Transit Chief Plans to Ask Riders to Grade Subway and Bus Lines

Riders on each line will be asked to grade different aspects of service, including the cleanliness of cars and stations, safety and the responsiveness of employees.

He said he would also ask riders to list the three things that they thought most need to be improved.

“I want to know what passengers want,” Mr. Roberts said yesterday during a wide-ranging interview that touched on topics as diverse as dirty subway cars and his affinity for the poetry of Robert Frost.

“I think too often people sit around in offices like this and say, ‘O.K., I know better than the customer what it is they want and so this is what we’re going to do.’ I want the customer to drive the priorities.”

…He envisions cards that would be handed out to riders as they exit stations, and which they could fill out and mail in at no cost.

The impulse is good, but broken. Roberts realizes that the truth about riders/customers is not in his office but is “out there.” In the subway. With the riders. The real people.

So what does he do? He sits in his office and creates a piece of paper that will be given to those riders. The paper will be sent back into the office where people in the office will look at the paper and make decisions about what to do.

Why not go out of the office and talk to the riders while they are riding? Take that impulse, Roberts, and follow it to the next level!

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Mr. Malave was one of dozens of curious riders who attended an ‘open house’ sponsored yesterday afternoon by New York City Transit to show off and receive feedback on a five-car test train, a prototype of the R160, the newest generation of subway cars.

Riders yesterday, told to focus on the FIND panel, were asked questions like, ‘Do you feel reassured that the train is going to your station?’ and ‘How easy or hard is it to read the words and letters on the sign?’

But riders seemed to be paying less attention to the sign than the rest of the car. Some of them said they did not regularly take the Nos. 2, 4, 5 and 6 lines (which use R142 cars, similar in design to the R143) or the L line and so were not familiar with the latest design.

Asked to compare the new car with the F train that she normally rides, Mar?a Romero, 72, a retired nurse’s aide from Gravesend, Brooklyn, said, ‘This is three times more advanced!’ Jared M. Skolnick, 34, an Internet marketer from the Upper West Side, said he admired the bright fluorescent lights, since he often took photographs in the subway.

James V. Sears, the agency’s senior director of marketing research, said the results of the surveys – along with comments from focus groups convened in 2003 – could be incorporated into the final design of the FIND panel.

Right. Because in order to understand the reassurance of a design feature, you simply ask people if they find a certain feature to be reassuring? Sigh!

If they spend all this money to advertise a show and then a disaster happens and the show isn’t going to go on, wouldn’t they ante up with the budget to remove those ads? It’s almost a month old, which is bad, and of course the show never premiered. It just seems sloppy and embarrassing. Won’t the MTA take them down themselves?

Another prop to occupy their minds.