No-GO Trains

Apparently lightning struck a signal box in Oshawa last night and once again the customers of GO transit were left in the dark. It appears that the lightning disabled the switch during the thunderstorm last evening and caused delays and cancellations on the Lakeshore line.

While GO Transit hardly be blamed for a lightning strike, they can be blamed for a lack of communication to their customers. Apparently their e-News service failed to notify customers of the delays and cancellations - kind of the whole reason they set the service up in the first place. Customers drove or worse yet, dropped off at the GO stations only to find out about the problems.

GO Transit has many problems including the fact that they don't own most of the tracks and inadequate funding from all levels of government, but they can control their customer service levels - they just seem to choose not to. It doesn't take tons of money to improve service levels, just competent management and employees who actually give a damn - unfortunately these are both in short supply at GO.

How difficult can it be to plug in a notice of delay into their e-News system and then call the media (radio and television) as a back-up so that their customers won't be inconvenienced. I've travelled to several European countries and have found their customer service exemplary. In-station, in-train at and even email and SMS alerts are provided promptly and clearly in several languages - as a SERVICE to their customers. Why can't GO provide similar service levels.

Part of the problem comes from the adversarial employee-management relations that seem systemic in Canadian unionized workplaces. The Amalgamated Transit Union who represents the majority of GO Transit employees is the same union who represents the bulk of the TTC workers and we've all seen what a great job they do in working harmoniously with management. Their idea of customer service seems to be somewhat akin to that of a cold-war era Soviet bureaucrat.

The rest of the problem lies with inadequate government funding - and I'm not talking about funding employee wage increases. What GO really needs in competent, visionary leadership that can sell the merits of improving this vital service to those that hold the purse strings. They need to be able to do things like buy their own dedicated tracks which would in turn enable them to electrify the entire service and maybe even improve reliability.

Unfortunately the don't have that kind of leadership and with the example they lead, I can't blame government for not wanting to throw good money after bad. It's a shame.