MTA chief weighs in on communication issues
MTA Administrator Ralign Wells plans to disable some of the agency's less reliable email notification services and go back to the drawing board.
Wells says he's been disappointed with the performance of the services that are supposed to notify passengers of problems on the Metro subway and bus lines. He plans to discontinue them until they can be done right.
The MTA chief called to follow up on a complaint registered recently by Alisa Bralove-Scherr about a problem she had with the Metro in which the email notification service failed her. Bralove-Scherr had arrived at the Owings Mills station anout 9:30 one morning only to be told the station was closed and that she would have to go to Old Court to catch a train. None of the MTA employees she encountered could explain what happened.
A later explanation that a crew was doing maintenance at Owings Mills raised the question of why maintenance would be scheduled for the middle of the morning. Wells explained that the maintenance work wasn't supposed to result in a service interruption but that somehow the power was cut.
As seems to often happen with the MTA, the operations people set to work to fix the problem but didn't think of notifying the traveling public. Wells said that's an issue he plans to address. He's planning to consolidate operations in a new control center that will also handle the communications end of the business. It can't happen too soon.
Comments
Hopefully this is a step in the right direction -- it doesn't need to be rocket science to be effective. Even adopting an efficiently used Twitter account would be better than something that simply does not work!
Posted by: Kat | March 29, 2010 5:10 PM
I've never understood why the e-mail alert system for the MARC Train works so beautifully when the ones for the other MTA services are so terrible. Aren't they being dispersed by the same people? If not, why not?
Posted by: Justin..... | March 29, 2010 9:52 PM
So, let me get this straight, MTA thinks no information at all is better than limited information sometimes?
Yes, the real question is why can't MTA get it right, but why do they think a 0% success rate is better than a 50% or even a 25% success rate? The riding public wants and deserves timely and accurate information of every delay.
It seems the big problem that morning on metro was less the fact that no email was sent but more the fact that people on the ground didn't know the problem. So why kill the email systems that does work on occasion (we all know its horribly unreliable, especially for subway riders).
So much for the high hopes I had for the new MTA Administrator.
Posted by: Richard | March 29, 2010 10:13 PM
Wow, an administrator who takes action: I love it! If it's not working, kill it. Plain and simple. And no, I'm not being snarky or sarcastic...it's pleasantly surprising to see someone who actually earns their title as "manager" or "administrator" by acknowledging issues and dealing with them head on, rather than the typical pay-millions-to-an-outside-consultant-to-tell-you-what-you-already-know-so-you-can-blame-them-when-everything-fails mantra that seems to be the de-facto "management" style in America these days in both the public and private sector...
Also, +1 to Kat's suggestion to use an existing system, such as Twitter, rather than paying some consultant to come up with some multi-million alert system that would probably be an epic fail all over again...
Posted by: Traffic Engineer | March 30, 2010 8:03 AM