Yesterday I had two trips on Trans Metro which ran within five minutes of their scheduled time and I almost felt privileged. There has been no text communication for a week delayed trains, but hold on a minute, the trains have still regularly run late. I heard through the grapevine that the messages were upsetting customers too much so they stopped informing customers of the late trains. If that is true it is an interesting approach, hope your customers don't notice the poor service you're providing.
Now on the positive side, they've installed some fancy electronic signs, and although they don't have real time information yet the aim is within a few weeks to provide at the station the real time information on the trains expected arrival. No room on the signs it seems for explanations as to why the train is late, I guess there wasn't enough room for dew on the line and other explanations that Trans Metro come up with.
So is it better to keep the reasons for delays from the customer of to tell them? Certainly the explanations appear to aggravate customers feeling about the situation, perhaps just knowing the train is going to be late is all you need to know. My feeling is the text medium is a bad way to relay explanations, you're better to leave explanation for the web site and just tell people how late the train is going to be. The text service is useful, because if there is a big delay you can make plans to get to work by other methods. The explanation just seems to aggravate people, especially when the reason is something like dew on the line.
Will be academic for next three days - the line is closed for maintenance, hopefully some of the problems will be resolved.
