(The following article by Chris Gosier was published in the Parsippany Daily Record on April 20.)
PARSIPPANY, N.J. — At a time when New Jersey has more cars than ever, NJ Transit is scrubbing up its customer service to make sure that taking the train remains appealing.
Highway congestion gives the system a solid base of customers who would rather endure a few minor hassles on the train than spend hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic each day. But for off-peak riders who could just as easily spend time in their vehicles, an irritation or two could be enough to derail their interest in utilizing mass transit, experts say.
“In the off-peak hours, there’s a tremendous amount of competition” for riders, said Martin Robins, director of the Voorhees Transportation Policy Institute at Rutgers University.
“Most of the markets are rather fragile for public transportation,” he said. “All you need are a series of bad experiences” to turn off customers and ensure they’ll never come back, he said.
Many of those riders could just as easily drive.
“There are more cars. Families have more automobiles,” Robins said. “The car is the ubiquitous form of mobility” that also may carry a lower per-trip cost.
NJ Transit made no mention of attracting off-peak riders when it announced its customer service initiative earlier this month, but a spokeswoman allowed that “certainly, our goal is to get people out of their cars and onto our system.”
“It’s also focused on our existing customers, and making sure they are getting the (best) value,” said the spokeswoman, Penny Bassett Hackett.
NJ Transit is targeting dozens of small irritants in the “back to basics” customer service program launched April 11.
Ten-trip tickets will be good for a year, not just two months. Monthly passes will be available through the NJ Transit Web site. Toilets on rail cars will be replaced more often — once every six months — to address odor complaints.
Trains will get light cleanings during the day, such as trash pickup or cleaning up spills. That’s in addition to a new policy of scrubbing the inside of rail cars twice as often — every 45 days, rather than every 90 days.
Tickets also will be printed more quickly at vending stations for bus and light rail — four seconds, compared with the current 13.
That’s one minor irritation that, on some days, doesn’t seem so minor, said Len Resto, president of the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers.
“You have the rail car waiting there with the door open, (and) as soon as the ticket comes out, the doors close,” he said. “A lot of times, you don’t know how frustrating that can be. You had a really bad day, and you wind up missing a train because you couldn’t get your ticket out of a machine fast enough.”
The initiative is “about transforming the culture to one that is centered on the customer,” NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington said.
Although NJ Transit “has a pretty good history” of customer service, it typically hasn’t been the highest priority for railroads, which tend to be monopolistic, Robins said.
“There’s a tendency built into this industry to downgrade the importance of customer service” and focus on financial or labor considerations instead, he said.
Resto said NJ Transit seems to be focusing on its riders’ biggest peeves.
“If the experience is better, there certainly is room for growth and more passengers in the off-peak,” he said. “If you make it a pleasant experience and make it easy to use and understand, then I think more people would use it.”