WASHINGTON — Metro Board Chairman Jack Evans conceded any problem with radio transmissions is one problem too many, but he said things are still better than recent reports might indicate.
The Washington Post cited dozens of complaints heard on scanner traffic captured by the website Broadcastify in the week leading up to a derailment of a Red Line train last month in downtown Washington.
“The story led one to believe that the radios are not working well,” Evans noted. “We do, I think Paul [Metro GM Paul Weidefeld] told me, 40,000 transmissions a week and they discovered 30 of them that were not clear, or garbled, or for whatever reason. So in the scheme of things the radios seem to work pretty well.”
But he added “there is no excuse for them not working 100 percent and that’s what our goal is.”
Evans said a lot of the problems were supposed to be addressed years ago when Metro entered into contracts with cellphone carriers to provide better signals inside its tunnels. At the same time work was supposed to happen to kill off any dead zones still in the system.
When those deals fell apart, so did plans for the signal improvements.
Since then the Federal Communications Commission has mandated other changes that led Metro to begin installing a brand-new radio system on a totally different frequency, but that isn’t expected to be finished before 2022.
“It’s taking a while because of something called track time,” Evans said. “In order to build this out we have to be there when the trains aren’t running because you can’t be putting in these big cables and everything and have trains going by. So we only have that limited amount of time between the time we close at night … and when we open up.”
Between that and the purchase of new radios scheduled for later this year, Evans said things will improve.
“All of this is going to enhance our ability to communicate 100 percent,” he said. “We’re buying the new radios, fixing the system, doing everything that’s necessary to make it 100 percent reliable.”
