An Evaluation of Promotional Tactics and Utility Measurement Methods for Public Transportation Systems

This report summarizes work in the third year of a research program that has sought to build on community-researched transportation needs and measure the impact of various marketing strategies for public transportation under carefully controlled conditions. The first part of the report focuses on the promotion of public transportation. It includes a survey of relevant communications and marketing literature, the research hypotheses that were deemed relevant, the methodology used to test alternative promotional tactics, and the results of interpretation of the findings for promotion for public transportation. The second part focuses on recent advances in methods for quantifying preference levels for various product and service features of transportation modes. Similarly, it reviews the relevant literature, presents the methodology whereby alternative measurement methods may be applied to evaluate attributes of transportation systems in the study area, and reports the findings concerning the usefulness of the methods tried as well as recommendations for transit planning and future research in the problem area.