Riders line up to board a Canal streetcar at a Bourbon Street stop.
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > july 17 > 2012
Both RTA and JET officials say they want feedback from riders — complaints, praise and suggestions. When making a complaint regarding RTA service, Mercadel stresses the importance of providing the route name, bus number, direction and time of the incident. The RTA will examine the audio and video footage from the bus and GPS information to analyze riders’ claims, respond to each person and keep the information on file to track common complaints. The process at JET also is very rider-centric. “When it comes to disciplining drivers,” Brown says, “I will call in a rider … to make sure the complaint is heard. We bring all the information to a meeting and we will hear them out. We make sure we treat our riders with respect, because our riders come first.” Washington, the bus rider who lives in eastern New Orleans, says his only complaint about local public transportation is the shortened and sometimes nonexistent weekend service, especially in his new neighborhood. “On a Sunday the buses take like an hour, so you gotta catch it at the right time,” he says. “If you don’t catch it at that hour, then you gotta wait a whole other hour. And the Hayne bus needs to come on the line on the weekends and stop later than 7 p.m.” “Folks are generally happy with the geographic transit coverage of the city, with most pre-Katrina routes having been reinstated,” Heiligman says, “It’s the frequency that becomes a major issue. When you’re waiting 45 minutes to an hour for the bus — longer on the weekends — it makes it really difficult to rely on (public) transit.” • Megan Braden-Perry is a regular transit rider and the author of “Public Transit Tuesdays,” which appears weekly on Gambit’s blog (www.bestofneworleans.com). Each week, she takes an in-depth look at a different local bus route. Her stories are archived at www.bestofneworleans.com/publictransittuesdays.
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