MARC Train Policies - The Opposite of a Good Idea

(Update 8/8/09: I definitely wrote this after a bad experience on the MARC. After many more good experiences, I've written a new post on the system usage. Yes, there are frustrating commutes sometimes, but in general don't listen to my post below, just enjoy the train.)

(Update 4/21/09: Apparently some of the features that I wish the MARC system had already exist - mea culpa)

It's been a long, cold winter, but recently the weather has gotten nice enough for me to think, "Perhaps I should start taking the train to work again." From where I live I have the opportunity to walk to Penn Station, then take the MARC train, then walk 15 minutes to my office.

This morning, after not having ridden the train in some time, I was quite confused that I could not purchase a "10-trip pass" at the kiosk. These passes were mildly discounted from the normal fare, but not as cheap as a weekly pass. It turns out that the MTA eliminated 10-trip passes on January 9th, 2009. So what are your options?

Single trip ticket - $4.00

Weekly Pass - $30.00

10-trip pass - $32.00 ELIMINATED!

Monthly Pass - $100.00

That's it! You can buy a weekly pass, but unless you commute round-trip 4 days a week, you lose money. Or you can buy single trip tickets. As other bloggers have pointed out, all this is going to do is convince occasional riders to drive instead. Even with expensive gas, the ten-trip pass was more expensive than driving. Now that gas is cheaper, the MTA has decided that the train should be more expensive.

I'd go even further. Even if I decided to suck it up because I wanted to keep from putting miles on my car (and avoid an expensive repair for awhile), I'm going to have a buy a ticket for every trip. Either every time I walk into the train station or I'll have to buy a stack of them and hope I use them all before they expire. Also, I'll need a stack for each direction. I mean, eliminating or reducing the discount on the ten-trip pass sort of makes sense, I know the state budget is strained, but why does it make sense eliminate the existence of a multi-trip pass?

It seems like the MTA treats the MARC trains as a luxury service offered to the people of Maryland. Newsflash: people who ride the trains are part of the solution for congestion and sprawl!

The other thing that doesn't seem to register in the minds of the MTA - if the service is more flexible, people on the fence will use the service more often. And why is there still no weekend MARC service? In the morning, run a train from north to south, then back up. In the evening, repeat. I bet MARC weekend service would be pretty overwhelmingly popular. Sure, if you have a weekly or monthly pass you can ride Amtrak on the weekends, but I'm talking about making the train work for occasional users. Basically every person I know in Baltimore who has friends in DC has wished that there was some sort of weekend MARC service. I bet you could actually turn a profit on weekend service!

I am definitely a big proponent of realism and understanding that there's only so much money to go around. But mass transit is more than just a service, it's a way to reduce pollution and congestion. Better, more consistent, rail connections within Maryland should be a priority - not an afterthought in the state budget.

So I was just talking with my girlfriend about questions that I have about MARC train service that don't have real answers:

1. Why don't we know the on-time percentage of MARC trains? It's not rocket science, this is the year 2009. Surely someone could record when a train arrived at a station and then have that information put into some sort of database. If this isn't already done, seriously, why not? If it is, then why isn't this information public?

2. Seriously, what does it cost to run a train from Baltimore to Washington, DC and back? Why is this not public information? If it's so expensive that you can't offer this service, prove it! Or at least experiment with it.

3. Why can't we put a damn GPS receiver on every train? Stick with me here, this is a pretty advanced concept. Put a GPS receiver on the trains, have it transmit data back to some main server every 60 seconds or so, make this data publicly available for anyone to view. Sound difficult? It's not, you could do this with an iPhone and a free app. Maybe with something a little more advanced people could see where their train was while waiting in their nice warm car instead of freezing to death on the platform.

Here's a proposal. How about we tie the incentive pay structure in the MTA to on-time percentage? I mean, why not expand this to figuring out if the Light Rail runs on time or even the buses? GPS units are not that expensive and if you don't go wild and hire too expensive of a contractor to implement the software it wouldn't kill you to even outfit the buses.

