The MTA would be crazy if it didn’t develop a marketing campaign around Wells. He should be on television and radio as no other MTA administrator has been before. He could be the Frank Perdue of Baltimore transit – as long as the product he’s selling isn’t a turkey.

This is a prescription for aggressive earned media. Why pay for advertisements if a good-looking, charismatic, black, 42-year old is your leader? Hold a press conference twice a week. Get on talk shows. Ask residents to ride transit. If the press likes you, give them more of your time.

By the way, most of the media like transit agencies. Few agencies really take full advantage of their ability to generate news stories about whatever the agency draws attention to. If no one at your agency is responsible for generating media in order to build community support for transit *and* get more riders, then your agency is missing out a huge opportunity. Always, always tell voters and taxpayers that transit makes their community stronger, wealthier and healthier and that more riders are in everyone’s interest. 

I wish Wells all the best and hope he takes the columnists’ advice.

This New York Times article explains it:

The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders. Only 27 percent use the train for work, according to its operator, compared with 60 percent of other public transit users on average nationwide.

In some part thanks to the new system, downtown Phoenix appears to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise economically pummeled city

…

In the first quarter of 2009, downtown Phoenix saw its revenues increase 13 percent, while the rest of the city saw a fall of 16 percent

What’s the lesson for other cities? Run more weekend service! The cost of running trains more frequently will be dwarfed by the business activity of all those riders going to enjoy the downtown attractions.

Valley Metro (the Phoenix operator) is running Saturday trains every 15-20 minutes from 5 in the morning until 3 at night (check out their schedule).

That’s what every transit agency that serves downtown ought to be doing: run the trains every 15 minutes all day and night Saturday and Sunday. Cities are changing. They are now destinations on the weekends. Transit agencies need to adjust.

u txt. we drive.

For a picture of the ad, check out Metro Magazine’s story on the topic.

The page itself is called “Google Apps (Spread the Word)” because the data-obsessed people at Google understand that asking your users to recruit another customer is the cheapest way to get more customers. 

There is a lesson here for transit agency leaders.

We need to get more riders. And certainly when tax revenue is declining, the operating budget must be balanced and service cuts is the usual blunt tool used to balance the budget, riders are ready to hear a call to help avoid the service they use by recruiting more riders.

It’s a movement (in Google’s words). Ask your riders to “join the movement” and get more riders.

How much does it cost you? Nothing! No ads. No commercials. Just your website and then your statements as the agency leader at meetings when you are likely to earn media attention. 

Then you can put up internal signs on the buses. Put an article in your rider newsletter. Include a slogan on the timetables. Spread the word about the movement to get more riders.

And what are our tools that riders can use to recruit other riders? Good maps and good timetables, easily downloadable and sharable. These are core functions of any agency that should be produced anyway.

Finally, include a story about how if they recruit more riders, they are helping to avoid cuts to their service. That’s the “movement” that you are asking riders to join — the movement of sustaining transit service to strengthen their community that they probably didn’t understand they were already a part of every time they chose to ride. 

There are tens of thousands of volunteer salespeople riding the bus every day. Put them to work. Ask them to spread the word.

I switched publishers to MagCloud from Lulu, for those interested in the print-on-demand marketplace. The More Riders page is here and I’ll put back issues up eventually. (One nice surprise: we were featured on the front page of MagCloud just now, presumably because people have been visiting the page from our @MoreRiders twitter feed – so please check out the new MagCloud page!)

The 7 (New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco) combined make up the bulk of transit ridership in the nation and thus provide the bulk of economic benefits from transit. That means investments in these transit networks derive disproportionate benefits, especially because they are so underinvested in currently. $50 billion! That’s a lot of money.

That’s also an opportunity to unite the riders and drivers of those regions in a national campaign. Investing in these 7 largest transit networks is a huge opportunity for economic growth — sustained economic growth for decades to bring them to a state of good repair — and we should be organizing and mobilizing riders and beneficiaries of these networks to make the case for a major investment in transit.

I’ve been posting more frequently on twitter than on this blog….you can follow all of the public transportation posts here:

@MoreRiders

Some of our colleagues are also on twitter — follow them as well for good insight:

@AaronAntrim

@RyanBarton

One lesson I’ve learned from following transit agencies and their twitter feeds: each route should have its own twitter account for delays, as posting delays about any route on the entire system makes for way too much static. It’s another indication that most riders interact with the agency by their particular route or two, not by the entire system, so communications and marketing should be designed around the route, not the agency.

According to a new report by the American Public Transportation Association, 30,000 jobs (besides better public transportation).

That comes out to one new job for every $33,333 in spending. Not bad at all, as economic development projects go.

The rate of jobs to dollars goes up if operating dollars and not capital dollars are included.

We’re facing high unemployment. Public transportation is a good method to increase employment and should be compared to other job-creating investments (like corporate tax cuts, personal tax cuts, corporate incentives and highway construction). I suspect we’ll do much better on a cost-per-job basis.

And these transit networks need $50 billion to get to a state of good repair.

That’s the conclusion of a report that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and 11 others asked the Federal Transit Administration to conduct on the federal Rail Modernization Program.

What does this mean? It means that federal taxpayers ought to come up with $50 billion over the next four or five years in a stimulus program for transit to get tens of thousands of people to work improving transit.

And it also means that there ought to be a coalition of agencies, advocates and riders from those seven cities to push for an investment in our economic future.

President Barack Obama’s New Foundation to deliver economic prosperity (fueled not by asset bubbles but by solid, sustainable infrastructure investments) will rely on modern transit. We need to help make the public case for a $50 billion invest in these seven agencies — in addition to all of the other investments in transit that generate positive economic returns — for a more prosperous, sustainable economy that taxpayers will enjoy.

Look for news articles over the next few days on this topic, and more importantly, look to see who will show public leadership to build the case for a $50 billion investment into the nation’s most important transit networks.

One of the ways agencies drift away towards customer-centric (or rider-centric) behavior is with language.

Jarrett Walker writes in his blog that agencies should drop the very “transfer” and replace it with “connect.”

So while to transfer invites associations with freight, such as laborious effort, to connectinvites associations that are liberating and enabling — at least to my ear.  Our professional and social connections represent possibilities that enrich our lives: to be well-connected is to have more choices, more opportunities, more freedom.  The underlying image comes from electricity and communications: things that seem to move without weight or effort but whose effect is to enlighten or liberate. 

When a third-rate bus or streetcar dumps me out on a barren street corner at the end of its line, and the driver tells me to go wait at that vandalized bus shelter on the freeway offramp, that’s transferring, and it’s hell.  But when I arrive in a lively urban place where trains/buses/ferries are leaving to any of a number of interesting destinations, a place that feels like the center of my city, a place that will provide many ways to use my waiting time if I have to wait, that’s what I call a connection.  And that’s what we should be offering.

He’s right. Transit agency leaders should embrace this (free) method of orienting the company towards the rider and not the operators.