Commuter Age

Metro-North Railroad has finalized its customer satisfaction pledge after six months of work between the Connecticut commuter council, the railroad, and the Department of Transportation.

No word on when the nine point pledge will be displayed on trains, in stations, to let riders know what they can expect in terms of good service.

The final document which has  been through many edits offers assurances of Metro-North’s intent to meet the following standards:

*A safe and reliable ride. This assurance includes being comfortable and ontime,  maintaining functional lighting and temperature control for riders, working public address systems, and clean restrooms.

•Accurate and timely information about service conditions. This was a major plank of efforts to win this pledge, after more than 200 customers were stranded on a train between Green’s Farms and Southport last July which forced the issue of a customer pledge into the public eye.

•Courteous employees, defined as, employees who are helpful and courteous all the time and provide accurate and timely information to customers.

•A clean environment, as in the railroad will maintain a clean environment for customers and the communities they serve on railcars, at stations, and station buildings maintained. This includes efforts to keep areas on and off the train, litter-free.To me, this seems like the type of thing that depends on how civilized people are handling their own trash.

•Alternate transportation. This promise/pledge pertains to Metro-North’s assurance that the railroad will make every effort to open train doors at stations to allow waylaid riders to seek alternate arrangements for transportation. If Metro-North service is cancelled, the railroad would “make every effort” to substitute emergency bus service.

•During discussions, officials for the railroad and state Department of Transportation parried calls for a straight-ahead guarantee of bus service on the grounds it would be impossible to muster enough buses to carry tens of thousands of riders in the event of a New Haven Line service outage.

•In the event of a significant event stranding riders at a station for an indefinite amount of time, Metro-North will immediately put in action plans to help those riders. Emergency personnel will be dispatched to assist the riders and efforts made to provide water and other aid.

This is again linked to the July incident when 200 riders were stuck on a broken down train in 100 plus degree weather. Tempers frayed, and customers complained they didn’t have enough communication.

•If weather requires the temporary cancellation or suspension of service during extreme weather, the railroad will make every effort to let peopel know before they go.

•Severe service disruption procedures will include up to date information about service restoration estimate times.

•Metro-North will waive its much reviled $10 refund processing fee for unused One Way or Round Trip tickets when a Metro-North service suspension is declared on the MTA Web-site.

A Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police K-9 team has taken top honors for the second time in three years going muzzle to muzzle against other  handler dog combos from police departments throughout the nation.

The K-9 team of MTA Police Officer Kevin Pimpinelli and his German shepherd Mullen bested seven other dog-officer combos at the finals in Pearl,Miss at the U.S. Police Canine Association finals.

January wasn’t just the snowiest month on record in Connecticut. It was also one of the most hectic in several years for commuters on Metro-North, who have been forced to deal with countless delays,  service changes and overcrowded trains.

Over at BlogJam they are collecting your stories, and want to hear from you.

How has the weather impacted your commuting experience? Have you been late for work,  stuck waiting for an hour or longer for a train? Unable to sit down on your ride to Stamford or Grand Central?

If so, leave a comment. Tell us what your experiences have been like.

Have a particular horror story? Or a story about Metro-North crews stepping up and improving service despite adverse conditions?

Have a memorable experience involving a trip to or from work?

Leave a comment and let us know. We’ll take the best stories and feature them on our websites.

You can also reach us on Twitter @ConnPost, @StamAdvocate, @NewsTimes or @GreenwichTime to send stories, photos or live updates during your commute.

The two outages which prevented Metro-North Railroad ticket machines from accepting debit or credit cards Friday and again on Sunday afternoon were caused by different problems, Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the railroad said.

Passengers without cash to buy tickets before boarding were held on their honor, and given envelopes to send the fare later, Anders said.

The problem on New Year’s Eve was caused by a problem with the internal clocks of recently activated data routing equipment.

On Sunday between around noon and 6 p.m., the machines were unable to accept credit or debit cards again after a service problem between Metro-North’s phone company and bank clearinghouse.

David Kooris, vice president of the Regional Planning Association of New York made some interesting comments at a Yale University event last week about the difficult proposition of marshaling statistics to make a case for smart growth in cities to make lifestyles more compact.

