The Real Deal: Metro's view to some media stories

The Washington Post   07/07/2009, byline: L. Sun & L. Layton

Headline:
Sister Transit System Took Steps to Counter Hazard

Article:
The Washington Post article by Lena Sun and Lyndsey Layton was misleading to readers in that it implied that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco had two layers of train protection that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) should have when in fact that is not the case at all.

The Real Deal:
After the article appeared, Metro’s rail and engineers spoke directly with their senior technical equals at BART who are responsible for the train control system, including senior operations and engineering staff. None of them had been contacted by The Washington Post for its article.

In addition, no current BART employees were quoted or attributed in the article. Technical details were provided by a retired public relations staffer, and a former BART engineer who used his experience while at BART to develop patent for a signal detection system that has never been produced commercially.

Metro staff had extensive discussions with BART staff. They were as surprised as Metro was to see how the article characterized the two transit systems. BART staff also provided the kind of insight and clarity into what, exactly, their system does.

From these conversations Metro officials gleaned the following:

1) BART has one primary system for detecting train circuits, not two, just like Metro.

2) BART employees developed an in-house detection tool to support its primary train control system, just like Metro.

3) The tool that BART developed (sequential occupancy recognition system  the Post erroneously referred to it as "sequential occupancy \'release\' system") was narrowly tailored to BART’s unique operating environment, track system and links.

4) The BART tool is not available commercially. This is not something that was developed or made available to the industry as a standard, as the loose reporting in the article would lead readers to believe.

5) The tool that Metro has developed (a "loss-of-shunt" tool) is a diagnostic tool that points out when there are anomalies in the signaling system and continues to be used by Metro staff.

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