sans comic sans

I walked into my G train stop Friday morning and noticed that the Rider Report Card placards had arrived, complete with unused surveys littered all over the ground. Hooray! Time to give the MTA some real talk about the much-maligned G train!

Before I get into G train improvements, though, let’s look at the insights we’ve gained so far about the seven lines for which we have survey data:

• No train has received a rider grade higher than a C, and none lower than a C-. Hmm. OK.
• The L, 4, 5, and 7 trains are overcrowded. Phoenix is hot in the summer.
• The J/Z takes too long to show up. Also, what is a Z train?
• The M and D trains are dirty and also take too long to show up.

Yawn. As my high school calculus teacher was fond of saying, these findings are “intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.”

The problem isn’t that people aren’t telling the MTA the right things, the problem is that the MTA’s survey is too general to be useful. It asks the easy questions and gets the obvious answers, masking the nuanced problems specific to each line. These specific complaints, I believe, are where the MTA could make some real improvements to the subway system.

For example, after the votes are tabulated we will no doubt learn that the top complaints of G train riders are “reasonable wait times for trains,” “minimal delays during trips,” and possibly that the “sense of security” is low. A train schedule—presumably the MTA records data about the timeliness of their trains—and a crime report would tell an MTA official the same things.

A couple of focus groups would tell them even more: these concerns are heightened on nights and weekends, when the G all but shuts down. The G train is actually very reliable during rush hours. Riders may amplify their concerns as a result of the G train’s reputation for being extremely unsafe and unreliable, a reputation gained in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Specific questions to specific riders about their G train habits would uncover these biases. Instead, we get the following findings: MOAR. FASTAR. SAFAR. Not surprisingly, that’s what everyone who rides any train line in the city wants.

A massive effort to understand the intuitively obvious.

Photo courtesy of randombit on flickr.