Sometimes transit agencies make riders feel like cargo or cattle, with an undue emphasis on operations and not nearly enough on running a welcoming, retail environment to sell more and more riders.
One of the ways agencies drift away towards customer-centric (or rider-centric) behavior is with language.
So while to transfer invites associations with freight, such as laborious effort, to connectinvites associations that are liberating and enabling — at least to my ear. Our professional and social connections represent possibilities that enrich our lives: to be well-connected is to have more choices, more opportunities, more freedom. The underlying image comes from electricity and communications: things that seem to move without weight or effort but whose effect is to enlighten or liberate.
When a third-rate bus or streetcar dumps me out on a barren street corner at the end of its line, and the driver tells me to go wait at that vandalized bus shelter on the freeway offramp, that’s transferring, and it’s hell. But when I arrive in a lively urban place where trains/buses/ferries are leaving to any of a number of interesting destinations, a place that feels like the center of my city, a place that will provide many ways to use my waiting time if I have to wait, that’s what I call a connection. And that’s what we should be offering.
He’s right. Transit agency leaders should embrace this (free) method of orienting the company towards the rider and not the operators.
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