Customer communications

Kevin O'Neil and many others are continuing to hold our feet to the fire on improving customer communications during service disruptions. Good for them. As I said at our board meeting last week, CTA does a pretty good job of responding to major logistical challenges -- from marathons, to playoff games with uncertain end times, to launching shuttle bus service when rail service is disrupted. But we need to do a better job communicating with our customers, and that's a responsibility that starts at the top.

You can see discussions of the challenges posed by emergency communications here and here.

I will say that during Friday's incident on the Cermak Branch of the Blue Line (when an unauthorized person got on the tracks), the CTA internal communications and the instructions to CTA employees gave much more explicit direction in terms of customer communication than I have seen in the past. I'd be interested in hearing from any customers who were involved in the incident -- did you receive useful and timely information? If not, how can we improve?