Infrastructure Money Tight? Do Better Bus Marketing

Posted on March 6, 2015     Leave a Comment

Cross posted on http://www.MobilityLab.org on March 6, 2015.

If cities want to reduce the need for expensive infrastructure improvements, they should brand and market their buses better, according to New York Times conservative commentator Josh Barro.

Citing a 2009 report from the Federal Transit Administration, he notes there is evidence to believe that transit agencies could attract more discretionary or choice riders if they “spruce up the buses and tell riders they’re faster than they think.”

This resonates with our experience in Arlington, Virginia, and in other progressive communities around the country.

To be sure, there is no substitute for offering high-quality bus or rail transit service, but many transit agencies skimp when it comes to marketing, outreach, and education and, as a result, the public often has no idea how good the service may actually be. Buses also have an image problem in many communities, which proper marketing could help address. Witness the huge sums spent by automakers in crafting the image of their automobiles.

Our experience in Arlington shows that transit agencies could indeed gain ridership if they did a better job on marketing basics, we call it “Making It Easy,” including:

• branding buses better,
• spending time to do good marketing and sales,
• puting information at the stops, and
• providing great real-time apps and other information tools.

We should do these relatively inexpensive things first, to maximize the use of the existing system and possibly forestall having to invest large sums in additional infrastructure.

In Arlington, our Commuter Services bureau markets all modes of transportation through a variety of means. Our research shows this marketing causes a substantial lift in transit usage as well as a shift from driving to other modes. In concert with good development planning and transportation services, our efforts provide better mobility without more traffic, at a relatively insubstantial cost as compared to infrastructure.

Barro contends that we should spruce up buses and let consumers know they are faster than you think. This isn’t a bad start.

In Arlington we’ve worked on some other ideas as well.

• We are developing a technology product called CarFreeAtoZ that will combat the car bias inherent in most current mapping software systems, and produce travel results more akin to real-world conditions across multiple modes.
• We’ve had success marketing the Metrobus 38B as the “Orange Line with a view,” and our Car-Free Diet marketing platform emphasizes how letting someone else behind the wheel can alleviate stress, among other things.
• We’ve worked on distinctive, colorful branding on our ART series of buses. (The same technique has been utilized on Washington D.C.’s successful Circulator buses.)
• And last but not least, we’ve taken deliberate action in improving the customer service provided by bus drivers. Our most recent survey shows that we’re succeeding, not only in terms of customer satisfaction, but, significantly, in terms of the numbers of Millennials using the service.

Yes, we need to think deliberately about the way we market buses in this country. And we can’t skimp on these efforts. If conservative writers like Barro can get on board with this concept, that’s good news.

Flying Cars Instead of Bikes? Let’s Talk Real Solutions. Now.

Posted on October 23, 2014     Leave a Comment

I really enjoyed this week’s “Fix My Commute,” the inaugural forum in the Washington Post’s America Answers series.

It was a first-class event that brought together a fascinating array of national experts and progressive mayors focused on solving the problems of increasing traffic congestion.

And while it was acknowledged again and again that our infrastructure is often operating at third-world levels, one major way to “fix” our commutes was sorely missing from the conversation.

Transportation demand management (TDM) is the “people” side of the equation to infrastructure’s “operational” or supply side. TDM is about coming up with multimodal transportation strategies that successfully change the mindsets of people and how they think about their commuting habits.

That said, among the event takeaways for me, from a TDM perspective, include:

• The bureau I lead, Arlington County Commuter Services (ACCS), is uniquely poised to take advantage of the converging meta-opportunities of increasing urbanism and less space with which to accommodate vehicles. In other words, we are well positioned to help our community and add value through our many programs and initiatives like Arlington Transportation Partners and BikeArlington, to name just two.
• The action and innovation in transportation is taking place at the local level, not at the state or national levels. We are lucky that, at ACCS, we operate in the space where we can help individuals, local businesses, and neighborhoods.
• The new normal in the transportation field is one of choice and options. Multi-modal is in. Uni-modal (in other words, the car) is out.1 Think about it: most of our trips incorporate something like walk to Metro or to bus and walk, or Uber to bikeshare to walk. And then something different on the return trip. Many people agreed at the conference that the new role of city government is “mobility management.”
• Providing choices to consumers depends on infrastructure and technology. While the private sector is innovating in some terrific ways, America’s infrastructure is failing. Vice-President Joe Biden was the most impassioned speaker on this topic, saying, “It’s just not acceptable that the greatest nation in the world does not have, across-the-board, the single most sophisticated infrastructure in the entire world.”
• While TDM was largely absent from the conversation, a few people did try to make the conversation about people. Open data was discussed as a means to provide information about transportation choices. What we know in ACCS is that building and providing options isn’t enough. To get the most efficiency out of our transportation infrastructure (at a time when this is most important), we need to make it easy for people to make the choice to use transit, to bike, to walk, or to share a ride. There’s a big opportunity through our Mobility Lab to get TDM included in the conversation as a proven solution to these issues.
• Emily Badger’s wonderful five-minute talk on “The War on Cars” notwithstanding, I thought the event missed the boat on the promise of biking as a way to improve our cities. There was more time on flying cars than on bikes. With 40 percent of trips less than two miles, biking can be a solution. Especially if we build more protected bike lanes and bike parking. Much more work needs to be done here.

