Ethan Arpi has a very interesting article about a recent surge of marketing the LA mass transit agency is undertaking to try to increase the appeal of their offerings. He says “Metro is doing something that no transit agency in the country has ever done: it’s marketing its products and services as if it were a private company bent on turning a profit.”
There’s a real logic to this since getting people to actually use mass transit has a kind of virtuous circle effect. The way the economics of mass transit work, if a given bus line gets more customers that means lower costs rather than higher costs. Which means it’s more affordable to run the bus more frequently. Which makes it more attractive to riders. Lather, rinse, repeat and you can see why savvy marketing is useful.
That said, it does strike me as something that’s probably primarily useful in a jurisdiction that already has a lot of transit, walking, and transit-oriented development. In a place like DC or Boston or Chicago there are probably a large number of people who are nudgeable into a more transit-oriented lifestyle. In any city, of course, getting objective policy correct is crucial, but I think that’s especially true in a place like Los Angeles. They’ve made a lot of strides in terms of transit availability in recent years, but they need to keep moving on that front, and do things with congestion pricing and land use.
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