Understanding How To Motivate Communities To Support And Ride Public Transportation

TCRP Report 122: Understanding How to Motivate Communities to Support and Ride Public Transportation provides a comprehensive discussion on the methods and strategies used by public transportation agencies in the United States and Canada to enhance their public images and motivate the support and use of public transportation. Additionally, the report identifies and describes methods and strategies used by other industries (comparable to public transportation) to enhance their public image and to motivate the support and use of their products and services. Also, this report examines the perceptions, misperceptions, and use of public transit, and the extent to which these affect support. Finally, the report identifies effective communication strategies, campaigns, and platforms for motivating individuals to action in support of public transportation, and it recommends ways to execute those communication strategies, campaigns, and platforms. This report will be helpful to transit agencies; elected officials; community leaders; business leaders; and federal, state, and local funding agencies in both the United States and Canada.

TCRP Report 122: Understanding How to Motivate Communities to Support and Ride Public Transportation provides a comprehensive discussion on the methods and strategies used by public transportation agencies in the United States and Canada to enhance their public images and motivate the support and use of public transportation. Additionally, the report identifies and describes methods and strategies used by other industries (comparable to public transportation) to enhance their public image and to motivate the support and use of their products and services. Also, this report examines the perceptions, misperceptions, and use of public transit, and the extent to which these affect support. Finally, the report identifies effective communication strategies, campaigns, and platforms for motivating individuals to action in support of public transportation, and it recommends ways to execute those communication strategies, campaigns, and platforms. This report will be helpful to transit agencies; elected officials; community leaders; business leaders; and federal, state, and local funding agencies in both the United States and Canada.

Protected areas are at the centre of nature-based tourism, which is increasingly popular across the world. As visitor numbers increase, so does awareness of the harmful effects that large crowds may have on both natural resources and individuals’ recreational experience. This volume considers the challenge of transportation to and within natural and protected areas, the improvement of which has already been recognised as having great potential for mitigating the environmental impacts of ecotourism. While several books have focused considerable attention to the management of protected areas in general, little has been said about the specific issue of sustainable transport, an emerging trend that is already reshaping visitation patterns in natural settings. This book provides current knowledge on issues associated with the transportation of visitors in natural and protected areas, and a comprehensive overview of the technical and strategic options available to tackle these issues. It approaches the subject via three main topics: preferences, or the visitors' attitudes towards transportation; practices, where current approaches are assessed through examples and case-studies of successful experiences and methodologies from around the world; and policies, where suggestions and recommendations are put forward for both local scale strategies and broad-scale regulatory action with global relevance. Contributors include academics in the field of natural resource management and tourism, with extensive experience in protected area management and active partnerships with natural park administrations.

Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of production and service systems. Computational Intelligence Systems find a wide application area in industrial engineering: neural networks in forecasting, fuzzy sets in capital budgeting, ant colony optimization in scheduling, Simulated Annealing in optimization, etc. This book will include most of the application areas of industrial engineering through these computational intelligence systems. In the literature, there is no book including many real and practical applications of Computational Intelligence Systems from the point of view of Industrial Engineering. Every chapter will include explanatory and didactic applications. It is aimed that the book will be a main source for MSc and PhD students.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Synthesis 89: Public Participation Strategies for Transit documents the state-of-the-practice in terms of public participation strategies to inform and engage the public for transit-related activities.

"The development of high-quality, equitable, and accessible public transit systems is a planning challenge that many cities recognize as being a fundamental aspect in the development of socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable communities. Accordingly, many cities and transportation agencies are aiming to develop public transit systems that are competitive with regard to speed, comfort and reliability, in order to retain and attract users to increase overall public transit usage. Nevertheless, regardless of the efforts to stimulate increases in transit mode share, current transit usage in many cities still lags behind the use of personal motorized vehicles and many transit agencies are losing ridership due to a variety of reasons. Therefore, novel strategies are needed to retain existing passengers and attract new users. Accordingly, the goal of this dissertation is to contribute to increasing satisfaction and loyalty among existing transit users. It offers a multifaceted approach to better dissect and understand the drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty among existing transit users, and contributes to expanding knowledge in the field of public transit research by: (1) Deepening the understanding of how improvements to particular service factors and users' image of public transit influence satisfaction and loyalty among different groups of transit users, in order to develop targeted strategies that maximize overall ridership retention; (2) Comprehensively reviewing and clearly redefining the concept of 'loyalty' in public transit in order to allow transit agencies and researchers to measure loyalty in a more valid and reproducible manner, i.e., the re-operationalization of the concept of 'loyalty;' and (3) Developing a methodology for assessing, contrasting and integrating customer satisfaction surveys (i.e., user's perception of service) with operations data (i.e., actual service), which is reproducible and implementable in many regions. Overall, the results of the research can be helpful for transit agencies aiming to develop specific strategies in order to benchmark user satisfaction and loyalty among different groups and maximize overall ridership retention. Insight into how passengers perceive transit services can be useful for helping transit agencies and cities generate better public policy as making improvements to public transit systems is one way to assist in the development of more socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable communities." --