I came away from “Fix My Commute” energized and feeling lucky to be working in a field, in a place, and at a time when what we do is building strength on the national agenda. Cutting-edge, affordable TDM programs can play a supporting role in helping our nation get a grip on our many infrastructure ailments.1

We look forward to more chances to make that case and give TDM its due respect.

Photo by Paul Goddin of Mobility Lab

Cross-posted on Mobility Lab October 23, 2014

Demand Side Strategies Are Secret to Arlington’s Success

Posted on July 7, 2014     Leave a Comment

Cross posted at http://www.MobilityLab.org on July 7, 2014

Two recent headlines really sum it up nicely for Arlington County, Virginia.

As Arlington Booms, Traffic Drops was written by Canaan Merchant in Greater Greater Washington and The Suburb of the Future is Here – How one city avoided the worst of suburbanization and revealed the path toward sustainable urban development was by Henry Grabar in Salon.

They highlight Arlington’s ability to remake itself – in little more than a generation – from an aging suburban bedroom community into a thriving urban place that has grown by tens of thousands of residents and workers. All the while, auto-traffic and congestion have been kept at bay because people have adopted transit, walking, and biking as a way of life.

Both stories discuss how Arlington’s well-documented smart-growth planning strategies – that have provided for mixed-use (jobs and residents) densification along its transit corridors and an ongoing investment in transit-walk-bike infrastructure – have resulted in growth, prosperity, and less traffic.

The lesser-known part of this good story is the TDM (transportation demand management) strategies that my bureau, Arlington County Commuter Services, has provided over the last 20 years. These have helped ensure that people use the place the way the planners intended. And the ACCS programs that have truly done the work include:

• Arlington’s Car-Free Diet
• BikeArlington
• WalkArlington
• The Commuter Stores
• CommuterDirect.com
• Arlington Transportation Partners
• TDM for Site Plans, and
• Mobility Lab.

Research shows Arlington gets greater utility out of its transportation system because of this collective TDM effort. ACCS programs remove more than 40,000 single-occupant vehicle trips per day from the D.C. region’s roads by shifting them to other modes. For a comparison of scale, consider that I-395 and I-66 carry a combined total of 37,000 passenger vehicles in eight inbound lanes during the three-hour morning rush period.

Arlington has committed to TDM on a scale that is almost un-matched in North America. And this commitment leverages the investment in planning and infrastructure by creating greater efficiency in that system.

It’s the smart-growth/land-use planning, the investment in transportation infrastructure,and the TDM strategies of ACCS that altogether create the transportation success propelling Arlington, Virginia’s story of transformation into such a great and prosperous community.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen

I-66 Doesn’t Need More Lanes Or Expensive Infrastructure

Posted on July 3, 2014     Leave a Comment

Yes, Virginia Interstate 66 is a mess. Commuters are right to decry the congestion along this stretch of interstate, where travel times from Northern Virginia into D.C. are the longest in the region.

But reports from Dr. Gridlock in the Washington Post that the state and federal governments are considering plans to add additional lanes onto I-66 are not only maddening, but they fly in the face of everything we’ve learned about induced demand.

With years of evidence to back it up, induced demand was defined beautifully in a recent story in Wired, which explained that because “increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more … the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless.”

In other words, it’s impossible to build ourselves out of congestion because the roads themselves cause traffic.

While the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT’s) plan to implement “Active Traffic Demand” along the interstate is a better plan, VDOT’s request for proposals from private corporations indicates that the agency is also considering large, engineering- and infrastructure-intensive solutions to I-66’s problems.

Instead, why not entertain these much cheaper (and probably more reliable) solutions:transportation demand management (TDM) and use of high-occupancy vehicle lanes?

VDOT has been very good at congestion management when it has done big projects. Think back to the Mixing Bowl project, the Wilson Bridge Project, and the Mega Projects. VDOT pours money into transportation management programs (TMPs) that are designed to communicate about the problem and encourage people to share the ride, use transit, or avoid the area at peak times.

Yet at the end of each project, VDOT packs up its bag of tricks and leaves thinking that the job is done. Imagine if the kind of intensive effort VDOT gives as projects unfold were also applied to a corridor day in and day out, year after year. Could results be achieved? I think so. VDOT could spend $5 million to $10 million per year – not a lot for the agency – and do some really sophisticated TDM marketing and incentives.

VDOT could work with employers in D.C., Arlington, and Fairfax. It could promote carpooling and transit. It could provide incentives. It could provide real-time vanpool and commuter bus information. This stuff works. We’ve proven it in Arlington.

One could couple these TDM programs with HOV-3 both ways during the rush and HOV-2 at all other times to ensure that road use on I-66 is maximized. Getting the best use out of the existing facility (demand management) is what VDOT should concentrate on, not continually trying to increase the supply. It doesn’t work.

HOV-3 and TDM will work, will be more cost efficient, and are better long-term solutions for everyone.

Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation

Cross posted on http://www.MobilityLab.org on July 3, 2014