Chapter 37: Marketing Public Transport

This chapter provides an overview of marketing strategies aimed at increasing public transport ridership. We start from the premise that marketing is a broad concept; it encompasses any policy or strategy intended to change individual behavior, in this case convincing more people to use public transport more frequently.

Increasing transit ridership has become ever more challenging, as rising real per capita income and decentralization of metropolitan areas make the private vehicle ever more attractive. These trends not only make public transport a less suitable substitute for the car, but, as ridership declines, subsidies must increase to maintain the level of service. Governments typically respond by reducing service and raising fares, setting off a cycle of decline. In the USA, these trends led to the near demise of the public transport industry in the 1960s. Since then, massive investment and subsidies resulted in a bottoming out in the 1970s, and modest increases in ridership since. More recently, 2002 was the first year in which transit ridership increased more rapidly than the population. In European metropolitan areas, public transport has retained a larger market share, and in cities where public transport is of particularly high quality (e.g. Zurich or Munich) significant increases in market share have occurred (Transportation Research Board, 2001).