Metro may end its “mystery rider” program less than a year after it began, as part of the transit system’s efforts to trim $154 million from the budget.
The Metro board agreed last spring to fund the program, modeled on similar mystery shopper programs in which undercover researchers are paid to shop at a store to assess its customer service. The transit service signed a $916,000 contract in June with Maryland-based Widener-Burrows & Associates for up to five years of quarterly reports.
But now, before the board has even discussed the first report, the general manager has proposed cutting the program.
“It boiled down to a business decision to save resources,” Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel said. “We certainly would have liked to have continued with the program.”
The transit agency has done this before. It began regular “Customer Environment Surveys” in July 2001 but ended the program in June 2006 because of budgetary constraints, according to agency documents.
Next year’s budget, which begins July 1, is not finalized yet. Even with the proposed trims the transit service would still need to pay the firm $195,000 for the first year of the mystery rider contract, Taubenkibel said.
“I hope they do cut it,” said Harold Snider, a consultant to the World Bank who uses the system’s MetroAccess service because he is blind. “If they need a third party to identify a systemic problem exists, that’s really bad. It shows they don’t believe in their riders.”
Taubenkibel said the transit system had customers’ feedback — about 40,000 complaints each year — but the paid mystery riders provided “an unbiased view.”
“The whole point of it is that we have a scientific approach,” he said.
Board member Peter Benjamin, who initially asked Metro about using volunteers instead of paid riders, as they had in the past, supports the idea of some type of evaluation tool.
“It’s worth doing this,” he said. “The question is whether it’s worth spending money on it.”
Complaints come in to the transit system, but he said those indicate a problem has gone too far. “If someone has gone to the trouble of calling about something, that tells us something,” he said. “You try to do it internally before the outside community goes and says, ‘This isn’t good.’ ”
