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?

Product Placements for Good?

Much has been said lately about advertisers’ practice of blending their branded products into the storylines of television programs—Staples for “The Office”, for example (actually a pretty good idea).  They figure that with everyone DVR-ing through their commercials, they need to get the word out somehow.

Its one thing to have a blatant Coca-Cola sponsorship of American Idol (full disclosure: my sister works for Coca-Cola, but it doesn’t mean I get a discount on my Diet Coke).  Even those Ford commercials, though extraordinarily annoying, are at least not fooling anyone but the most sheltered viewer.

I know I was as excited as anyone when “Carpoolers” came on the scene last season.  Anyone know what happened to that show?  Okay, so it didn’t exactly show a realistic view of carpooling, and in some ways brought the image down a peg or two, but it did get the word into the public lexicon and gave us something to talk about for a few months.  Maybe “Vanpoolers” would have given them more story lines—conflict between characters, clandestine romances, medical issues.  Heck, I think its an hour long drama, myself.  Maybe I’ll write it someday.

In the meantime, though, can’t we get some Desperate Housewives onto the LA Metro for a shopping trip? Does Ugly Betty have a good experience on the subway? Can the cast of The Office decide that they can’t take the rising gas prices and take advantage of a company-sponsored vanpool?  Or even Chloe and Courtney fighting for a bus stop in front of their clothing stores on Keeping Up With the Kardashians?   That pretty much exhausts my knowledge of prime time TV (and I happened to catch the Kardashians on The View last week; my son and I normally stick to Deadliest Catch and the Food Channel, although right now he’s watching Wipeout, which is just downright hopeless).

I was on a project team recently where a part of the marketing plan was to have buses roll by with the project logo on them.  I think we can be more creative than that.  Just as driving the latest Escalade helps to define a character so, too, would their use of transit, carpooling or vanpooling.  Watch for “The Real Working Housewives of Westchester County” coming to a network to you soon.  Just kidding.

Who’da thought?

I saw a piece on Fox News Channel this morning that talked about a serious problem being faced by thousands of commuters trying to escape rising gasoline prices–the lack of parking at transit stations.  The report, which did not mention a specific region but identified it as a countrywide program, reassured the audience that the states and municipalities are now looking to expand this parking.

Anyone who works with transit knows what an incredibly oversimplified statement this is.  Are there many plans on the books right now to expand parking significantly in major transit areas?  I know that Connecticut has done its best but is at the mercy of the municipalities who don’t want traffic from out-of-towners clogging their streets.  Many other areas simply have run out of space–and noone wants to build a big nasty garage in a suburban area (although they are coming through on occasion).

And once the parking is in place, can the transit services accommodate the additional passengers?  I know, that certainly depends on the system.  But the irony of cutting transit budgets in states like Florida when riders are flocking to do what millions of dollars have been spent to get them into transit is almost too much to process.  So we are left with carpooling and vanpooling as the only sure-fire methods of helping individuals stop spending their food money on gasoline.  It seems like a missed opportunity to pass this new interest in transit by.  Are states reviewing their transportation budgets to pay more attention to transit and parking? Are we as an industry good enough at marketing vanpooling and carpooling to really have any impact? 

I don’t know the answer, but this is the time our industry has been waiting for, forever.  Not to benefit from the misery of all the families who have no choice but to pay the gasoline for lack of options and inability to accommodate any form of ridesharing–there will always be an ambient level of people who can (or will) not do anything but drive alone to work.  But this is our time, folks.  When gasoline is back down at $3 a gallon and the panic is over, we’ll be kicking ourselves in the butt for letting this opportunity pass us by.  I hope to hear from some readers who can prove me wrong.

Who is leading this charge?

As I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts (which have been read by no one because technically my blog is not operable yet, but I do enjoy reading my own writing and my mom says she likes it but she’s my mom) this is a spectacular point in time where transportation demand management has merged with environmental and energy issues to be top of mind with most of America. 

Who is our spokesperson?

I personally believe Al Gore blew it when (a) he released “An Inconvenient Truth” commercially rather than recruit thousands of people to give free DVDs out in the downtown areas of every city in the country—the people who had to be persuaded.  All the move did in theaters was preach to the converted. And (b) he rejected me (and my friend Jeff) as spokespeople to deliver his speech to other groups, even though  between the two of us we could have brought most of the transportation, municipal, marketing and business leaders in the tri-state area to the table.  He did, however, pick Cameron Diaz.  Okay, she is better looking than me (and much better looking than Jeff).  But is she going to get up in front of 200 Chamber of Commerce suits at a luncheon in White Plains and do the show?  I think not.

We need a powerful, non-partisan champion who is respected and well spoken and can leap a small Rush Limbaugh barb in a single bound.  Not a Hollywood type (though I respect Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio for their efforts, plus that guy from HBO’s Entourage).  Not a politician.  An enlightened business person?  A former president?  A dynamic university president?  And its not a matter of whether you believe the planet is going to be a puddle by the time our kids graduate high school.  Its about how our world works—how things are made, how people get around, how we power our homes, how we feed our people.  Please send suggestions to me via this blog, and I’ll follow them up. And don’t nominate me, I’m way too busy writing my blog, raising my kid, building my consulting practice, that kind of stuff.  Plus (and this I know will get some responses) I think it needs to be a man.  Gotta be practical if we’re keeping our eye on the prize.

WOW!

This is the most exciting time to be in the transportation business, I know since I started in 1985 but maybe even since the invention of the rail car. 

When I first had the idea to start my own consulting practice, I knew I wanted to work in three distinct areas: transportation, environment, and energy.  Since I first had this thought in February, I can drop the “distinct” and see an amazing synergy materializing between the three areas.  Never in my memory have more people been talking about these three issues, and acknowledging their dependence on one another.  Energy with less of an environmental impact is needed in order to power vehicles to allow people to travel.  What a concept.   Who’d have thought that $4.00 gas would have been the tipping point?

Is the Transportation Demand Management industry participating in this minor miracle of mobility, or is it purely market forces at work?  Are we facilitating change, or simply accommodating it? How do we create programs that justify continued funding when folks are flocking to full train station parking lots and forming their own carpools in droves at work, without outside help? What a tremendous opportunity to achieve what we had hoped for decades—liberal use of public transportation, awareness of the cost (and in many cases, the environmental impact) of each vehicle trip, and public sentiment leaning toward long term solutions? Do I dare say a decrease in traffic congestion, too?

Probably the best long-term solution I have heard was presented by Tom Friedman in his May 28, 2008 Opinion Piece in the New York Times titled “Truth or Consequences.”  Friedman creates a mythical presidential candidate who would support energy economist Phillip Verleger Jr.’s “price floor” of $4.00 a gallon for gasoline.  The price would never fall below this point; if it did, the federal gas tax would rise to make up the difference.  Accommodations would be made to ease the burden on lower-income households, car manufacturers would have to consider this new reality in planning their future inventory, and families would have to decide how badly they needed that extra row of seats in the back of the minivan if they knew for sure that the price of gasoline would never fall below $4.00.

What would have to happen to elect such a candidate and give them the support of Congress to make such an idea a reality?  How could the transportation, environmental, and energy advocates help make this happen? This is our once in a lifetime opportunity for change.  How cool to be a part of this.