Transit is unique.
To work well, transit needs the active participation of hundreds of third parties — employers, municipalities, retail owners, schools and any other place where people go by transit.
Most businesses sell a product or service that is self-contained. If you want an iPod, you buy it from Apple.com or go to an Apple store. If you want a spaghetti dinner, you order it from a restaurant
But no one buys a bus or train trip in order to experience the bus or train trip. They buy it as a means to an end — to get to where they want to go in order to do what they really want to do which is to work or shop or learn or play. So for transit to work well, as we’re just selling a means to work, shop, learn or play, we need the partnership of the people on the other end of the trip (where the potential riders work, shop, learn or play).
We need them to design their facilities around transit so the bus rider gets dropped off in the front. And we need them to tell their workers, shoppers, students and customers how to get to their place by transit, since they are in touch with their workers, shoppers, students and customers much more than we transit operators are.
What’s more, it’s in the economic interest of the magnet institutions (the places that are drawing people to work, shop, learn or play) that own or otherwise finance their own privately-maintained parking facilities to minimize the use of expensive parking and maximize the use of cheap transit. This insight is not widely understood by the magnet institutions.
Thus, one of the central challenges of a transit industry leader is to show the magnet institutions that they benefit from shifting away from use of their own parking facilities and towards transit — because those magnet institutions are in a much better position to market transit to their people than the transit agency is.
More after the jump
Our direct competitor — the privately-owned automobile — doesn’t face the same problem we do.
The private automobile, as our own Owen Brugh wrote about this week, spent almost $10 billion of their own money on direct advertising to consumers.
They don’t rely on convincing magnet institutions to provide parking and to design their facilities around parking, because they have battered and overwhelmed them with an endless barrage of $10 billion worth of marketing until most people expect and demand free and convenient parking.
So part of our job as leaders who grow transit ridership is to constantly recruit, cajole and convince third parties — the magnet institutions that generate trips that we are competing with the automobile for — to help shift the trips they are generating into transit.
That needs to be part of the job description of every Board Member and every Director/General Manager/CEO — not the job of a mid-level communications staffer. Because it takes a commitment from the top person of the magnet institution to shift the modes from parking to transit of the trips that they generate, not from an analogous mid-level external relations or communications staffer at the magnet institution and only a Board Member or top person at the transit agency can forge the relationship and make the request to the top person at the magnet institution.
Once the commitment has been made by the magnet institution, then the communications staff of the agency can work with the staff of the magnet institution to execute the shared policy objective of shifting trips from parking to transit by distributing maps and timetables, reminding potential riders about the good for the nation and the world they do by not burning as much as oil and distributing better rider instructions and trip planning.
But we need partners and only transit leaders can seal the deal.
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