1. Why does Metro have a blog? Under the leadership of Robert Baer, Metro has made transparency and communication a high priority. As a public agency, interaction and engagement with the public – our customers, the taxpayers, elected officials, and concerned citizens – is crucial to our mission. We also want to be able to frankly address issues as they arise, in a way that goes deeper and broader than a soundbite, and where we can hear directly from you.
2. How is this different from Customer Service? This blog is not intended to provide the transit customer information that Metro already provides on its website and via its Customer Service department. If you have customer complaints or questions, if you need information about schedules or fares, you should visit Metro’s website or contact Customer Service. If we receive comments or emails related to these kinds of issues, we will try to forward them or redirect you to the proper person.
3. How will you have time to blog? Communicating and being responsive and accountable to the public is a part of every job we do at Metro. The blog provides us with a very efficient and effective way to do that. This blog was created by a group of employees from several different departments who saw a need and came together to fill it, but we all have kept our usual jobs in the agency. We have committed to working as hard as we can to start this blog and keep it running as smoothly as possible, but please have patience with us if we get a little bogged down from time to time. We will keep you informed if we are having trouble finding the time to be as responsive as we intend to be.
4. Why haven’t you blogged about [x]? Each blogger will be posting about the issues or topics that catch his interest. Some of those interests overlap, but inevitably some issues will be overlooked. While we will make every effort to cover events and occurrences that are of particular interest to Metro customers and the St. Louis region, from time to time we may miss things or not have the time (or the interest) to blog about them. The fact that we do or do not blog about any particular topic doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that we haven’t blogged about it. If you have a suggestion or feel that a particular issue needs to be addressed, please contact the blog team and we will take your suggestion under consideration.
5. Why do you moderate the comments? We have created this blog to facilitate better communication with the public. We want this to be a conversation, not one-way communication. However, we do have limited resources so we cannot assign one person to monitor comments all the time. As a public agency, we have a responsibility to the public not to host comments that are obscene, illegal, contain personal attacks, violate copyright laws, and so on. At the same time, we are committed to creating an open dialogue.
Our compromise solution, then, is to establish and publish a Comments Policy, by which we will abide when moderating comments. We are looking for feedback, even if it is critical, so long as it is civil and abides by our policy. Please have patience with the process as we work out the bugs – we will try to approve comments as quickly as we can given our time constraints.
