So what do you really think of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's service?

Randomly selected survey respondents will get a free MetroCard or 10 commuter rail trips.The MTA itself wants to know, and is encouraging subway, bus, and railroad riders -- as well as bridge and tunnel users -- to participate in periodic public opinion surveys. The MTA plans to use the surveys to help make decisions about allocating scarce resources to where they are most needed. 

"We need a larger customer sample to drive our understanding of customer priorities down to finer levels of operation, such as individual subway lines or groups of stations," said Peter Harris, MTA Director of Market Research. "Our goals are to increase public participation while providing MTA planners with more in-depth, actionable information faster and at no extra cost, which we can do by adding well-designed online surveys to our existing research program."

The MTA expects to survey groups of registered customers three to five times a year on customer priorities, improvement preferences, and satisfaction with a number of MTA's new initiatives. The MTA also will use online research to evaluate the effectiveness of MTA marketing and communications.

Customers who are interested in participating should go to http://mta.info/survey and fill out a short registration survey. Then, when a survey is conducted, the MTA will send participants an email message with a link to the online survey.

Every time the MTA conducts online research, it will randomly select several lucky customers who completed the survey and offer them their choice of either a free MetroCard or a free 10-trip ticket on the MTA railroad of their choice.