I think the reason that MARC train riders are always so frustrated with the MTA is just the lack of transparency. For me, it's the lack of vision. The Baltimore-Washington metro area is not going to get any less urbanized. If the suburban park-and-rides are already overcrowded, it's not going to get any better. It's time for some real leadership and vision. I'm talking about an elected official willing to stand up and say "Hey, this costs money, but we're going to need this in 25 years, so we have to spend the money now." Then, they'd actually have to think about how to re-design public transit to lay the infrastructure for the next 50 years instead of just tacking on bus routes after the people are already there!

An anecdote

The other day I had one of those experiences that makes you say "wow, this is a semi-interesting anecdote that, if spun the right way, really illuminates the modern human experience."  When this happens to a free-lance journalist, the Bat-phone starts ringing at Slate.com.  When this happens to me, I post about it on my blog.

The other day I got a pretty scary voicemail on my cell phone from BGE.  "The account linked to this phone number will be denied service unless payment is made immediately."  Now, I was pretty certain that I hadn't accidentally forgotten to pay the gas and electric bill for the last few months, but that isn't the kind of message you ignore.

So I call the phone number that they mention in the message, enter my account number, and learn that my bill has been paid in full (just as I thought).  Nonetheless, that voicemail was a mystery and I'd rather not have my electricity accidentally turned off and have to explain to my roommates why all their food is rotting in the fridge.

Quick divergence - anyone else hate how hard it is to get ahold of BGE when you want to talk to a person?  First you have to wait until normal business hours, then you have to find the secret number on the BGE website.

Step 1 - Do not visit the page headlined "Contact Us."  That just leads you to one of those web forms that allows BGE to conveniently ignore you.  Seriously, there should be a special kind of purgatory (yes, just purgatory, this isn't that big of a sin) dedicated to companies that don't publish a phone number at all, just a web form for questions.  Have you ever been looking for information, run into one of those web forms and though "Hey!  This will make my life easier!  Instead of finding the information I need right now or talking to someone with that information, I can send a message into a black hole of accountability!"

Step 2 - Click on the "Customer Service" heading instead.

Step 3 - Careful!  You can try the 410-685-0123 number, but when I did it just rang for awhile and then went to someone's voicemail.  Yeah, like someone saying "Hey this is , leave a message and I'll get back to you."  No way to know if that's actually BGE.

Step 4 - Try calling 800-685-0123; after convincing the computer that you didn't accidentally call that number instead of the automated bill-payment-by-phone or balance-inquiry-by-phone number, you can be put on hold and eventually talk to a real person.

Is it me or was that too hard?  Here's my rule of thumb, if a company says that they're dedicated to customer service, but it takes me >5 minutes to get a representative on the line, they're full of shit.  Open challenge to all companies: I want to go from Google to talking to one of your representatives in 5 minutes or less.  This isn't rocket science, it's hiring a bunch of people to answer phones.

Ok, back to the story:  So it turns out that the account that was about to be shut off wasn't mine, but it was linked to my phone number.  Apparently whoever had signed up for the account had done it years ago, before  giving up the phone number that I now have on my cell phone.  This led me to think, what do I really know about this person who used to have my phone number:

• Their name is Wade or Wayne or something that starts with a W (based on the wrong number calls I got for a surprisingly long time.  I think I got a couple within the last six months).
• They have lived in the same location for at least 5.5 years (that's how long I've had this phone number).
• Based on the speech pattern of the people who inadvertently reached me, they are a lower-income, probably African-American, Baltimore native.  This is based on my aggregate impression over many wrong numbers.
• The are about to get their gas and electric shut off for non-payment.
• They aren't going to get a phone call to warn them.

There's an odd asymmetry in this relationship, I know a few things minor details about this guy's life but have no way to contact him.  He knows nothing about me, but can very easily reach me - he knows my phone number after all.

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (Part 4 of 4)

Today brought some good news from Virgin Atlantic. Apparently, they found my girlfriend's luggage and would deliver it. Can't complain too much about that. Unfortunately the suitcase just showed up now at 6:30 PM. I say unfortunately because she left on another flight to see visit her parents for the Fourth of July week at 4 PM.

