How you can get the right information about MATAplus
Back in July, Disability Connection wrote a letter to MATA about misinformation on their website. They have an outdated MATAplus Rider’s Guide with old errors that we wrote about in this blog on July 17.
MATA has still not made the simple correction we asked for and you may still be getting misinformation from the MATA website. In looking closer at this issue, we have discovered that MATA has three different MATAplus Rider’s Guides.
The first of MATAplus’ three Rider’s Guides is the one that you may get from the website. If you go to the MATAplus tab a blue box at the top of the page says: “Download MATAplus Riders Guide (PDF).” You may notice that it is not an Adobe “pdf” it is a Microsoft Word document. Back in July when we notified them of the error, we assumed they had just linked an outdated version of the Rider’s Guide.
Version 2 of the MATAplus Rider’s Guide is also available on the same webpage. The end of the second paragraph reads: “Click here for access to the MATAplus Riders Guide. The word “here” is a link to an Adobe “pdf” document and a version of the MATAplus Riders Guide that also states on the back of the cover page that it was updated May 2019.
This version of the Rider’s Guide does not include the error we noted back in July. You may think it is the same information however, because they both say that they were updated May 2019. This can make helping people to understand how the system works very difficult. We are mainly interested in helping rider’s get good information. It is sad that MATA has been unable to remove the misinformation from the website, and to have contradictory information essentially side-by-side on the website.
Version 3 is a printed guide we received just yesterday. This version not only seems to have correct information (We have read through it just once so far), but it also clearly prints “Updated March 2022” on the inside front cover.
This should be the information that MATA links to from the webpage and what we all use to understand the system. Hopefully MATA can find this error and correct it immediately.
