Friday, June 23, 2006
Some drivers are incredibly rude
This is something that can be ranted about everyday, because few things are worse than
rude employees of a company that has effective monopoly on a service crucial to a huge amount of people. You have to put up with it (and all the other issues) since there is no alternative other than municipal bus lines of incorporated cities, but they don't cover most of L.A.
MTA is like a big, bad, mean monster in a city of people and children. I hate it. Hate what they're deliberately doing to people in terms of arrogance and attitudes.
One sucker of a driver ignored the waiting bus riders at a stop right across the MTA customer center on Wilshire/La Brea, and the bus was almost empty. It just tells it all, doesn't it. People had to wait about an additional 30-40 minutes for the next bus to arrive, because it was on a weekend.
That said, there is a way that you can report problems. Metro has a toll-free number, 1-800-464-2111, which goes directly to their Customer Relations department. Before calling, though, please note the following information or your complaint isn't going to get acted on:
1. Date and time
2. Location and direction of travel
3. The bus number (four digit number) and line number (one to three digit number)
4. Operator badge number, if you are reporting something that happened while you were actually on the bus (the operator has his or her number displayed on the Metro patch on the uniform sleeve), and/or a physical description of the operator, to make it certain to management that it is the right operator
You can help get the problems fixed, but it will take more effort on your part than starting a blog.
The fact seems clearly to be that most people either aren't aware of Metro's toll-free number, or don't use it out of apathy. Because of all the times people have been dodged and dissed, the problem would be fixed already had they indeed complained, by any decent company.
So either they have complained, and MTA didn't care. Or they didn't complain because they didn't know of the number since it's not advertised well, or they didn't bother to call anyway since the level of sloppyness was unacceptable, and beyond the level of when you'd normally call customer relations.
If you don't want to work toward improving, your rants ring hollow.
Once the MTA changes its attitude to something more customer oriented, i.e. where they indeed care about the customers, improvements will come naturally.
Even small major improvements seem to take a decade for this system to even consider doing. That apathy is the prime reason for why the public transit system in Los Angeles is that inadequate, and is more than reason to be irrate. Public trasnportation in L.A. is way too important to be covered in apathy.
I didn't say your advice didn't matter. But it's just a fact that most people either don't know about the toll free number, do not carry cell-phones, or the line is closed, or they simply don't find it worth to use it because the service sucks anyway. Rather than calling 1800-COMMUTE how about making sure that buses run adequately in the first place.
If buses ran with a large amount of consistency, people would trust the system and wouldn't feel compelled to call a bunch of numbers.
You sound like a gulag defender. Somebody who's embraced by the system and therefore defends it no matter how much it sucks and what it does to others.
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