By Philip Newman
A Metropolitan Transportation Authority official testified for more than an hour today on how the agency responds to straphanger complaints, but Councilman John Liu (D-Flushing) said the MTA failed to demonstrate that anything is actually done about such complaints.
Liu convened a public hearing at City Hall after MTA Board Vice Chairman David Mack recently suggested that complaints from the public tend to end up in the trash bin. MTA officials have since disavowed Mack’s comment.
MTA Deputy Executive Director Christopher Boylan told the hearing that more than 2.3 million complaints are received each year by the MTA via the MTA Website, e-mail, regular mail, telephone calls, walk-ins and directly to transit employees.
“It’s clear the MTA has established various avenues through which complaints are received,” Liu said. “But whether those complaints are actually resolved and how long it takes to actually resolve them is painfully unclear.”
Holding up a trash can, Liu said “this only inflates the existing public perception that what MTA Board Vice Chairman Mack said is absolutely true –complaints from the public are not heard and simply added to the proverbial ‘circular file.’”
The councilman said the MTA “needs to have a comprehensive system not just to track incoming complaints but more importantly to track the resolution of those complaints.”
Other Queens Council members at the hearing were Joseph Addabbo (D-Howard Beach) and Diana Reyna (D-Brooklyn).
