Quote:
Originally Posted by Boblobla
The thing that got to me was they announced the trains were running 10 minutes late but it was WAAAAAAAY later than that. I got to the stop by Quincy's downtown at 4PM and got to Somerset at 5:15. If they had said the trains were running 45minutes late I would have grabbed a beer and had my wife come pick me up...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I was going to put this in the GMG thread. If they're way behind, just tell people, and those who can will make alternate plans. If you tell people "10 more minutes" every ten minutes for 30 or 40 minutes, don't be surprised when they're pissed off.
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I think part of the problem is determining what the delay might be in the first place. If, as in this case, a section of catenary wire goes down, it takes some time to figure out what the delay might look like, and you don't know what the true delay is until after the fact when service is restored.
So a section of wire is found to be faulty in some way, that doesn't mean someone immediately goes "Okay, get on the intercom and twitter, the delay will be X minutes." Lots of things have to be determined and planned out - What section of track is affected by this? How far do we have to single-track? Where are the trains, and how many of them are "trapped" on either side of the unusable section of track? How fast can the Enmax crew get there? How long can we estimate that it will take to fix it? What buses are available to run shuttles? How many spare drivers do we have to drive them? How many buses do we have to take off other routes to run shuttles?
People demand more clear communication which is more than understandable - especially on bitterly cold winter days or sweltering heat like earlier this week. However the biggest problem is the problem itself - the cause for the delay. A lot of causes for delay are just difficult to get a grasp on and estimates of the extent of the delays are often way off just by the nature of the situation.
Something like Monday is just frustrating for everyone involved because all anyone can really do is throw their hands up until the time is put in to rectify all of the individual problems involved, modify the mitigation plan, and then repeat until everything is finally back to normal. One big problem occurred and subsequently a plan was put in place to get people to their destination. All bets were off when another problem, however small, occurs. Then something else. Even the best communications strategy for customers is going to sound uncoordinated and confusing because, well, it is.
All that said though, there were definitely communications issues highlighted over the last couple days. For instance, I had heard that customers in the northwest didn't get proper intercom messages and were left wondering what was going on. Certainly some improvements should be made.