Kooris spoke last week at a roundtable hosted by the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences.

In order to correctly place smart growth developments and increase the odds of reducing the amount of vehicle miles traveled, Kooris said, urban planners need better statistics showing where vehicle trips take place, the distance they cover, and whether mass transit options and development patterns can reduce automobile use and by how much.

There is also the matter of cost and convenience of the other transportation modes like rail and bus that will probably also influence where the hypothetical traveler of the future wants to live.

A new study from the New England chapter of the American Automobile Association finds that 80 percent of parents improperly install child safety seats in their cars, based on an inspection of 10,000 installations made by technicians in the past eight years.

The results were released to mark National Child Passenger Safety Week, which runs from Sept. 19 to 25.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that motor vehicle accidents are the number one killer of children under the age of 14.

Based on data compiled since 2002, 86 percent of those who took advantage of the AAA’s child seat installation service had previously installed the equipment incorrectly, according to spokeswoman Fran Mayko.

Some of the findings of the study are:

•72 percent of parents secured the seats too loosely in the vehicles.

The organization launched Seated, Safe, & Secure, a child safety seat initiative in 2002, which aims to educate parents and guardians about proper safety belt usage.

The AAA will next do a clinic in Stamford will be from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.,  Tuesday, October 12, at the Belltown Volunteer Fire Department, 8 Dorlen Road.
To make an appointment for that or another AAA clinic you can call 203-765-4222 x 3142.

The state of Connecticut has been found eligible by the U.S. Department of Transportation to compete for a newly available $7 million set aside to expand the New London to Orient Point ferry route to carry freight to get commercial traffic off of roadways between  New York and Connecticut.

The marine highway corridor is one of eight projects and six initiatives selected by the U.S. DOT to be eligible for the assistance.

“These projects will help make better use of America’s Marine Highway by reducing gridlock, improving the environment, and putting skilled mariners and shipbuilders to work,” said David Matsuda, Maritime Administrator for the U.S. DOT.

Aside: Getting a freight barge program going definitely seems a more feasible(less costly) mid-term goal than reviving long moribund rail freight corridors. Those corridors will probably take many more billions to significantly rebalance the country’s truck to train freight ratio.

Elsewhere, Gov. M. Jodi Rell rescheduled the State Bond Commission’s meeting Wednesday which included nearly $500 million in railroad-related bonding projects announced last month.

Rell has asked the State B0nd Commission to authorize borrowing $260 million towards the $880 million venture to double track a rail line New Haven to Hartford to Springfield rail line, which would permit trains to potentially thunder along between 90 to 110 miles per hour in that corridor. (I prefer a more leisurely ride)

The DOT has also made an additional request for $220 million to the Federal Railroad Administration towards that project.

A second request would appropriate $226 million to act on an existing option to buy an additional 80 rail cars from Kawasaki Rail Corp.

The state has already authorized spending for 300 of the new cars to replace the New Haven line’s M-2 and M-4 rail cars.

Cablevision Systems Corp. is among the companies that have submitted a proposal to outfit Metro-North and Long Island Railroad trains with Wi-Fi networks at no cost to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The proposal promises to have the system built and activated within 12 months of being selected.

MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said information on other firms that submitted proposals was not immediately available on Wednesday.

This spring the MTA issued a request for proposal for a company to equip its trains for wireless Web access, assuming the cost of both installing and maintaining the technology.

Since 2008, Cablevision has operated a network providing wireless Web coverage at stations from Greenwich to Milford and north to Redding on the Danbury branch, including parking lots and platforms. That service is only available to Cablevision subscribers.

“Access to Internet on MTA trains will transform the riding experience and we believe Cablevision is uniquely positioned to deliver this enhancement through the extension of Optimum Wi-Fi…” said John Bickham, Cablevision’s president of cable and communications in a statement. “As a New York-based company already providing popular Wi-Fi access at nearly 200 MTA commuter rail stations we propose to deploy wireless Internet access across the entire MTA system within 12 months of selection, at no cost to the Transportation Authority or taxpayers.