I have to say, 48 hours to return a lost bag is not the worst record in the world, but that does not excuse the customer service that my girlfriend received over the last couple days. It's nice that they found the suitcase and returned it, but it would have been a lot nicer if they could have pretended to care about the inconvenience it caused.

Virgin Atlantic could have done some small things to make this experience a lot better. For example, offer some sort of parking voucher or pass so that I didn't have to pay an extra $8 for the hour and a half that I had to wait around in vain.

• Or offer $25 towards some clean clothes. Something that shows that this is not business as usual for your company.

• Or have some people on the phone that don't lie through their teeth to customers (my girlfriend was promised four different times that she would receive a call back within the hour - it NEVER once happened).

• How about having a manager on staff? Once the call center person actually said "Well, this call center is based in India and it's 3 AM here, so we don't have a manager." Locating your call center in India is a business decision you made, it shouldn't effect the level of service we receive. What are we supposed to do, wait until 1 AM on the east coast to call India to try to catch a manager?

• Hire more call center employees! I don't care where they are located, so long as I never hear the words "We are experiencing an abnormally high call volume." Bullshit. I'm going to just call bullshit on that recording. Call volume can't be abnormally high all the time, that's just normal call volume and you're hoping that we'll hang up and use your worthless website instead.

Overall, I'm just tired of companies trying to avoid actually interacting with their customers or meeting the needs of their customers. Especially airlines. It's as if they have completely forgotten that we are contracting a service from them, the transportation of a person and a some baggage from one point to another. If they fail to live up to their side of the contract of course we're going to be pissed.

In a world where FedEx can deliver a package to any address in the country on the next day and give me real-time tracking updates, how is it at all acceptable that airlines can completely lose a bag for 24 hours or more? We have bar codes and hand held scanners, why isn't there a system of scanning bags every time they move from one place to another?

All the things I've suggested are not incredibly difficult to implement. However, I doubt we see anything like that any time soon. As long as companies can look around the industry and say "we're not really that much worse than everyone else," there is little impetus for change. It takes guts to do your job well, to do it better than everyone else, and I don't see any airlines demonstrating that kind of will to excel. They're too busy trying to cut another inch out of the legroom in coach.

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (part 3 of ?)

As we've been told countless times by automated messages and unhelpful people that emailing this address is the fastest way to get a response. To quote the email above: "We'll write back as soon as we can, within the next 21 days."

Does this sound like an acceptable level of customer service?

When will companies learn that automated replies are more frustrating than anything? This is why I hate emailing companies, it's much easier to ignore email than a phone call.

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (part 2 of ?)

Believe it or not, no one from Virgin Atlantic called back! My girlfriend tried their baggage help number again. Once again, the person on the other end can not help her find her reference number and recommends that she send an email to customer.relations.us@fly.virgin.com.

Like I said, every step of the way it's just been "I can't help you, try this phone number instead." The people on the phone say try the internet. The website lists a phone number. Is anyone at that company able to do anything for customers?

Virgin Atlantic Sucks

My girlfriend arrived at IAD yesterday from CDG via London-Heathrow. So before she even got to Dulles customs she was pissed at Virgin Atlantic. Why? They have a one carry-on only policy, but didn't tell her this in Paris. So she arrived at Heathrow with two carry-ons. Virgin Atlantic would not even let her into the transfer area with two carry-ons (apparently they've never heard of "gate-check"). So she had to go through British customs to check one of her carry-ons.

When she arrives at Dulles, one of her checked bags never shows up. Dulles customs sucks bad enough without losing your bag. Believe it or not, this is just the beginning of how terrible Virgin Atlantic is at customer service. So she fills out the lost bag form and goes through customs.

Now, they give her an phone number for baggage services (1-800-880-6253), who of course say "It's too early to know where your bag is, give us until tomorrow." She asked to be transferred to the customer service department and is told that the Virgin Atlantic customer service department doesn't have a phone number!

She's still mad, so she wants to talk to a customer service agent. However, the Virgin Atlantic baggage office is closed and locked. We waited there for half an hour, then went upstairs to the ticket counter.

