The Bay Bridge in San Francisco was closed for nearly a week due to the collapse of a steel beam and two tie rods. During the closure, the ridership on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system increased dramatically to record levels. So, now BART is studying ridership data and feedback from new and infrequent riders, in hopes of attracting them to take public transit on a regular basis.
According to the BART’s website:
On Wednesday, the first full day of the emergency bridge closure, BART began an online survey aimed at finding out more about those reasons. The survey will close at the end of business Tuesday, Nov. 3, so if you used BART during the bridge closure, there’s still time to submit your feedback.
Around 1,500 people responded to the survey, which was posted on the homepage of BART’s website and promoted through social web channels including @SFBART on Twitter, the SFBART blog and Facebook fan page. Although anyone could take the survey, analysis will focus on the responses from first-time or infrequent riders.
Preliminary Results
Suggestions given in verbatim, open-ended comments for what would get people to ride BART more frequently included: expanding service, improving parking availability at stations, making machines easier to use, ensuring announcements and signage are clear, keeping trains clean and providing more police presence. BART will dig deeper into the statistical data from questions about trip origins, destinations and frequency.
Carbon Savings
Getting more people out of their cars and onto trains is good not only for BART, but also for reducing environmental impacts of highway congestion, he said. For example, during the first two full days of the bridge closure on Wednesday and Thursday, BART estimated that riders took 163,000 extra BART trips. If they had driven vehicles for those trips, the trips would have resulted in about 1.8 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
Technology has been cited as one possible solution for increasing ridership amongst choice riders (choice riders are those that have multiple alternatives to travel). Studies of the OneBusAway system, for example, have shown that real-time information about city bus arrivals/departures, can increase the number of rides that people take (though it’s yet unclear whether OneBusAway increases rides amongst choice riders). The BART webpage also links to a variety of iPhone and other mobile phone apps for the BART.
