Message About Service Driven Home at MTA

Inside the sparkling Gateway Center, where the MTA makes its headquarters beside Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, executives from Walt Disney Co., Saturn and Southwest Airlines took the lectern Thursday to offer those who run the city’s public transportation system a pep talk of sorts.

The main message during the first day of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s two-day Customer First conference: Giving customers more than they expect equals customer loyalty.

And on Bus 522 and a Red Line subway car, which ran from the San Fernando Valley to the conference, riders hoped the executives got the point.

During the ride, which started at 6:45 a.m. in Encino, riders were not so concerned with service with a smile. Their needs were more fundamental.

One simply wanted bus arrivals to be as predictable as the taste of a Big Mac, while another wanted to feel safe on a lonely train at night.

“I’m not real concerned about a bus driver being the most pleasant person in my day,” said Marty Logan, 49, a social worker who takes three buses and the Red Line from his West Hollywood home to his Alhambra office.

“A lot of the time buses are late, or they don’t come at all. I just want them to be on time so I make it to work.” Indeed, the MTA’s own statistics show that discourtesy is not the biggest customer service problem on buses; it accounts for only 13% of monthly complaints.

Instead, one-third of 16,376 rider gripes last year dealt with schedule reliability.

Being passed up at a bus stop was the next most frequently cited problem for riders, at 16% of the total. Complaints of inadequate safety accounted for 1.5%

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But the relatively few safety complaints meant little to Marissa Mandordor of Long Beach, who had to ride the Blue Line to the Red Line on her way to a Santa Clarita bus bound for the development firm where she works. The 7 p.m. trip home can be unsettling, she said.

“Just last night a strange man was getting off the train as I got on,” she said. “When he saw me, he turned back around and hopped back on the train. When I got off later, he did too. It seemed like he was following me but he eventually went away.”

In the glossy literature handed out at the conference, which was primarily attended by MTA officials and those of other Southern California transit agencies, the MTA touted the largest bus fleet expansion in decades.

It spoke of a new campaign to remind riders of the on-time performance warranty that offers free rides if buses are more than 10 minutes late, a customer suggestion form to be placed on all buses and an adopt-a-bus program to beautify bus stops.

Officials said safety was one of their top priorities.

The literature did not mention that some of the improvements were the result of a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups on behalf of poor and minority bus users. As part of a settlement, the MTA agreed to put more buses on the street, lower the costs of monthly passes and assign more police to the bus system.

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“We’re taking the lead. We’re improving customer service here and throughout the county with this conference,” said Scott Mugford, director of customer relations for the MTA. “We’re bringing transportation officials from the everywhere and improving service as a whole.

“I think that the customer service idea at the conference is central. If you look at scheduling problems, there are things like buses being sidelined. But if you look further, there’s a large people component to that. We want to make it clear that our No. 1 goal is clear: to provide the fastest, safest, most reliable service possible.”

But Eric Mann, director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, a plaintiff in the bus riders suit, said the MTA is not doing all it can to improve service in a meaningful manner.

He acknowledged the massive job faced by the agency. It moves an estimated 1 million people daily over a 1,400-square-mile area, operating 1,750 buses along with the Red, Blue and Green rail lines.

He said money being spent on completing the $5.9-billion subway should instead be used to buy more buses.

“If they want to place the customer first, they should get to the essence of the problem. Spend more money to put more buses on the street.”