The best place to find more riders (and thus more revenue and more political support for taxpayer investment in transit) is anytime besides rush hour. Commonly known as off-peak, these weekend, evening and 10 am – 3 pm riders are our best friends.
We like them because trains and buses are usually packed during rush hour and relatively open during the rest of the week. Therefore we can carry more off-peak riders without any additional capacity investments like more buses or trains.
(I think far too many transit leaders shy away from more ridership with the fear of dealing with the capacity expansion needs with the new riders. That’s exactly the problem we should be trying to put ourselves into. I can’t think of too many businesses that avoid chasing after as many customers as possible because they are concerned that they won’t be able to serve them. We need more riders — far more than we have today — and the best way to make the case for more capital investment in transit to serve more riders is by overwhelming existing capacity. That will build a political constituency of frustrated riders who want more service and make the case to the public and private sectors that there is a need for more investment.)
And after the jump, some data from a New York foundation on how off-peak riders are more attracted to price breaks (as well as better marketing) than peak riders….good news for agencies considering a ridership campaign.
The data from the Nurture New York’s Nature study that calls on congestion pricing for most of Manhattan and abolishing all fares with most of the revenue provides some insight for farebox transit.
The study (citing MTA reports and their own research) claims that work (or peak) trips are not very sensitive to price. They are inelastic, in other words — no matter how much you stretch the rider with higher or lower price, they still need to get to work and most of them will ride whether the fare is expensive, cheap or free. They calculated a -0.09 price elasticity (which means that free fares would generate 9% more peak riders — not that much!
For the non-work (basically, non-peak) riders, free fares generates a lot more riders. They have a -0.23 elasticity — a 23% jump in ridership.
That’s the fundamental insight we should remember for our ridership campaigns: non-work, off-peak riders are more likely to try transit than work, peak riders.
One way we can lower the price of transit for potential riders is by giving them the information on how to ride. If we make them figure out how to ride and navigate our confusing timetables, our crazy maps and talk to a human being about transit for the first time on a moving bus, we are essentially raising the cost. Those potential riders have to deal with all of that, and for many of them, the cost is too much.
We need to bring that cost down. That’s what a transit ridership marketing and communications campaign is all about: attract those non-peak riders with cheaper transit by eliminating the cost of figuring out how transit works.
Thanks, Mr. Kheel of Nurture New York’s Nature, for crunching the numbers. Good luck with getting free fares in New York. I for one think it’s the right way to go.
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