Mass Transit Needs a Moving Message

[dougskiles]

This article discusses something that I felt we ultimately need to move transit forward in Jacksonville - a public relations campaign.

http://www.indystar.com/article/20110623/NEWS19/106230378/Smith-Mass-transit-needs-moving-message?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CIndyStar.com

An excerpt:

What transit advocates in St. Louis pulled off last year is simply amazing.

Voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase to restore bus service, which was slashed a year earlier, and to expand the MetroLink light rail service and bus rapid transit farther into the suburbs. The tax generates about $75 million a year in St. Louis County.

Keep in mind, voters agreed to this during a recession and after killing plans for a similar tax increase in 2008.

How did transit supporters do it?

The short answer is they made it a community issue. They made transit relevant to everyone -- rich and poor; white, black and Latino; urbanites and suburbanites; people who ride the bus every day and people who have never ridden it and probably never will.

The brilliant campaign slogan was: "Some of us ride it. All of us need it."

That phrase capped humorous radio ads that featured a man interviewing random Metro bus riders. One played for the attendees of this week's conference went something like this:

Interviewer: "You ride the bus every day. What do you do?"

Rider: "I'm a nurse."

Interviewer: "What would happen if I got hurt and went to the hospital, and you couldn't get to work?"

Rider: "You'd die."

Extreme (and, I think, hilarious), yes. But it gets the message across. If other people can't get to work, your life, no matter who you are, will be affected.

That's an important point to remember in Indianapolis, where most of the people who ride IndyGo buses are working-class folks who don't have a car. They're waiters, baristas, clerks at grocery stores and drugstores, FedEx employees and, yes, nurses.

Put that way, people in St. Louis began to see things differently. They began to view it as an economic development issue, which is an angle the business-sector-led Central Indiana Transit Task Force has been pushing since last year.

"It's what kind of region do you want to live in? What do you want our region to be in the future?" said John Nations, president of Metro Transit and a champion of the 2010 campaign in St. Louis. "It's very important to tie the vision of transit to something bigger than moving people on a bus down a road. It's about empowering people to live independent lives."

Nations even has a comeback for those who complain they're tired of paying for things that others use but they don't.

"When is the last time you used the fire department?" Nations said he would ask those voters. "Should we cut funding for them, too?"

This speaks to a larger point.

[Ocklawaha]

Great points Doug. Stressing the diversity of people that ride the JTA system wouldn't hurt us either. Not only does the average Jaxson consider JTA to be the ride of the poor, JTA itself spends a great amount of energy on planning the next poverty route.  They don't seem to understand for choice riders they'll need a choice transit service.

OCKLAWAHA

[danem]

Another good ad would be something like the opening of the movie Office Space, where the old guy on the sidewalk with the walker makes better time than the commuters in the traffic jam.