Monday, July 23, 2007

Customer Service

While there are certainly plenty of individual SEPTA workers who are excellent with the public, overall the agency is pretty clueless about making it easy to ride the system. A big barrier to people riding public transportation is simply ignorance. Boarding a crowded bus can be stressful if you don't know what's expected of you. Ticket machines for the rail system have disappeared. One has to consult a horoscope chart to know when subway employees will or won't actually sell tokens to you, and existing token machines don't like "new" (now years old) US currency. Day and weekly passes should be easily available everywhere. Etc...