First off, we would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the past two and a half years. You, the riding public, have been very generous with your time and donations, allowing us to stay focused on our mission: providing you information.
After careful review, we’ve decided to officially adjust our business operations according to our current availability, financial position, and ridership trends. It is our expectation that the vast majority of you will not notice any changes, however we’ve detailed a summary of what to expect below:
- Monitoring of WMATA Metrorail on Mondays and Fridays will generally be reduced, especially outside of AM and PM rush hours, e.g. mid-days and nights.
- Weekend monitoring of WMATA Metrorail will change from continuous monitoring to incident monitoring, i.e. we will only commit to investigating moderate or major incidents in real time after notification from riders or automated MetroHero Alerts.
- Monitoring of MARC and VRE will be discontinued until further notice.
- Field audits will be suspended from July 1st thru September 15th, and we will not commit to conducting audits when the outside temperature is below 40 degrees or above 90 degrees. (This will allow us to more generally monitor WMATA Metrorail more efficiently, especially during weather extremes.)
- We will begin publishing periodic reports to the public on the data we collect during our operations.
These changes will take effect July 1st, 2018. Altogether, we will be monitoring WMATA Metrorail operations an average of 30 hours per week, and will continue to review incidents as soon as we become aware of them. We expect this to bring our total monthly expenses to about $725, or $36.25 per business day. For context, we currently collect about $180/month via Patreon, which only includes subscriptions and not other generous one-time donations made via other payment services.
As always, we are open to suggestions via email at contactus@railtransitops.org. You can also message us on Facebook and Twitter. Remember: we are 100% funded by folks like you. If you find our services useful and would like to donate, please click here. Thank you again for your continued support!
Regards,
The Rail Transit OPS Team
www.railtransitops.org
railtransitops.org 