My quotes in the Washington Post about Metro failing to promote itself

The Washington Post's Kery Murakami decided to dig deeply into data about growth patterns of people moving into spaces within a half mile from Metro stations throughout the DC region.

He contacted me (representing Arlington's Mobility Lab) because our expertise is on how important initiatives other than infrastructure are to the transportation choices that people make. Sure, running safe, reliable trains on time is really important, but it straddles the line between infrastructure and the education aspect we focus on.

In places like DC where the transportation grid has been built out about as much as possible, the only way to go is to win people's admiration and loyalty to various ways of moving around. The good news is that it can often be effective (if done well, which it often isn't), and it's a heck of a lot less expensive than building new highways and train stations.

Anyway, this is a good article, with excellent reporting and (I think) some pretty great quotes from me! :-)

But even though that meant 38,000 more people were living near a station, ridership didn’t grow. According to Metro’s figures, it fell. Weekday boardings in the District dropped by 13 percent between May 2011 and May 2018 — or by an average of about 57,000 boardings daily — while all those people were moving in around stations.

That was “absolutely” a lost opportunity, said Paul Mackie, research director of Mobility Lab, the research arm of Arlington County Commuter Services. “It doesn’t help that the SafeTrack repair program has led to a general decline in both service and loyalty to Metro,” he said. “But Metro needs to promote itself harder, especially in light of competition from other options like Uber, Lyft, carpooling, e-scooters, bikes and bikeshare, and the rise in teleworking.”

Mackie also said Metro hasn’t done enough to reach out to all the additional people moving in around stations. 

“There is a huge TransitScreen on the marquee at Gallery Place/Chinatown that lists when the next trains are leaving,” he noted. “Why aren’t those signs in every neighborhood and bar and restaurant and library and hotel promoting transit?"

I was also quoted in a separate Post article titled, Data shows areas near Metro stations remain havens for the rich.

“We’re seeing the rich get richer – in both wealth and quality of life – and low-income people having to keep fighting to stay afloat with everyday tasks – like getting to work or daycare,” said Paul Mackie, research director for Mobility Lab, an Arlington transportation research center funded by local and federal governments.

Washington Post quotes me on people who are making transit better

MetroHero, one of many unofficial DC Metro apps

It's been a good week for me getting quoted in major newspapers. First it was USA Today about Trump's pick for transportation secretary and now I'm in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post (Page 2 of the Metro section).

Reporter Faiz Siddiqui attended Mobility Lab's Transportation Techies this week and did a nice wrap-up of how everyday citizens are using data to figure out myriad ways to make Washington D.C.'s Metro subway better.

Here is an excerpt from "How developers are turning to Metro’s newest software tool to enhance their apps:"

The gathering at Metro’s headquarters, the latest in the series of monthly meetups sponsored by Mobility Lab, the research arm of Arlington County commuter services, was all about little fixes developers can make to improve riders’ experience, said Paul Mackie, a spokesman for Mobility Lab.

“This doesn’t need to be part of a 30-year-planning process or even a five-year process — a lot of these things can be incorporated immediately,” Mackie said. “It’s not only free labor, but it’s passionate and caring labor.”

Yes, We Could Get More Stupid, and Idiocracy Shows Us How

It's believed that Mike Judge's 2006 sci-fi comedy Idiocracy was released in far fewer theaters because of the way companies like Starbucks and Carl's Jr. were portrayed in it.

Fox, the distributor, allegedly didn't like that its advertisers were being treated unkindly. This is probably just one of many reasons to, even now, eight years later, watch the movie, which runs from time to time on cable TV.

I caught it on Comedy Central last night and thought it was hilarious. Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph play an average soldier and a prostitute respectively who get shipped 500 years into the future in a military experiment gone awry.

Once there, they encounter an America that has seen its gene pool deteriorate to the point where nobody is literate and people sit on their toilet loungers watching TV shows that make today's reality television look like Lawrence of Arabia.

Someone could easily say Idiocracy is, like what the Washington Post called the musical comedy I wrote with Dan Sullivan called Wiener Sausage: The Musical!, "tasteless and popular." But you can't even really say that. Sure, it's tasteless, but not many people saw it. Over the years, it has built a cult following and is becoming relatively more popular.

But if you're a fan of other Judge offerings, like Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, and Extract, go quickly to your DVR to schedule Idiocracy.

**** out of ***** stars