We refer to the letters from Jill Taylor, Steven Lewis, Simon Clennell and Mary Painter, on radio broadcasts on KMB buses. Their concerns centred around whether these broadcasts serve passengers, a survey we conducted, passenger preferences and potential commercial benefit from broadcasts.
We do our best to stay in touch with what passengers want. A research company with international expertise was commissioned to independently design and conduct a survey.
Cutting-edge methodology was used with a statistically representative sample of more than 1,000 randomly chosen respondents. Their brief was simple, to find out what people think about radio broadcasts.
The survey was conducted over the phone and found that 76 per cent of respondents thought that radio broadcasts were a better service and 12 per cent were neutral.
Despite this level of approval, we do indeed offer a choice for passengers who prefer to ride without listening to broadcasts. Starting this month, in line with our schedule for implementation, all our buses offer broadcasts on the upper deck only. This is despite the fact that more than two-thirds of survey respondents prefer that we offer broadcasts on both decks.
When we launched initial broadcasts several years ago and presented broadcasts a few months ago, we took great care to act in the passengers' best interests.