Measuring Performance
At this week's Chicago Transit Board meeting, CTA staff provided an intial response (link pending) to my request for improved ways of measuring how effectively we fulfill our goal of delivering on-time, clean, safe, and friendly transit service. Like any enterprise, CTA can measure operational success—or the lack thereof—only if we establish clear performance standards, use metrics to determine whether our performance is neutral, positive or negative, and take steps to improve our performance where necessary.
On balance, CTA achieves a pretty remarkable feat each day – providing 1.5 million trips for people throughout the metropolitan region. And the fact that our ridership has grown significantly in the last few years demonstrates that we are providing a service that people want. But if there’s one thing this blog has taught me, it is that problems and challenges are not transparent to our customers, and in many cases to our board. If I can’t get an answer to a question about a particular disruption in service, then there’s no way a customer will, and that’s simply not acceptable.
So I also asked staff to start posting performance data on CTA’s website. CTA already captures a great deal of transit data that is used internally to monitor and improve service. Other than ridership reports and a lone slow zone map, we don't put much on the web. We should be sharing much of this data with you so you can see where we succeed, where we need improvement (one of the reasons I have this blog), and positive and negative trends.
So how should we measure success? Some of the operating performance metrics I suggested are
On balance, CTA achieves a pretty remarkable feat each day – providing 1.5 million trips for people throughout the metropolitan region. And the fact that our ridership has grown significantly in the last few years demonstrates that we are providing a service that people want. But if there’s one thing this blog has taught me, it is that problems and challenges are not transparent to our customers, and in many cases to our board. If I can’t get an answer to a question about a particular disruption in service, then there’s no way a customer will, and that’s simply not acceptable.
So I also asked staff to start posting performance data on CTA’s website. CTA already captures a great deal of transit data that is used internally to monitor and improve service. Other than ridership reports and a lone slow zone map, we don't put much on the web. We should be sharing much of this data with you so you can see where we succeed, where we need improvement (one of the reasons I have this blog), and positive and negative trends.
So how should we measure success? Some of the operating performance metrics I suggested are
- Adherence to schedules / on-time performance
- Major service disruptions
- Rate of equipment failure
- Number of customer complaints (or compliments)
- Employee and customer safety data
- Vehicle fleet and station cleanliness
posted by Carole Brown | 1/12/2006 11:00:00 AM
