WASHINGTON -- Already faced with more than 40,000 complaints a year, Metro is planning to cut the "mystery rider" program, the Washington Examiner reported.
Makes sense to us. Faced with budget cuts, service, conditions and morale are bound to get even worse, why waste money paying people to stuff the complaint box when plenty of others are doing it for free?
Last year, the transit agency signed a $916,000 contract with a research company to pay mystery riders for their unbiased feedback and more scientific quarterly reports, the Examiner reported, but faced with $154 million in budget cuts, the old unscientific -- and free -- method of feedback from the lunatics who regularly use the transit system seems smarter in this economy. Metro officials started thinking about cutting the program even before the first report was analyzed.
The most frequent of the thousands of complaints from riders include late buses, missed pickups by disability vans and broken escalators, the Examiner reported.
OK, Metro Access has a history of disappointed customers, and the broken escalators are so common, we're shocked when we go a couple days in a row without seeing them. (And c'mon, people, they're just stairs, after all! Bend those knees! Or take the elevator. Or call Metro Access, um, maybe don't call Metro Access.) But do people really expect buses to arrive when the website or, even more ridiculous, those little street corner schedules say they will? Let's just hope for service at regular intervals. When you wait 45 minutes and then see two buses on the same line back to back, then it's time to whine. It's baffling that Metro would even attempt to draft a schedule. Just write "every 15-20 minutes or so" and hope there aren't any broken water mains on the route.
According to that mystery rider report, by the way, sales clerks gave incorrect information 25 percent of the time and "provided good customer service" just 50 percent of the time, the Examiner reported. Actually, that doesn't seem all that bad.
