Monday, November 08, 2010

Go Transit Passenger Charter

I just received an email about the new Passenger Charter. This is exciting as now we have a concrete document that states Go Transits commitment to us. We have felt the change in attitude at Go Transit over the past few years both from the friendliness and helpfulness of staff members and the free rides for delays over 45 minutes.
Their charter outlines 5 promises to the commuter:
- to be on time
- to keep you informed
- to provide you with a safe travel experience
- to ensure your travel with us is always comfortable and to always be available to help. 
Here is the link to the actual charter.  Check it out and let's keep them to it together.
http://www.gotransit.com/passengercharter/en/passenger_charter.aspx
One thing that looked inaccurate or unclear.
- We will run more than 90% of rush hour trains within five minutes of the scheduled time.
The stat shows 95% but from experience on the lakeshore line over the past 10 months, most trains closer to 9:00 arrival have been 10 to 15 minutes late.  I am interested on how they came up with this number and how this is audited. 
The Second thing I noticed was that safety is not measured on how safe the trains, stations are but on how safe customers feel.

Every three months, we conduct a customer satisfaction survey to better understand what we are doing right and what we need to improve on. This is the cumulative results for this year for customer satisfaction when it comes to safety.

What would matter more to me would be seeing the results of safety inspections, how often brakes fail, trains break down on tracks, in winter I would like to see random inspections of station platforms for ice buildup, how many people have slipped on stairways, hurt themselves on the platform. This would be more meaningful then a survey where some people responded to questions and others never reached the survey.

Just curious, out of the ridership totals how many actually answered the surveys.

I look forward to comments from Go Transit.

3 comments:

TomW said...

It sounds like you are at Union every weekday, carefully noting actual and scheduled arrival times, because that seems to be the only way you can support your claim that "most trains closer to 9:00 arrival have been 10 to 15 minutes late."

Here's a challange for you: every time you travel on the GO Train, note down the scheduled and actual arrival times at Union and wherever you travel to. Publish the results once a week, and we'll see how your stats compare with GO's. (NB: GO publish on-time stats for *every* train - see (e.g.) http://www.gotransit.com/PassengerCharter/en/ontime/trackrecord/LW_EB_morning.aspx )

Anonymous said...

Looking at the link you sent me you can see that there are two trends that match my hypothesis. 1) Trains starting at Hamilton seem to be delayed more often (this is because of the king rd overpass that is being put through) 2) Closer to 9:00 arrivals is where the 91% and 92% happen.

I am less concerned about the stats on delays and cancellations then I am about the safety improvements being shown based on the user survey and not about actual safety enhancements. Anyone who takes the train and arrives on track 26/27 knows that this year there were fire hazards there major ones that got changed after complains arose about the doors being so small.

I am interested in hearing about the safety audits that they will be doing in order to ensure safety across the network is maintained.

TomW said...

91% on-time means 9% not on-time (less than one in ten) - which I hardly think counts as "most"! In fact, it would be more accurate to say that most trains run on-time, not "10-15 minutes late"!

With regard to safety audits, I get the impression you have a mistrust of GO's internally generated statistics. So, who exactly do you think should carry out the safety audits?