Recently, APTA released its latest report on public transportation passenger demographics and travel characteristics – albeit not very different from the findings of their first study, Americans In Transit, published back in 1992. We still find that Caucasians, females, and people between the ages of 25 and 54 are taking the majority of trips. So what is the value in analyzing understood passenger information?
It’s in transit communications. When we think about demographics as areas for targeted outreach, rather than just different types of riders, their ridership trends become much more valuable to agencies. Consider, for example, female riders. They have a clear proclivity for taking transit, given that seven separate studies have found females to be in the majority for rider gender. Thus, they are likely to notice and respond well to communications that have been shown to be significant to women. Customer Preferences for Transit ATIS, a 1993 report on transit communications methods, indicates that the one piece of real-time information that females are much more interested in than males is current weather. So when we merge one well-known demographic statistic (female majority ridership at 55.5 percent of trips taken) with transit information preferences (women wanting current weather reports on transit websites), we begin to see obvious ways in which agencies can easily cater to specific audiences and ultimately boost ridership.
Lets look at another characteristic from the APTA report: trip purpose. As many might assume, the predominant trip purpose was work, at 59.2 percent. In third, at a scant 6.8 percent, were social purposes. Again, transit communications offers an easy-to-implement solution. One of the more effective means for engaging the public and inducing additional trips is a community events calendar. By listing upcoming events and their respective stops along a given transit line, agencies can grasp a much larger percentage of the social purpose demographic. Likewise, a detailed system map with a sampling of stores and attractions at each stop can also play well with this crowd.
The scenario can be repeated for almost every demographic, too. For the 5.9 percent of trips taken by riders who have been taking transit for one month or less, agencies can combat initial rider intimidation and instill feelings of goodwill by making transit representatives available wayside, a communications method for which non-riders have demonstrated a preference. To boost the 8.5 percent of trips taken by teens aged 15 to 19, try educational outreach, such as conducting an in-class trip-planning exercise to the library. As to the 5.5 percent of trips taken by Asians or Pacific Islanders, bilingual information sessions at community centers and with advocacy groups can be an effective tool.
So for those agencies with demographic information, consider overlaying your data with your current communications efforts and see if there aren’t some gaps that public affairs and community outreach can easily fill
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