Marketing of Public Transport and Public Transport Information Provision

Abstract

Increasing levels of car ownership have been causing problems for the governments around the world, particularly in the fields of traffic congestion and air pollution. Income growth coupled with the perception that car is the most comfortable means of transport resulted in the increase of motor vehicles on the roads and in certain cases this increase is hard to handle. Besides general growth in the number of cars on the roads, there is also an issue of their major concentration on a limited territory: in urban areas, which nowadays are poles of attraction for migration flows.A number of measures has been introduced to restrain car use in urban areas, including parking fees, licenses on car ownership (the case of Beijing), restrictions on circulation in certain hours or zones, etc. However, since mobility is crucial for normal functioning of a city, these measures, in spite of being quite successful, should be coupled with favoring alternative means of transport, such as cycling, walking or public transport.Compared to the image of owning a private vehicle, the image of using public transport is relatively poor. As a result of marketing efforts of car industry, car is now considered to be one of the most comfortable and fast means of transport and is always associated with notions like “freedom” or “control”, even though these notions do not necessarily reflect the mode of car use in a congested city.Taking this into consideration, it seems important to develop marketing of public transport in order to improve the overall i mage associated to it, restrain current users from switching to the use of private vehicles and attract new users. There has been a number of initiatives in this area which prove that marketing of public transport can be indeed a way of fostering its use.Public transport information provision is another important factor that can favor people to use public transportation modes. Often potential users are repelled by the lack and/or complexity of information about routes and timetables, so providing them with easily accessible, trustful sources which show relevant information can attract the clients. Besides, with technical progress and widespread use of the Internet, there are much more means of information dissemination available to public transport companies. Using them in a coherent way may gradually increase the level of trust in a company and thus foster people to rely on public transportation modes.