A Pittsburgh rider has an excellent column in today’s Post-Gazette on the simple steps (like taping a print-out of the bus schedule to the back of a bus stop sign with scotch tape) that help new riders navigate transit.
A few months ago, my girlfriend noticed something: At a bus stop on South Dallas Avenue, just a block from our house in Point Breeze, someone had posted a bus schedule.
The “schedule” was only a strip of paper, printed on a standard computer printer and cropped with ordinary scissors. It listed only a letter (signifying which bus) and a time (when the bus passed this stop). A stranger, probably one of our neighbors, pasted this timetable to a “no parking” sign with Scotch tape.
Total cost: about 10 cents.
Total worth: priceless.
It’s worth going through the entire system — every line, every stop — from the perspective of a new rider every quarter or twice a year to ensure that basic rider instruction information (schedules, maps and fares) actually exist and if not, getting the information out.
This almost-free information distribution generates ridership and revenue.
Who is in charge at your agency of ensuring this occurs? (If the answer is no one, you’ve got an improvement in your org chart to make).
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