Quote:
Originally Posted by Wooster
Let me explain the genesis of all this to you guys.
The Advisory Group was an election promise of the Mayor - it was very specifically highlighted in his platform. Further to that, it's creation has been in the works for several months - not in response to the recent service disruptions. The terms of reference (which I wrote in consultation with transit) was completed a week or so ago, so it seemed an opportune time to launch while we were talking about transit anyway. Similarly, publishing of performance measures was also an explicit promise of the mayor over a year ago in the election - and something the Mayor has been discussing with transit. Fortunately, the new GPS will provide a bevy of data that will make measuring things like on-time performance a lot more meaningful.
Yes this advisory group is focused on customer experience issues like communication with customers when delays happen, safety, customer-service protocols, user-friendliness of the website, fare payment methodes and trip-planning etc. These issues ARE very important to improving transit beyond it's basic operational issues.
That does NOT mean that issues of network planning, or scheduling or other operational issues are being ignored. There are other more effective means than a committee to communicate with customers and gather meaningful input about those things.
For instance there will be the development of a 30 year capital plan for Calgary Transit - as approved through Council's Fiscal Plan for Calgary. Input into that plan, in my opinion, is probably not best served by a committee. Similarly, the NCLRT alignment consultations were quite effective through the open house formats they used (and very heavily attended).
Things like scheduling issues of various lines across the city is way beyond the capacity of a 12-15 person committee. Say for instance they needed feedback on the #3 route because it's perpetually late or feedback on the alignment of the 72/73 - what if nobody on that committee rides those routes, what use would they be?
The Advisory Group is intentionally designed to be focused and responsive to customer experience issues - it's not designed to solve all of transit's problems. If that's what people thought, perhaps that was not communicated effectively enough.
I suppose cynicism is an understandable response, but PR is not the driving force behind these initiatives. sorry.
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Well I'm glad you wrote all that, because this was the next item I was going to address.
Guys - this advisory group idea was spearheaded by the mayor's office, not CT during an emergency meeting on "what to do about the Killer Train and third-world electrical system perception."
In addition to the points made by Wooster about the customer service scope of the initiative, there's a reason why there is a list of topics that are officially off the table. It's all well and good if things like scheduling, routing, etc. are discussed during this process, but when recruiting people for this thing, you can't send the message that they should bring all their gripes about why the bus doesn't run on their street at the exact time they want to leave and get home, why they don't get the bus with the seats they prefer, etc. and that transit will make those changes just because they are in the group. That's an extreme, but you have to limit the scope to the customer experience, otherwise the group's objectives and results won't be focused and every meeting will be people arguing over lines on a map, etc. Of course scheduling, bus fleet, etc. are very much linked to the customer experience, and will naturally come up in these meetings, and transit/the mayor's office will likely listen and think about it. You just can't give the impression that this group is being made to tear down Calgary Transit's operations and rebuild them from scratch and everything will be done that way. Not sure if I put all that into words very well, but hopefully it makes sense.
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Yep, I said that to Jason M. It feels like a PR exercise to calm down the enraged masses. I'd like to be wrong.
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