Metro News Release
For immediate release: March 27, 2008
Metro Board adopts goals for the year
The Metro Board adopted a comprehensive list of about 40 specific goals that focus on safety and security, service reliability, communicating with riders, financial management of the transit agency and employee recruitment, retention and development.
The adoption of the goals “is very significant in that it defines our mission as an organization, and lets everyone in the region know what we are going to do in 2008,” said Metro Board Chairman Christopher Zimmerman. “We are establishing – publicly – the standard to which the agency expects to be held, as we strive for high performance and continual improvement.”
Many of the transit authority’s goals will be very visible to its riders such as the installation of overhead handles in rail cars, the start of door-to-door service for paratransit riders, fewer train off-loads, additional limited-stop bus service and more Transit Police officers in the bus and rail systems.
“Overall, this Board supports the General Manager’s efforts to establish clear lines of responsibility and accountability within the organization,” Zimmerman said. Now, having set out well-defined objectives, we – and the public – can fairly judge the result at the end of the year.”
“I appreciate the Board’s support in this effort, as it will help focus our resources in these areas and identify specific areas where additional funding may be needed,” Metro General Manager John Catoe said.
Highlights of the goals include the following:
Safety and Security
· Metro will develop and initiate safety committees in every work location to improve safety in the workplace.
· All employees who come to work will go home. There will be no work-related fatalities.
· Metro will improve safety/security by redeploying Metro Transit Police officers to locations in both the rail and bus systems where there have been high incidents of criminal activity.
· Metro will increase public awareness of safety inside rail stations by installing additional red platform edge lights inside at least 10 stations as an additional alert to customers that a train is approaching.
Service Reliability
· Metro will implement new express bus service (limited-stop service).
· Metro will implement improvements to the bus system to meet service demands. This will include increased schedule adherence by 10 percent.
· Metro will implement improvements to MetroAccess to meet service demands. This will include adding 65 vehicles to the fleet and implementing door-to-door service.
· Metro will implement improvements to the rail system to meet service demands such as the addition of 30 rail cars to the number of cars deployed on a daily basis.
· There will be a 10 percent reduction in the number of times customers are off-loaded from trains with a special focus on a decrease in off-loads due to maintenance.
· Metro will increase its adherence to headways on both bus and rail by 10 percent.
· Metro will install grab handles in 25 percent of its railcar fleet.
· Metro will develop and begin testing a new approach to station management focused on customer service.
Customer Communication
· Metro will develop new notification standards for major construction through a test of new signage materials.
· Metro will improve communications during incidents by implementing new sign guidelines for incidents.
· Metro will develop a comprehensive station signage program, which will include the initiation of the replacement of permanent directional signs inside a few core stations.
See the complete list of goals.
News release issued at 4:37 pm, March 27, 2008.