TRAX riders aren't so sure.

For the second time in as many weeks, the north-south light rail line was delayed Monday morning when a power cable snapped near the Interstate 80 overpass. UTA officials said power was restored by mid-afternoon, and TRAX resumed its regular schedule in time for the evening commute.

But while riders say the transit agency responded more efficiently to this breakdown than to an almost identical incident two weeks ago, riders still didn't get the information they needed to make decisions about their commute.

Embarrassed by what they described as the "chaos" that ensued from a Feb. 26 snafu - exacerbated when UTA officials failed to rally enough buses to form a "bus bridge" to ferry commuters past the broken segment of the line when the fix wasn't completed by 5 p.m. - TRAX officials put into place a contingency plan that was executed early Monday when the duplicate problem occurred, about 100 yards down the rails from the first break.

When the second break occurred, Monday morning, buses were mustered and an emergency response planning team gathered at UTA's headquarters.

"We have people on the phones. We've got a big network of communication in place. So everything is much more smooth than it was two weeks ago," UTA spokeswoman Carrie Bohnsack-Ware said Monday morning. "We've got people on every platform telling people what is going on. Everyone is in the know . . . and we're getting people where they need to go."

But several TRAX riders said they still had trouble getting timely and accurate information about what was happening and how long their delays would be.

Tony Tuttle gets on a bus near 1100 East and 3300 South. He said he was several blocks into his commute when the driver told him the TRAX train he transfers onto at the 3300 South station was delayed.

"If the driver had told me when I got onto the bus I could have gone back to my car," said Tuttle, who was a half-hour late for a downtown job he started last week.

Stan Peterson said he also received inaccurate information from a bus driver. Peterson, who gets on the TRAX train at the 6400 South station, said that when he arrived at the station he noticed there were fewer cars than usual in the lot and asked a driver whose bus was idling nearby whether there was a delay.

"He told me the delay was southbound but not northbound," Peterson said.

Peterson also was delayed on Feb. 26 and said if things were better this time around, he didn't notice.

Leslie Knowlton said a flashing sign at her station, at 7200 South, indicated there would be delays - "so at least it was nice to know," she said - but she said there was no indication of how long the delay would be. "It ended up taking an hour versus [the usual] 25 minutes," she said.

While maintaining Monday afternoon that the situation was "so much smoother" than it had been two weeks earlier, Bohnsack-Ware acknowledged there is still room for improvement. "The first time was a great learning experience," she said. "The second time we did much better, but there are things we still need to work out."

In the meantime, she said, UTA is working to fix the problem that led to both breaks, which appears to have been caused either directly or indirectly by the power line's contact with the underside of the overpass. "We're really trying hard to correct all of our faults," she said.

mlaplante@sltrib.com