One word to describe yourself: Passionate
Alma Mater: Northwestern University
Fast fact about yourself: I have gained a reputation as “the girl with the SunRunner tattoo.”
What’s your best experience on transit and what made it memorable? In college, I regularly rode the Chicago Transit Authority to get into the city for internships and entertainment. There was one particularly warm summer evening where I was coming home on the Red Line and the very crowded train got stuck for a while. Someone pulled out a guitar and started playing music to pass the time, then another student on the train (who I did not know) started tap dancing and pulling up people to dance with him. Before long, the full car was singing along to Disney songs and several people were dancing. When the train started again, everyone applauded and hugged. It was such a lovely moment and little slice of the best of humanity—it could have very easily been everyone just sitting on their phones or getting annoyed, but instead it was just an unexpected moment of joy. I still have some of the videos I took that evening.
Amanda Baird joined PSTA as the marketing manager in 2021. She was promoted to senior marketing manager in July of 2023, and when the director of the department left that fall, she was selected for her current role as director of the marketing and communications department. Colleagues share that Baird continuously looks for more responsibility and ways to advance promotional efforts for the agency’s new initiatives.
When Baird joined PSTA, she brought experience from working at private advertising agencies, implementing key innovations and advancements to PSTA’s marketing and promotional activities. For instance, she established a comprehensive brand guideline and introduced digital advertising and data management techniques to track marketing success.
Baird’s drive, combined with her prior experience, allowed her to jump head first into helping implement PSTA’s SunRunner Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service. PSTA was one year out from launching the service when Baird joined the team. Almost immediately, she had a huge impact on the branding and design of the first rapid transit of any kind in the Tampa Bay region. Her efforts to brand and market the SunRunner BRT service as public transit bringing value to the community has paid off.
Four years later, the SunRunner is beloved by the community, meeting its ridership goals and becoming a signature element of the city of St. Petersburg, Fla. In 2024, PSTA and the SunRunner project won the American Public Transportation Association’s (APTA) Excellence in Inclusive Collaboration Award along with the external project partners. More recently, a briefing on the service during a City Council meeting received a standing ovation and many appreciative speeches showing the value the community sees in investing in public transit improvements.
Following the success of the campaign for the SunRunner, she led her team to develop a UPASS partnership with a neighborhood association, advancing what has normally been a program for universities and schools to an entire neighborhood adjacent to the BRT service. She has since taken on the responsibility to advance the second rapid transit service, the Spark, and developed successful promotional campaigns for the new airport shuttle and ferry boat operation.
She remains committed to her professional growth and industry involvement. This summer, she will participate in a weeklong program at the Leadership Development Institute at Eckerd College focused on advancing her already strong departmental leadership skills. She currently chairs the Florida Public Transit Association Marketing Committee and oversees the statewide award program. She also served on a committee overseeing a statewide transit marketing initiative. She has presented at the 2025 APTA Marketing Conference, the APTA Marketing & Communications Conference and helped mentor the agency's internal Leadership PSTA class members.
Is there a specific experience that led you to where you are today?
My formal education is actually in film, television and creative writing, so that’s where my career started. My first “real” job was working for a nonprofit local TV station in Atlanta, which did not have a marketing or communications person. I absorbed all digital marketing, branding and advertising duties on top of my normal production duties. That’s where I fell in love with communications and marketing. I was able to make the connection between my storytelling skills and brand development and product marketing.
When I came to PSTA, I honed those skills over time while working at marketing, branding and advertising agencies. I was totally new to the world of transit but quickly fell in love! I’ve always been drawn to mission-driven work, and PSTA’s mission of safely connecting people to places serves a critical role in our community.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
I love that I get to constantly challenge myself professionally, and the work I do has a direct positive impact on the city and county I live in and love. Being able to do work that directly shapes the way people live is infinitely rewarding. We have a great team, and we’re all working together toward the same goal.
As a marketer and comms professional, I love that working at PSTA gives me the best of both worlds. Often, we’re forced to choose between being able to dive deep while working in-house with one company or enjoying the fast pace and opportunities for innovative thinking at an agency. Working at PSTA lets me deep dive and become an expert on all things public transit in my community while constantly tackling new challenges as we launch or improve our programs and services.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
At a core level, my job is that of a translator—taking “transit speak” and making it relevant to our stakeholders, riders and the general public. Working with some of the most brilliant technical experts in the business often requires me to tell them to hit pause and literally spell things out for me, so I can effectively explain what the project is, how it’s going to benefit our riders and why it matters. This might be funny to the planners reading this—keeping track of all the acronyms thrown around in transit makes my head spin.
What is the accomplishment you’re most proud of and why?
The launch of the SunRunner in October 2022 was, by far, the highlight of my career so far. This route was the first of its kind for Central Florida, and when I joined the team in 2021, I immediately dove feet first into marketing, advertising and public education for the project. The project had over one million rides in its first year and has become embedded in the DNA of St. Petersburg.
People who had never set foot on a bus in their lives were extremely excited to ride the SunRunner. A lot of that success and positive sentiment specifically came from the work done by my team and I in the branding and advertising of the service. That brand design and marketing strategy went on to win the 2024 APTA Excellence in Collaboration award, which was a shared win between my PSTA team, Jones Worley and H.W. Lochner.
To me, the SunRunner is so much more than a bus route. It’s a love letter to the city’s past, present and future. It travels between downtown and the beaches, a corridor that historically was home to a streetcar route, is currently populated by some of the city’s coolest neighborhoods and destinations and has a brilliant future of new development on the horizon. The vehicle design includes “Mr. Sun,” who has a long history as a tourism mascot for the city dating back to the 1940s, and now he graces the side of the SunRunner buses to continue welcoming people to St. Petersburg. I’m so proud of this project and the story it tells that I actually got a tattoo of the same Mr. Sun image on the project’s opening day!
What is an accomplishment you would like to work towards in your career?
I want to make my community a place my children are proud to call home and build a community where car travel and transit are equally attractive and convenient. That comes both from the behind-the-scenes work of nurturing community relationships to secure funding for improved service and new projects, as well as building consumer trust and increasing ridership.
What is your best advice/tip/best practice you can share from your area of expertise?
Working in transit communications and marketing, you have to be able to find the balance of technical transit knowledge and marketing savvy. It’s all about being able to tell a story you want people to remember and act on and doing so with enough knowledge and authority to back up your message. Develop relationships across the organization and try to speak to people on their terms. Do your best to know a little bit about everything and don’t be afraid to ask questions when you don’t know. The most important question you can ask, and must not be afraid to ask, is “why?” Because if you don’t know the “why” behind any new initiative, you can’t expect your audience to care.
About the Author
Megan Perrero
Editor in Chief
Megan Perrero is a national award-winning B2B journalist and lover of all things transit. Currently, she is the Editor in Chief of Mass Transit magazine, where she develops and leads a multi-channel editorial strategy while reporting on the North American public transit industry.
Prior to her position with Mass Transit, Perrero was the senior communications and external relations specialist for the Shared-Use Mobility Center, where she was responsible for helping develop internal/external communications, plan the National Shared Mobility Summit and manage brand strategy and marketing campaigns.
Perrero serves as the board secretary for Latinos In Transit and is a member of the American Public Transportation Association Marketing and Communications Committee. She holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism with a concentration in magazine writing and a minor in public relations from Columbia College Chicago.