The New Year is a time to dust off those routines thrown so out of whack by holiday parties. No, I am not talking about going back to diet and exercise, but your commuting routine. If you regularly commute by transit two or more times a week, good for you! But have you signed up for Guaranteed Ride Home as well?
Guaranteed Ride Home (GRH) is a great service provided by Commuter Connections that offers free rides home from your workplace, up to four times a year, in the event of an emergency or unscheduled overtime. Did you come to work on the Fairfax Connector bus, only to get ill and need to go home? Need to stay at work late to finish a project, but don’t want to ask your carpool to wait? Call GRH – a taxi or service car will be sent to your office to take you straight home. All you need to do is tip the driver, if you want. It is a great service, and has helped many employees in a jam.
You don’t have to take my word for it though – Commuter Connections recently released preliminary results from their customer satisfaction survey. The survey, sent out to just over 3300 customers, had an overall satisfaction rating of a whopping 96%! The survey showed that 36% of the respondents used GRH due to an illness, while 24% due to a sick child, with 27% due to other emergencies. The majority of the riders, 78%, waited less than 15 minutes for their GRH vehicle to arrive. That is impressive – but when you are sick or anxious, you really do not want to have to wait much longer than that. It’s nice to see that GRH delivers on speedy response time.
Customer feedback leaned heavily towards the positive side as well. For the number of people responding to the survey, 69% provided written individual comments, although sometimes these were a mix of positive and negative reviews, a staggering 96% made positive comments. Some comments included “GRH is the only reason I commute,” “The GRH program is a great incentive for using mass transportation for commuting,” and “I was amazed at how well this service worked!” Most of the negative comments focused on communication issues, or were from people unsure on how the service worked. Stay tuned for the official release of the results from Commuter Connections!
It is clear that the GRH program is an excellent service provided to commuters, one with a proven success rate. Not all public transportation services can boast numbers like this. So if you haven’t signed up yet, make January your month to do so: register here now. Remember that you need to sign up every 12 months, so add this to your 2014 calendar after you do it today. And if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to ask Arlington Transportation Partners.