The woman at the ticket counter is entirely unhelpful. She keeps repeating that it's too early to search for her bag. No shit! We want to know if you are going to give her a couple dollars to buy some underwear and a clean T-shirt. My girlfriend remains remarkably calm in the face of such ridiculous service and asks if we can speak to a manager. We are speaking to the ticket counter manager.
-Where is the baggage manager?
-At the gate for the next departure.
-When will he or she be back?
-Probably about 8 PM (this is at 6 PM).
-Is there anyone else we can talk to?
-Try this pamphlet with phone numbers.

So I immediately dial the "Virgin Atlantic Customer Relations (US)" phone number (1-800-496-6661). You should dial it, it's an amazing exercise in futility. It takes you to a recording that tells you that "the fastest way to get a response is to use email at customer.relations.us@fly.virgin.com" After that it tells you that you can mail them at Virgin Atlantic Airways 501 W. Fort Ave. PM Box 331 Norwalk, CT 06851 or fax them at 866-258-0951. Then it asks if you would like to repeat the message. If you don't repeat the message, it hangs up. It is literally impossible to speak to a live person who works for Virgin Atlantic customer service.

I try to explain this to the manager at the ticket counter. She says, I'm not kidding, "Are you sure? There's a lot of numbers on that sheet." My other choices are all international phone numbers.

So eventually we give up and leave the airport. Today it gets even better. My girlfriend tries to log onto their website to check on her bag. It asks for a 10 digit file number. She has no such thing. She's got a bag tag number (a British Airways tag at that, because the flight from London to Dulles was actually BA) and a Virgin Atlantic Property Irregularity Report number (6 digits).

She calls them twice more, each time the person asks for the file reference number and can't help her without it. So she tried explaining to them that she doesn't have one and could they please give her that number so she can check online and stop calling? The guy says that he'll call her back in an hour. That was at 10:35 AM. As I type this, it's 11:05 AM.

Given everything above, what is the likelihood that Virgin Atlantic will call back? They've got 30 minutes.

Moral of the story - Don't fly Virgin Atlantic, they could honestly care less about customer service.

Challenge to Virgin Atlantic - If you as a company ever discover this post and feel that it does not properly represent how you "put customer service and commitment to our passengers at the heart of what [you] do,"* then you should:

1. Create a comment on this post to justify why on earth a company that cares at all about it customers would have a customer service department that can never be reached by phone.
2. Admit and apologize for the behavior of your company. At every step of the process anyone that we have interacted with has said "Have you tried waiting and then using the internet instead of calling us?" Here's a hint for all companies - that's the worst possible thing to say to someone who's just been on hold for five minutes!

Here's an update - 11:17 AM, still no call back.


* - Source: http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/customerrelations/index.jsp

Comcast Ruins My Friday Afternoon

How, you might ask, can Comcast frustrate you on a Friday afternoon when you are not even a Comcast customer? It might seem natural to assume that poor customer service can only happen to you if you are a customer, it seems Comcast has reached a new level. Like a gangster spraying bullets from an automatic weapon, Comcast has hit an innocent bystander with their terrible customer relations.

This evening I had nearly completed my evening commute. I pulled into the alley behind my house to park my car, when lo and behold, a Comcast Authorized Contractor!



I'm going to take a moment and make some observations here:

1. This alley is a one-way street
2. There a bunch of empty parking spaces behind
   a) the house they are servicing
   b) other nearby houses
3. The contractor is actually getting something out of the car right now
4. It would take surprisingly little effort to move that vehicle and let me pass

Guess what the Comcast Authorized Contractor decided to do? How about insist that I back out of the alley, drive around the block, then drive back up the alley (the wrong direction on a one-way street) to reach my parking space. In his defense, he did offer to let me wait 15 minutes for him to finish his work, then he would move the car.

Has Comcast already forgotten about that guy that made a YouTube video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on his couch? I would have thought that Comcast would have made the point to their technicians and contractors that Comcast is judged by their behavior. I guess I would have been wrong.