Service disruptions

I’ve heard from a lot of customers who are pretty annoyed with how CTA communicates with customers when service is disrupted. With heightened security awareness, as well as a recent spike in other external disruptions to service, this has become a bigger issue.

One of the most important things we can do is to provide customers with timely, accurate information about their service. That’s true all of the time, but especially when the normal routine is disrupted.

During service disruptions in recent weeks, many customers have said that announcements were not made at your station, or that they were inaudible. Others have expressed chagrin that CTA personnel you passed did not inform you of a service disruption before you entered a station.

We also get many compliments for employees who handle these incidents well, especially the ones who have calmly and professionally led the evacuation of a train or a station. (Thanks to those of you who provided specifics for both good and bad incidents – I try to make sure we take appropriate action in each case).

Right now, I’m looking into the quality of our sound-system; training and procedures for our operators, customer assistants, and control center staff; and better and more frequent pre-recorded service disruption announcements.
We are in the process of upgrading our communications infrastructure throughout the rail system, which will certainly help. At the last CTA board meeting we approved a $31 million contract to expand our fiber optic network. This is a costly and time consuming process, but we are moving as fast as we can with the resources available to us. I have also asked CTA to explore creative ways to disseminate information about service directly to customers via email or phone in the same way airlines do.

One final point: we can and will increase the frequency and clarity of customer communication, but there will continue to be times when we simply don’t know how long a disruption will last or can’t say what the cause is. See my earlier post and comments with more details on this challenge.Please keep me updated on how we’re doing. We’ve asked you to talk to us about suspicious activity, and we owe it to you to do a better job of communicating how we’re responding to such threats and other service disruptions.