You have to do worse than delaying a smart card system and trimming bus routes to turn riders against OC Transpo.

Nothing, it seems, will ever compare to a complete transit shutdown.

The 2013 customer survey has Transpo celebrating the best scores since the 2008-2009 bus strike.

"We are back to pre-strike confidence levels in this organization," transit commission chairwoman Diane Deans declared Wednesday after the results were released.

Actually, the presentation was Transpo's compilation of survey results collected by Core Strategies. The raw data will be released next week.

But Transpo staff and commissioners were just short of doing fist pumps as management went through the scores, which included an 80% rating of the service by transit users and a 73% rating by others. The latter score is the highest since annual surveys began in 2008 and the score from transit users is only eclipsed by the 82% in 2008.

Transpo employees are more caring than ever and the department has never been so responsive to customers' needs, the results indicate.

When asked what characteristics best represent Transpo from a list of choices, more people chose "convenient and reliable" compared to previous years.

Management is even taking as a win a score of 6.5 out of 10 for Presto making "transit more convenient."

However, one result that many in the room acknowledged is a big concern is the rate of women who don't feel safe using Transpo at night.

Only 49% of women felt safe waiting for a bus late at night and 57% felt safe riding the bus late at night. For men, the ratings were 71% and 76%, respectively.

"I think those are things we can learn from," Deans said. "We need to take those seriously and we need to look when it comes to future budgets and when it comes to future decisions what we can do."

"Clearly the focus needs to be put on that and we'll put our focus on that," Transpo GM John Manconi said.

Manconi said having staff visible at transit stations matters to customers, so he plans to make sure all workers, not just law enforcement, are easily identified as transit employees. Transpo also wants to improve lighting at stops and stations.

Only 820 of 1,525 respondents to the random phone survey indicated they used transit.

The survey was done between Nov. 22 and Dec. 10. The margin of error is +/- 2.5% for overall results and +/- 4% for transit users, 19 times out of 20.

jon.willing@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @JonathanWilling