In terms of operating performance, the LIRR isn’t doing all that bad this year…year-to-date through the end of October, on-time performance is at 93.0%, and while even that’s not all that great, it’s better than it was at this point last year, 91.3%. The LIRR met its (lower) on-time performance goal for the first time in nearly 3 years back in March, and did so again in April, May, June, and September. But even as OTP trends upwards slightly, there’s another metric that’s soaring upwards—and it’s not a good thing: the number of complaints being made to the LIRR.
The MTA has on its website Commendations and Concerns data for each of the different agencies. The datasets were added in response to a request from PCAC, and list out the number of complaints, the subject matter of those complaints, and the incident detail of those complaints by quarter. They haven’t done a great job of keeping it up-to-date—they completely skipped over two quarters at one point, and I had to ask them three different times to update the dataset for the first half of 2016, and their sluggishness is likely the result of the troubling tale the statistics tell.
In the third quarter of 2016 (July, August, and September), the LIRR was the subject of 2,874 complaints filed by riders—that is an average of about 32 complaints each day, and represents the latest step in an alarming upward trend. In the last half of 2014, the LIRR averaged 317 complaints per quarter—since then, complaints have increased by more than 800% to 2,874 complaints in 2016 Q3—that is a tremendous and alarming increase. To go from 3 or 4 complaints a day to 32 complaints each day in just under two years is not a good sign.
The MTA puts this data up on its website as a loose CSV file for Excel—they provide no documentation or information about what the data actually represents, so I’m not sure if a complaint registers in the quarter in which it was submitted, or the quarter in which it was responded to (the LIRR’s “unique” application of customer service means they’re often not the same thing—it’s not out of the ordinary to have to wait four to six months to get a reply from the LIRR, even for relatively straightforward matters...a family member of mine had a problem with a refund submitted to the LIRR in January, and it took the railroad more than nine months to finally resolve the problem…). These complaints do seem to represent what’s reported through the MTA’s online CustHelp contact form (since the categories and definitions match)—they do not seem to include social media complaints, so there’s a whole separate giant heap of unhappy riders not counted in these statistics directly—it’s just the people who were so ticked off they felt it worth their time to go online and submit a formal complaint.
Complaints by Subject Matter
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Top complaints about “Station/Bus Stop/Facility/Structure” typically seem to focus on problems with “Station – General”, platforms, waiting rooms, track/right-of-way, restrooms, pedestrian overpasses and underpasses, and seats/benches.
Complaints about the LIRR’s employees are particularly concerning, and the employees subject matter has been among the fastest growing categories of complaints since the second half of 2014. And the growth in complaints about employees has been largely driven by complaints about train conductors, which have increased 933% since 2014. The LIRR is now receiving almost three complaints per day about train conductors (compared to one complaint every four or so days in 2014), and considering these are the employees riders have the most interactions with, this is a huge problem. The LIRR has some great conductors that really care about their jobs and their riders, but there are some that definitely do not, and the LIRR doesn’t seem to be doing anything to weed out the nasty conductors and cleave them off from the herd. It’s a big problem.
And digging down into the details of complaints about train conductors is even more unsettling…in the last quarter, the single biggest subject of complaints about conductors was “rude/inappropriate language”, which was the subject of 109 complaints—more than one per day. “No announcement/messages”, “incorrect information displayed”, and “not helpful” round out the top five details of complaints—also not very good things.
Twitter Complaints
The complaints made formally through the online CustHelp form should be taken particularly seriously, but they represent just a fraction of the total complaints to the LIRR. The LIRR receives a tremendous volume of feedback from riders on social media, Twitter especially. Since last October, I have been keeping track almost every Tweet mentioning the LIRR’s official Twitter account, @LIRR, and the railroad’s replies to riders. From October 2015 through the end of October 2016, the LIRR was mentioned in over 40,000 Tweets.
The vast majority of Tweets mentioning @LIRR are reporting problems or seeking information, but the LIRR’s response rate to rider Tweets on Twitter is very low…just 12.9% over the same period. That means that 87.1% of Tweets to the railroad were ignored, which represents thousands of passenger questions unanswered and thousands of different issues unrecognized (and thus uncorrected). And even if you do get a response, it’s usually not timely, but that’s a discussion for another time.
The graph below shows the number of Tweets mentioning @LIRR (the yellow bars), and the number of replies back to riders by the railroad (the green bars):
And again, despite the railroad’s OTP increasing in recent months, the volume of Tweets mentioning @LIRR is tremendous, and continues to trend upwards. In TweetDeck, I have a LIRR column and I read just about every single Tweet that has the letters “LIRR” in them—and I can tell you for certain that despite the LIRR’s OTP in March being the highest it has been in years, those 40,000 Tweets were by no means all “you’re doing a great job”.
The large increases in formal complaints and Tweets to the LIRR on Twitter show LIRR riders are unhappy about more than just late trains. There’s more to running a passenger railroad than just getting people to places on-time... it’s a critical portion of that, but they can’t treat people like garbage along the way. They have to give us relatively clean and usable facilities, they absolutely have to have courteous and professional employees, and some semblance of customer service. The LIRR seems to be losing its customer focus, the trend has gradually becoming more apparent over the past two or so years in the way I’ve seen them treat their riders. It’s not a good trend, and it needs to be reversed as soon as humanly possible.
