Customer service, great leadership, and better messages are keys to communicating the value of public transportation.
That’s what a recent panel at the 2017 Remix Conference in Atlanta, Ga., confirmed, during a day of sessions on how the transit industry needs to find better ways to promote itself as an invaluable product capable of providing a path to freedom and a better life.
Not every transit agency can be a superstar communicator like LA Metro. (For the latest evidence of that, don’t miss the system’s new ads that embrace the weird and use a topic as vanilla as “good manners on the train and bus” as a launching pad for reaching a goal of actually getting people to embrace and love LA Metro.)
“What good transit can do is it allows you to travel when you want and allows people to live a freer life,” said Stephen Hunt of Valley Regional Transit in Boise, Idaho. He noted the imbalance in Boise, where residents spend $1.5 billion annually on operating their cars versus VRT’s $15 million for transit operations.
“I believe we as transit professionals need to be a lot more intentional about communicating this freedom. And you can’t expect to attain freedom from transit on $15 million. We got good at telling how much transit we needed and what that would cost. If we didn’t get that money, traffic would get worse. So our biggest story was a threat, and that’s not our best story or a way to get things done.”
Hunt added, “It should be less about ridership projection and more about accessibility. If you can talk about accessibility and where service exists, people can get engaged because they can see they live or work there, it becomes an issue. And that gives you a goal and a mission that is a story that people can understand immediately.”
So freedom and wacky entertainment – with high production values and a local YouTube celebrity – are definitely needed. But a focus on the fundamentals is another part of the puzzle for repairing transit’s battered image.
“We have to start with the front-line employees. [People are] not going to ride transit or not because of me,” said Kelvin Miller, general manager of The M in Montgomery, Ala.
Excellent customer service is crucial, agreed Belinda Woodiel-Brill of Knoxville Area Transit in Tennessee. “Keeping our front-line people happy is always a challenge, but we’ve got to do that.”
Miller added, “We brought in our drivers to our meetings to show them the routes and they help us make suggestions” for potential route and schedule changes that could contribute to more reliable, efficient service.
He also noted that transit needs local leadership and champions.
“As a general manager, you have to be approachable. In a lot of cases, the GM will direct people to the communications department or 911 instead of directly addressing the problems they hear,” Miller said. “In Montgomery, as everywhere, we have talk radio, and it’s always about the negative things on public transit.”
His agency met with CEOs and leaders from throughout Montgomery who wondered why they should use public transit.
“We don’t have traffic congestion or parking problems. But still, you don’t have to deal with gas, road rage, you get on the bus for a 30-minute ride [that may take 10 minutes by car], and then you’re there. Just talk to why you want to use it, the benefits, the environmental benefits, the economic benefit we bring to Montgomery.”
Woodiel-Brill said Knoxville pushed for transit to be the focus of a city board committee. “A committee of the board, not the transit agency. Pulling some of those folks in at the beginning is like the whole honesty thing. Bring in high-level folks early on, win them over early, and let them tell the message for you.”
Leslie Caceda said the Atlanta Regional Commission, where she works on transportation technology and policy, hosts a lot of summits to bring leaders together. “We just had a TDM [transportation demand management] summit to learn all about messages from each other.”
She said that messages about success stories can be powerful. Students at Woodward Academy take MARTA in droves to the private prep school outside the city core.
“[MARTA’s image problems] don’t affect this school. How do we overcome that transit is usually seen as dangerous for kids? There’s a good storytelling opportunity: if kids aren’t taking this school bus, they’re probably being driven – and cars are terribly unsafe.”
Another messaging opportunity, Woodiel-Brill said: “We are taxing ourselves by operating our own personal cars. You’re basically working one day each week to pay for your car.”
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