Metro is in the midst of addressing one of the last Transit Access Pass bugaboos beyond the fixes I described previously: the rather poor quality of service provided by Xerox, the vendor staffing the Regional TAP Service Center.

At the Metro Board Executive Management Committee meeting on Thursday they will consider an extension of the contract with Xerox to facilitate a transition to having the Center be in-house staffed by Metro employees represented by the Transportation Communications Union (TCU).

This is good news. Not that everything will be peachy keen even with this change. Alex Vickers’ comment to my previous post I think brings up a very important point in re gating:

Closing the turnstiles is still going to be a complete nightmare… was held up for 5 minutes the other day trying to get through the turnstiles and almost missed my train. It’s difficult to deal with the huge rush of an entire train of people unloading and the stations weren’t designed to deal with two way traffic. Union Station is going to be a complete C.F

Another commenter, who wishes to remain anonymous because of business with Metro, explains why this could be a good move for customers.

This helps fix one of the biggest complaints about the TAP program, which is the poor customer service. By bringing this in house hopefully you will have staff at MTA Customer Service Centers actually helping passengers with the card instead of directing them to the phone booth where they sit on hold for over half an hour.

Oh, yeah…

By the way, Xerox is even in hot water for non-compliance with the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) participation commitment it made when awarded the contract. This is how dis-pleased Metro is regarding this failing: “Xerox has failed to demonstrate on-going good faith efforts and may be subject to administrative sanctions”.

Ouch!