Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Anybody home at SunRail?

Early Monday morning one of our favorite riders tweeted that there was a broken sprinkler head at the Sanford SunRail station spewing water like a geyser. She reported this on our Twitter feed, and on SunRail's official Twitter feed. Not a biggie, right? Read on.

Just for the heck of it, we rode up on the train and shot a photo of the geyser, which is right next to the sidewalk that riders use to reach the bus stops and parking lot. We posted the photo on our Twitter feed.




Monday night, the same young lady, on her way home 12 hours after she first reported the problem, tweeted that the sprinkler head was still spewing.

But wait, it gets better! This morning another gentleman reported the same broken sprinkler head was still spewing. Imagine how much water has been wasted. And who pays that water bill?

There's a much bigger issue. Does anybody at SunRail, or the Florida Department of Transportation, even care? Do they care about the concerns of riders? Do they care what's happening at the SunRail stations? We don't see much evidence of their concerns.

They got rid of the platform Ambassadors. They blow off riders pleas for weekend and night service. They downplay complaints about malfunctioning ticket machines. They sell us 7-day tickets, but only provide 5-day-service.Now they're ignoring maintenance requests. "If you see something say something." Yeah, right!

Other than the outside contractors who sweep up at stations, and the train crews, does any SunRail or FDOT official even visit stations on a daily basis?

Mind you, the Sanford station is within a mile or two of SunRail's maintenance and operations base. Yet over a 24-hour period an obvious maintenance problem wasn't addressed. Do they need a pipe wrench? They can borrow ours.

And if they don't care now, just five months since SunRail was launched, what will the stations and trains be like 5 months, or 5 years from today?

Please, would somebody at SunRail or FDOT act like you care and fix the friggin' sprinkler!

UPDATE
At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 9, SunRail posted this message on Twitter:
"SunRail operations is working to fix the problem in Sanford immediately. In the future, use our customer hotline 1-855-RAIL-411."



2 comments:

  1. That problem was reported months ago (May) and no one at SunRail or FDOT felt the need to look into it. My spouse was a former platform ambassador in Sanford and they reported that and many other problems at the station but to no avail. My spouse says the ambassadors cared for SunRail and it's passengers and were very upset to be let go in the manor that they were.

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    1. Wow, we had no idea the problem had been around for months. Thanks for providing that additional information. We share your disappoint with the dismissal of the Ambassadors. They were badly needed in May, and they're still badly needed. We will write about them more in the future.

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