Comment from Interurban Transit Partnership DBA The Rapid

Service Quality Performance Areas and Metrics The Rapid supports the FTA’s focus on safety and security, cleanliness, universal accessibility, real-time information, and system reliability because each affects whether customers and families choose transit. These areas should inform local decision-making alongside measures of service availability, frequency, affordability, travel time, and customer experience. Reliable, safe, frequent service with clear information is broadly important to all riders, including families. The FTA should distinguish between objective operational measures and subjective perception measures. Existing NTD and oversight data can provide useful, consistent indicators for items largely within an agency’s control, such as safety events, mechanical failures, service delivery, and ADA-accessible infrastructure. Customer perceptions of safety, cleanliness, accessibility, and ease of use are equally important, but should be interpreted as locally contextualized feedback rather than uniform national performance scores. The Rapid recommends that the FTA prioritize existing, validated data sources before creating new NTD or oversight reporting requirements. Operational data standardization and open standards, including GTFS and real-time service data protocols, can reduce the reporting burden when definitions are mature and measures are comparable. Any new data collection should be piloted with agencies of different sizes, modes, and service environments, fully funded, and designed to produce actionable information rather than duplicative reporting. Data Availability, Limitations, and Collection Methodology The Rapid collects information relevant to the proposed traveler questions through operational systems, customer and community surveys, and contracted research services. Availability varies by measure and mode: operational data may be readily available for service delivery, whereas perceptions of safety, cleanliness, accessibility, and ease of use require direct engagement with customers and the community. Surveys, focus groups, pulse surveys, and transit master-planning outreach are complementary tools, and no single source should be treated as a complete measure of service quality. Current methods have meaningful limitations related to frequency, response rates, representativeness, cost, and the inherently subjective nature of some measures. Perceptions of safety and cleanliness can be affected by neighborhood conditions or broader community circumstances beyond a transit provider’s control, even when vehicles, facilities, and operations meet agency standards. Developing, administering, weighting, analyzing, and reporting statistically valid surveys requires substantial consultant and staff resources; The Rapid’s survey program is supported through local operating resources rather than Federal capital funding. The Rapid’s customer-value survey uses randomized on-board intercepts for fixed-route and BRT service, plus randomized phone and email for paratransit customers. Samples are proportionate to ridership by route, time of day, and day of week, with a target of 95 percent confidence and a margin of error of plus or minus five percent; results include Net Promoter Score and passenger-sentiment crosstabs. Its community-value survey uses a third-party call center to contact randomly selected cell and landline numbers, confirms service-area residency, weights responses by key demographics, and seeks a representative sample within the same confidence and error thresholds. Other Considerations Uniform thresholds or national rankings based on customer perception could risk obscuring meaningful differences among transit agencies. Fleet size, modes, network design, service area, population density, customer demographics, local culture, seasonal weather differences, and the surrounding built environment all affect both service delivery and customer perceptions. Peer benchmarking among agencies with comparable characteristics may be more informative than nationwide comparisons, while preserving each agency’s ability to use locally tailored feedback to respond to its community.