Rider Experience Committee tracks service quality

On August 6th Sound Transit's Rider Experience Committee met to discuss its evolving scorecard" for ride quality. It's a promising set of metrics, but it would be great if the committee's writ expanded beyond current service to the future.

The scorecard has metrics in five categories: dependable, safe, available, clean, and informed. The individual items seem reasonable enough:

Sound Transit

So how are they doing?

Ridership, obviously, is way off of 2019 levels. Public safety incidents and customer complaints are back to the 2019 baseline after shooting up in the spring, possibly because ST implemented a recovery" fare to discourage some anti-social behaviors.

But oh, those escalators:

Sound Transit

It's incredible we're still at this point with the escalators, but at least they're measuring the right thing.

Overall, it's a good set of metrics: not too vague, but not so simplistic that there will be perverse outcomes. What really bothers me is where Sound Transit really botches rider experience - when it sites and designs stations.

The Rider Experience Committee doesn't seem to have the early planning process in its domain, which is a shame. Nearly every station open to date could have benefited from a little more thought into how people will flow into and through the station. Someone expressly thinking about these issues could improve things while it's cheap to do so.