A D.C. Bus That's 7 Minutes Late Is Still Technically 'On Time'

A new analysis of 15 Washington Metro bus lines shows that the system has an on-time performance rate of 75 percent. That sounds good on the surface, until you realize that Metro considers a bus "on-time" when it arrives anywhere in a 9-minute window between 2 minutes early and 7 minutes late. In Metro's eyes, you can show up at a bus stop, listen to "Stairway to Heaven" in full, wait one more whole minute for the bus to arrive, and still leave "on time."

Metro's performance also takes a hit when you consider that its on-time window is far more forgiving than the industry standard. By the standard measure — 1 minute early to 5 minutes late — Metro's on-time performance falls to 61 percent on average. Even that figure fails to give an accurate picture of service quality, because it measures whether the bus itself was on time, not whether a rider arrived somewhere on time.