I'm not sure who orchestrated the script of lies to be told to bus passengers but if Metrolinx CEO and brass want to live up to their promises of transparency, they need to take a good hard look at how GO Transit interacts with taxpayers AKA passengers.
What the hell is wrong with telling a passenger the truth about why a bus is late or didn't show up at all? This crap about a mechanical malfunction only to be told another story about traffic congestion, then told an all out lie of a bus reported to be on time when I have a Twitter status timeline of a bus being 17 minutes late? Not cool.
I'm not sure who leads the social media team at Metrolinx but the person or team managing that account is either a hamster or a bunch of robots because the lack of interaction is insulting. I don't ride GO Transit for free. I pay, on average, $309 a month to use their services. If I ask a question, I deserve an answer - even if it was on Twitter.
The folks on the GO Transit Twitter panel are more interactive but the boilerplate apologies and promises of looking into complaints were charming at first, but now it's just apparent it's all a script to appease a frustrated customer base.
This week was an extremely important one at work. A combination of it being month-end with a four-day long weekend looming on the horizon meant time was super tight, with several projects that needed to be completed. Plus, it didn't help I lost a day of productivity getting high off drugs administered during oral surgery.
On Tuesday, after waiting 10 minutes for a bus that looked like it wasn't coming, I told my bus mates as I managed to snag a taxi (no small feat when you live in rural Clarington) that I couldn't stick around and risk missing any train leaving Oshawa GO before 8 am. I offered to share the fare but I was the only one in a time crunch. Tuesday was launch day for an important company initiative. Being late was not an option.
Thirty dollars later, and as I exited the cab that got me to the station at 7:48, don't I see the Route 90 bus - my bus - pull in at 7:49. People ran to catch the 7:53 train. I was livid.
I found out the bus was 17 minutes late. One bus mate told me the driver did not give an explanation for being late, instead he offered an apology. I sat in the Quiet Zone and fumed. Someone owes me $30.
Had I known the bus was at least coming and would be at the station in time for the 7:53, I would have waited. In total, it cost almost $49 to get to and from work that day. Paying the GO fare for the train was further insult to injury.
To make a long story short, I found out that GO Transit is mandated not to instruct passengers about late arrivals of buses until 20 minutes past the scheduled arrival time.
Twenty minutes?! In this day and age of GPS, real-time tracking, mobile communications and two way radio?! Twenty minutes in the commuting world means missed train connections and opportunities to take local transit. How the hell is any bus passenger supposed to make a decision to take that city bus that arrives three minutes before the GO bus, but takes twice as long to get to the station, is actually the better alternative because your GO bus is running 17 minutes behind schedule or has disappeared?
Last summer, there were three occasions where my regularly scheduled bus didn't show up. On all three occasions I was told no one knew what happened. How the fuck (pardon the language but I find that statement ludicrous) does a company like GO Transit lose a bus? How is that possible? And see, you can't bullshit me because my dad worked for a logistics firm, his trucks were equipped with GPS technology as far back as 1998. He couldn't stop to take a pee without it being noted he was idle or off-route. You can't tell me that GO Transit isn't using fleet management technology. Is it bargain basement technology? Has anyone tested it lately?
Earlier on the blog
I ran a story about GO's bus tracking implementation courtesy of my resident guest blogger. GO Transit promised full functionality by February 2014. This included stop announcements and the opportunity to obtain real-time bus availability. Metrolinx won't provide answers for the delay. None of this acceptable. The silence is unacceptable. The election is long over.
Wake up.
