Welcome ACT Members!

So, if even half of the people who promised to check out my website during the Association for Commuter Transportation conference in Atlanta this past week, then I might even crash the server (not likely).  Am hoping to greet new visitors, here.  I think there’s a lot to talk about, and I am honestly more interested in the conversation that I am in the business opportunity of the blog.

I thought it was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in years.  I’ll be writing more about it in coming days (my son begins 5th grade tomorrow, so I need to get some sleep.  But I will say that after more than 20 years of ACT conferences, I realize the value of long term, professional relationships.  As the principal of my newly formed company, I was able to call upon long-time consultants, large and small firms as well as individually owned companies, and program operators to give me advice, encouragement, and, of course, hope for the future.  I certainly got the message that its going to a slow road to full federal funding and program implementation, but the support I got from my professional colleagues was invaluable.

Conferences are great places to learn new things.  But its the people you meet and make a point to get to know and stay in touch with who make this organization and this industry very special.  Its a business of partnerships of all  kinds, and those need to be based on positive relationships.  I had the privilege of spending time with quality people this week, and feel great about it.  I hope many of you had a similar experience. 

More to come (if I think of something) on the conference.

Hold’em if you’ve got’em

Okay, I know that’s not the way the saying goes, but it is the point of this post.  We’ve seen increases in public transit ridership, carpooling and vanpooling over the last 6 months or so that we would otherwise get with (really, really good) marketing and a whole lot of aggressive outreach to commuters, employers, and anyone else we could find.

So the mantra that I am encouraging my clients to adopt is RETAIN CURRENT CUSTOMERS.  We’ve all heard the standard “its less expensive to keep a rider than to get a new one.”  Well guys, we’ve got them now.  The baselines have risen in double digits for some operators. 

So when you all sit down to plan your fall marketing plans, remember that you’ve been given a gift, albeit at the cost of higher gas prices and hardship for many people.  Let’s hope these new converts are content with their new commute.  Or are they ways we can make them even happier?  This is the windfall we fantasized about (at work, I mean).  A shift from changing behavior to rewarding behavior and improving capacity and service could be a challenge for some systems, who may have had their 2009 marketing plans cast in stone before gas prices began to rise.  Cast that stone aside–ill-placed bible reference, I know–and make 2009 the year of innovation in developing strategies to retain riders.  At the end of the year you’ll be much further ahead than you would have been if you’d played it straight.

We’re All in this Together

Anyone with a child under the age of 13 is now humming the song of the above title from High School Musical.  I know I am.  Sorry about that.

I recently attended an APTA meeting on state transportation partnerships, and was struck by the collaborative nature of everyone at the meeting.  No, there was not a group hug at the end between the highway, rail and bus folks but if I had known them all better I might have started one.

They all point out that with reauthorization (again? are there any acronyms left?) a mere 18 months away, this is the time to be forging our partnerships and not fighting each other for the scraps on the table.  The transportation system is critical to our economic, social and political growth.  It is at the heart of our success as a nation (well, that and that document called the Constitution).  The panelists all pointed toward a transportation system that covered everything from airports to vanpools, with everything (including highway and bridges) in between. 

One particularly interesting session for me was the one on Mobility Management.  As a Transportation Demand Management professional for most of my career, we had always used that term to describe what we do for commuters and able-bodied individuals.  Guess what.  The rest of the transportation industry uses that term for what we would consider paratransit.

But a colleague of mine from Connecticut DOT pointed out that mobility management is actually mobility solutions management.  That’s the core of what we do.  We provide transportation solutions for people who need to travel from point A to point B.  It doesn’t matter whether they do it via rail, bus, carpool, paratransit, bicycle, or eliminate the trip altogether via teleworking.  We provide solutions.  The buses need good roads to travel on.  The highway system is critical to move goods and people, particularly in areas not currently served by transit.  But providing solutions without regard to mode or territory is the best we can do for the people who rely on us to get to work, school, medical appointments, and maybe, when they’re done with all of that, to go out and have a little fun.

Have we missed the bus?

As I pulled into the normally mobbed Costco gasoline station the other day, I stared with horror at the price sign–$3.99  (and 99/100 of a cent) per gallon for regular.

I know, for most that would be a welcome sign.  Finally, gasoline below $4 a gallon.  But as an industry that has been searching for way to get people into bus, train, subway, carpools, vanpools, telework, bicycling and walking*, is our great opportunity just about ready to pass us by?  Have the people who have tried MARTA in Atlanta enjoyed it so much that they are going to continue (and did they get a parking space at the station I hope?).  Did all those people who tried the bus for the first time get a seat, a comfortable ride and arrive at their destination on time?  Are newly formed carpoolers bonding for life or secretly resenting that they have to share the ride?

I worry about this.  The increases in ridership didn’t have too much to do with the efforts of highly professional, skilled TDM professionals or brilliant advertising campaigns (but if only I’d had one out on the street at the right time…..).  It was $4 gas.  What this experience has shown me is that there is a huge discretionary market for alternative transportation–higher than I think anyone in their wildest dreams ever expected.  We interact with the captive market and the super long commutes and the people who are fed up with traffic and maybe want to save a little.  There’s a little bit of “last resort” in all of that.  But with $4 gas, these new riders suddenly saw our alternatives as a viable and maybe even attractive option.  Did we do enough to make their experience enjoyable? Of course we want every rider, transit dependent or discretionary rider, to have the same excellent experience when they use BTSCVTW (call me lazy–my son and three friends are out back on the trampoline and probably are in need of some adult supervision because its all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out; my mom used to say that all the time). 

I know that transit operators, TMAs and others work very hard to make the travelers’ experience as easy as possible.  We should keep that as a top priority and maybe concentrate on incentives to maintain some of these new riders for a while rather than spend marketing dollars on attracting new ones.  We will never, ever attract as many as $4 gas did.  Let’s hold on to a few of them.

I don’t want people to have to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline.  That’s not my point.  I know it hurts people.  Heck, it hurts me since I made a knee jerk boneheaded decision to buy a Mercury Mariner SUV last year–I’m a single mom with one son, sure he’s got sports stuff but that’s what trunks are for. 20 miles per gallon. And I have to put a flag decal on the back so I can distinguish it from all the other silver SUVs in the Target parking lot. Seriously.

But when the price of gas goes down, as it most likely will, I want to be sure we keep those new riders.  It’ll cost a lot more to get a new rider to keep one–if I didn’t hear cries of pain coming from backyard I would do a search and look up that number, but I know it exists.  That’s a real big shift in how we think about marketing.  Retention has always been mentioned but never really taken seriously.  Now’s the time to pay attention to all of our BTSCVTW’s.

*I propose an industry standard acronym for that since I’m tired of writing it out.  So here goes: BTSCVTW.  Not perfect.  Any transit modes that start with vowels?