The urban mobility ecosystem is evolving as more shared mobility services enter the market along with a whole range of technology convenience enablers that are making journeys easier to plan, navigate and pay.
In order to better understand the impact these new services and technologies are having on people’s mobility habits, Masabi decided to survey more than 1,000 US residents, with access to public transit, in order to understand how they use transportation services, with particular emphasis on their view of public transit and why they choose one mode over another.
We also asked about their attitudes towards the quality of public transit services and what tangible changes transit agencies have and can make in order to attract riders to their services.
Private car ownership is still prevalent, but it doesn’t need to be
While many studies have touted the decline in ridership numbers to the likes of ridesharing companies, our survey found that the opposite is likely true, and the biggest competition public transit faces is by far private car ownership with almost 70 percent of people surveyed driving themselves on at least a weekly basis.
Congestion is one of the biggest threats to our future cities, and private car ownership is the main cause behind it. People must be incentivized to choose a shared resource like public transit over driving themselves in order to reduce traffic and pollution that plagues many downtowns. This is, of course, easier said than done, but our data starts to get to the crux of what might encourage people to give up their cars - or at least reduce their use.
Respondents resoundingly chose convenience as their top motivator for riding public transit, beating out price, travel time and even necessity. A full third of our respondents selected it as their primary reason for riding, which is over 10 percentage points higher than the next ranked choice (cost). While this means that public transit agencies are vulnerable to losing riders to more convenient options, it also means that even minor improvements in convenience can boost ridership numbers.
What are these convenience boosters and which did respondents indicate would have the biggest impact on boosting ridership?
We asked that as well, and the responses from monthly riders - those who are likely driving a personal car or using another option on a regular basis, but have shown a willingness to use public transit - prove that minor improvements can make a big impact. Almost 35% of monthly riders said bus or subway tracking via an app would cause them to ride more frequently, the highest ranked improvement. Mobile ticketing, an app that combines multiple transit options and longer service hours were also prioritized by riders.
These ‘convenience enablers’ are interesting not only because they’d instantly boost convenience, but also because they mimic features available already in ridesharing apps. In other words, for public transit to compete in today’s world of hyper-convenience for consumers, it must adopt the same features that people expect from other mobility services.
Ridesharing is a friend, not a foe
The survey also produced a number of results surrounding ridesharing, with the overarching theme that public transit should see ridesharing as friends, rather than foes. If convenience is the number one factor that people want from public transit, then it means that they are really looking for the easiest and smoothest journey to their destination. Riders are not, for the most part, loyal or restricted to a particular mode of transit, and would likely give up their cars if there was an option that was convenient, more reliable, more affordable and gave them a full door to door experience.
For this reason, public transit should seek to partner with ridesharing and bike sharing companies to help enable full first-last mile journeys. In fact many riders are already combining the use of public transit and ridesharing. Our report found that 35 percent of people with access to public transit are already doing this on at least an occasional basis, with 7 percent combining them on a weekly basis. If cities partnered with ridesharing to make this process even easier, those numbers would likely increase and congestion in cities would drop as more riders switched over to high-occupancy public transit and shared mobility options.
There is a perception that ridesharing is moving some people away from public transit and while this may be the case in some places in the short term, ultimately shared private transit services and public transit complement each other, as shown by the fact that 95 percent of weekly rideshare users ride public transit services, while only 20% of weekly drivers do so.
The future is positive for public transit
Overall, the survey results point to a positive future for public transit. Many headlines make it seem like public transit quality in the US is declining, but rider perceptions do not match this sentiment. We found that 32% of people think their local transit options are improving, while only 19% of all respondents say the quality of their local transit is declining - the remainder believe it is staying the same.
While we are still in an age dominated by private car ownership in North America, we are starting to see a shift toward connected multimodal journeys, which will only get more pronounced. One of the key messages from the survey is that convenience is crucial to riders when selecting to use a mode of transport, and especially to riders who use public transit infrequently. But with the right technology convenience enablers, investment in services and public/private partnerships, agencies can not only survive, but thrive, helping to reduce congestion, pollution and create more liveable cities of the future.
By bringing all of these things together, adding in open data, regular services and the ability of an agency to effectually control and prioritise transit resources and you have a viable alternative to private car ownership and the start of a Mobility-as-a-Service offering, which will only get more attractive to citizens with the availability of more on-demand services and autonomous vehicles.
The Mobility-as-a-Service movement is a huge opportunity for transit agencies and places the agency at the center of connected mobility within a city.
