The OCTA answer to the previous post!

Thank you so much for your email. OCTA is working directly with the contractor to resolve these problems. This means the staff is going to Veolia and working hand in hand with the Veolia staff. Some very positive staff changes have been made by Veolia within this last week. We are already seeing the effects of these changes. This morning at 7:00 am the contractor was at 96.8% for on time performance. Now this is raw data and will change slightly as the data is adjusted. The contract states 94%. The dispatching procedures and schedules have been revised to address all of the concerns that you stated. Now this won’t all be fixed over night but it is moving in a positive direction.

We had the programmer from Trapeze out and he adjusted settings which have speeded up the system. Trapeze is used by most large transit agency’s. We are in the process of cleaning up the schedule change that occurred in December. We will see a positive effect of this next week. Moving Mr. Jerry Dullack into scheduling as the Manager is one of the changes I mentioned. Also, Veolia has hired a Manager over dispatch which the effects have been immediate. Additional staff changes will be made as needed in the very near future.

I agree with you that most of us are not real coherent early in the morning. Because they did not get the schedules until almost 8:00pm the night before they were having to make over 700 phone calls. They did not want to call customers too late so some were made in the morning. The problem was caused by trying to fix run templates for efficiency. This has been corrected so that the customer knows at the time of the booking what time the bus will be there.

OCTA is always concerned when our customers are not getting the proper service they deserve. Please be assured we have monitored the service from day one. The OCTA staff monitors the service on a daily service. We hired the contractor to do the job and tried to stay out of there way. OCTA staff is now working as a team with Veolia to smooth things out. We are now moving in the right direction. We will be glad to come to your next meeting, if you like, to explain all of the changes that have been made. Please be assured we are working very hard to give good customer service.