WMATA Rush Hour Promise data

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (or affectionally, WMATA) rolled out the "Rush Hour Promise" program in 2018, as part of the organization's Back2Good initiative to revive its reputation. The Promise provides a full refund to Metrorail riders when train delays result in a significantly late arrival to their destinations, during peak commuting hours.

This repository demonstrates scraping the data from WMATA's Daily Service Report Listings, and structuring it into a CSV for analysis.

Caveats to the data [source]

• A rider's SmarTrip transit card must be registered online in order to receive the credit
• A rider may only receive a credit up to four times each month
• Many components of the Metrorail wait time, including single-tracking and headway wait between trains, are factored into WMATA's time expectations

Scraping the data

Install the requirements using bundle install, under Ruby 2.6.

Execute ./scraper.rb to receive a running log as data is scraped:

$ ./scraper.rb
2018-11-27: on-time 87.8%, <5 mins late 95.4%, 285 received credit
2018-11-26: on-time 84.3%, <5 mins late 93.8%, 593 received credit
2018-11-25: Ignoring a Sunday
2018-11-24: Ignoring a Saturday
2018-11-23: on-time 89.9%, <5 mins late 96.9%, 184 received credit
2018-11-22: Ignoring a holiday
2018-11-21: on-time 91.8%, <5 mins late 97.6%, 430 received credit
2018-11-20: on-time 90.4%, <5 mins late 96.8%, 1,474 received credit
2018-11-19: on-time 92.6%, <5 mins late 97.7%, 881 received credit
2018-11-18: Ignoring a Sunday
...

Upon completion, the data is stored in the rush_hour_promise.csv file.

Insights from the data

Calculated as of January 21, 2018.

• The median number of riders receiving credit each day is 640
• On median, 90.7% of riders arrive on-time and 97.4% of riders arrive no more than 5 minutes late, according to WMATA's trip-duration expectations
• The three worst days from a Promise credit perspective were February 28, April 17, and December 11, during which less than 84% of rides were timely, and over 17,000 riders received Rush Hour Promise credit
• The ten worst days from an on-time perspective were all in August 2018; on the weekdays between the 13th and the 24th, no more than 73% of riders arrived on-time