminate excessive strain on infrastructure, and track geometry work to ensure the correct rail alignment.”

The Metro Board is currently developing the agency’s budget for Fiscal Year 2020 beginning July 1, and one of the decisions to be made is whether or not to extend the moratorium on late-night hours. The DC representatives and Mayor Muriel Bowser are heavily in favor of ending the cuts, while Virginia, Maryland, and the feds seem to be on board with continuing them for another year.

We've been on the waiting train for three years @wmata. It's time we give residents and businesses a metro system that works as hard and as late as they do. Restore late night service. #KeepMetroOpen

Join us in asking @wmata to restore late night service: https://t.co/RzNQ3Wl7Iz pic.twitter.com/UasZoPI4JB

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) February 21, 2019

Metro uses ‘work-wrench hours’ to keep track of maintenance

Metro records work done in the rail system by an indicator called “work-wrench hours,” which measures “total time that a technician has tools-in-hand and is directly conducting work.” While useful for determining how much time is spent doing work, by itself it does not measure the efficiency of the workers nor the quality of the work.

Pizzurro submitted the PARP request in December of last year, and received it earlier in February 2019. (WMATA shared some preliminary numbers earlier in 2018 in presentations to the Metro Board justifying the position of agency staff that the current shortened late-night hours must continue for at least another year.)

The charts below show “wrench time,” which records the amount of time used by track crews. Multiplied by the number of workers on the tracks (average crew size shown in red), this results in the “work-wrench hour” metric.

Since the rail service hours were cut for SafeTrack, Metro data show gains in total work time used during the overnight hours when the rail system is closed. The dataset does not include work-wrench hours spent on SafeTrack projects or scheduled trackwork when the system is open (like when trains single-track beginning at 10 pm during the week).

Calculated over all seven days of the week, Metro data show that workers were able to take advantage of just over 11,000 hours to perform trackwork between July 1 and November 30, 2018 in the current fiscal year. Of the four years of data requested by Pizzurro’s PARP request, this marks the highest year-to-date total compared with 9,346 hours in FY 2018, 8,496 in FY 2017, and 8,212 in FY 2016.

Not much additional time spent on work during the week

Breaking the data down by day of the week provides a more nuanced picture of when the work has been accomplished.

During the week (Mondays through Thursdays), little change has been seen in the cumulative amount work performed by Metro track crews. Slight increases in work-wrench time can be found, but the maximum increase totals 296 hours on Tuesday evenings, while the smallest increase appears to be on Wednesdays with a cumulative increase of 87 work-wrench hours thus far this year.

Because the data does not include time spent working on single-tracking during service hours or SafeTrack, the dip in productivity during FY 2017 is somewhat a mystery, though one possible explanation is that less “standard” work around the system was being performed due to the manpower requirements of the SafeTrack surges.

Big improvements in time available for trackwork on weekends

The data appear to show significant increases in work-wrench hours on Fridays and Saturdays, and to a lesser extent, Sundays. While weekday overnight hours are still more productive than each weekend night period, the change in late-night hours allowed Metro to take advantage of the overnight window to do more than a scant amount of trackwork.

Eliminating post-midnight trackwork on Fridays gave track workers three additional hours of track time per week, which resulted in a significant tripling of work-wrench hours performed. In addition to the extra time granted to workers, the average number of workers in each track crew increased meaning more workers on average were able to perform work during the same time window.

Metro’s new service hours went into effect in FY 2018 when Friday service began ending at 1 am instead of midnight. From FY 2018 to FY 2019 however, with the same Saturday morning opening (7 am), workers were able to fit in nearly 350 more wrench hours, which by itself is more work than they were able to get done during all of the first five months of FY 2016.

A similar pattern can be seen for the overnight periods after Saturday’s rail system closure to Sunday morning’s opening:

When Metro closed at 3 am on Saturdays and opened at 7 am on Sundays, workers used a total of 147 work-wrench hours from July to November in FY 2016. But with the three hours of service after midnight eliminated during SafeTrack, Metro was able to quadruple the total work-wrench hours in the system. That trend continued further in FY 2018 when openings on Sunday were pushed back to 8 am, even when late-night service until 1am was restored. Still further work has been done so far in the first five months of FY 2019.

Metro wants a continuation of the current hours

When the Metro Board voted in 2016 to curtail service hours for the next two years, they inserted a sunset provision so the late-night hour cuts would automatically roll back beginning July 1, 2019, unless the Board took another action to extend the moratorium.

Metro staff believe the cuts are needed for at least another year in order to allow their preventative maintenance program to make progress. A 2018 presentation made to the Board noted electrical fires were down 3%, track defects down 35%, and emergency/unscheduled trackwork was down 59%. This progress, Metro says, has led to higher customer satisfaction (from 69% in 2017 to 76% in 2018) and customer on-time performance that is “the highest since recorded in FY11.”

Metro’s rail staff, led by Acting Assistant General Manager Laura Mason, have requested that the current hours be kept in place. Several aspects of Metro's preventative maintenance program require four or five years to complete a single pass, and the extra late-night hours help track workers accomplish those tasks.

The Metro Board is set to vote on whether or not to extend the moratorium on late-night hours this coming Thursday.

Metro Reasons is a regular breaking news, investigative reporting, and analysis column by Stephen Repetski about everything Metro. Please send tips to Metro Reasons.