PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA wants to continue a high six-figure contract to outsource workers to report on the rider experience, but some SEPTA Board members are questioning the cost.
Think of them like “secret shoppers” who ride SEPTA and report back on how clean stations or vehicles are, or whether the announcements and signs were clear. SEPTA was considering a three-year, $825,000 contract with King of Prussia-based Careers Express to provide quality monitors, but board member William Leonard asked: Why can’t SEPTA recruit riders to do it?
“This might be an area where we should investigate how we can do what we need to do a little less expensively,” he said. “I think we can reduce the cost of this item, maybe by having volunteers from our own ridership.”
Lex Powers, SEPTA deputy chief communications officer, said outside workers can be trained to provide what SEPTA requires.
“It is more cost-effective for us to outsource it,” he said. “It’s also more flexible. … The real strength here, for example, is that we could train the folks who are doing this work on our rules and our processes and our procedures in a way that a rider wouldn’t be able to.”
Powers said there is also a benefit to outsourcing this work: having an anonymous third party.
Chuck Bode, a transit activist who spoke during the public part of last week’s operations committee meeting, said he was a quality monitor in the ’90s, and yes, it was important to be anonymous.
“It didn’t take long from when I got on a bus for the operator to curse me out because I had turned him in. They figured out right away who was doing this,” he recalled.
Bode noted that the program was used to make sure employees followed rules. “That’s why it had to be contracted out so that it wasn’t one union, one employee telling on another.”
The board is still considering its quality monitoring options.