The beginning...

To begin this proposal, I would like to begin with a small exercise. This proposal will be full of
graphs and information, but lets start from our own perspectives. Imagine transportation. How
does one get to work? To school? To grandmas house? Now, I would like to make an informal,
non-enforceable wager with my audience of 10 dollars that three modes of transportation were
thought of in a specific order. A car (most likely in a traffic jam), a school bus, and a long,
desolate passage amidst pine trees. If I was correct, my bank account information will be listed
later for payment. Now my subject at hand happens to be the WTA bus system. Does anyone
understand the issue here?

So whats the problem?

For those of us who need things spelled out for them, Im happy to hold a hand in need. The
issue here is that nobody thought of public buses. Yes, we thought of school buses, but those are
the free engines that get minors to a place they dont want to be in the first place. At the end of
the day, and dont tell my mother the bus driver Im writing this, school buses are no more than
prison ships rounding up victims for their daily torture. What Im really talking about here are
the public buses. The cost efficient, environmentally friendly, social hotspot encompassing the
definition of a bus. Although that string of positive qualities obviously isnt enough for people
because nobody rides the freakin things. With information gathered by the United States Census
Bureau, in 2013 less than 5% of people rode the bus. Specifically in Whatcom County that
number is as low as 3%. So if these pavement-dwelling monsters are so good, why dont we use
them?

My answer for this query is simply this-- Nobody cares. I have been grumbling about this for so
long trying to come up with other answers. Is it the speed at which they travel? No, riding the
bus seems to be almost as fast as driving with maybe a miniscule difference between the two, not
noticeable enough to force 80% of the population another direction. Was it the cleanliness of the
buses? No, at least not in Whatcom as the buses sparkle more than a twinkle in someones teeth
during a Colgate commercial. Perhaps it was the cost? Well we all know thats wrong especially
for college students because we get a free bus pass. For others though it is still obviously more
cost inefficient to drive as one must pay for gas, parking, car maintenance, insurance, and other
mishaps that may force one to break the seal on their wallet. The only answer that makes a
modicum of sense is that nobody gives a damn.
And why should they give a damn? What about the bus is so special? How about the fact that
carbon emissions are reduced directly by each passenger who chooses to ride the bus over drive
their own vehicle. Or maybe the stimulating of public transit revenue which distributes benefits
heavily to the lower-class opposed to buying a brand new car and spending much more of each
passenger's money to line the pockets of the already incredibly wealthy. Or maybe the reduction
in daily commutes for every resident of a given city by reducing the amount of vehicles on the
road. I dont believe it is an open argument whether riding the bus is more beneficial, and I
would like to close the argument as to whether it would greatly benefit us all as a whole. It
definitely would help our society and we need to figure out how to make more Americans ride
the bus.

And the answer is-So how exactly would we fix this problem? How does one make people care about a system they
are heavily informed about (Im under a heavy assumption that everyone understands that buses
are at least equal to driving when it comes to environmentally friendly and much better price
wise) and they simply choose to ignore. Instead of asking why people dont ride the bus, lets
start with who doesnt ride the bus. Although I could not dig up any information on how people
are geographically affected by public transportation, a safe assertion is that those of us in rural
areas are less saturated with the iron-clad people eaters opposed to metropolitan areas. I did
however find data from 2009-2010 Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA)
showing that the peak demographic for transit riders are females between the age of 15-19.

As the article states, people tend to use buses less as they grow older, rather than more. So why
do teenagers (both male and female) ride the bus more often than anyone else, and why is that
number still only at 25%? The best reasoning would be a lack of vehicle access. The beginning
of the VISTA article shows heavy correlation between the lack of available motor vehicles and
the rise in public transit usage. This translates well into our second set of demographic. Our
information above shows no substantial difference between gender, so lets look for a moment at
ethnicity.

There is an interesting research paper by Mark Garrett and Brian Taylor of UCLA that bluntly
addresses the topic of minorities on public transit. They found that public forms of transportation
rose in usage by minorities in the year 1995 more than three times their previous amount in 1977.
Obviously this spike is enormous and it happened around the time more and more Americans
could afford personal vehicles. Although they were more accessible, they were still only
accessible to those with some form of disposable income, in other words, those above the
poverty line. So why exactly are more minorities riding the bus than white Americans?

This question is answered in a sad, but very simple way-- socio-economic status. According to
the U.S census bureau, even though they make up less than 30% of the population, African
Americans and Latinos make up more than 55% of Americans below the poverty line. Now
where are we when we ask the question Who rides the bus?. Young adults and Americans of a
lower socio-economic status. But this could also easily be linked to necessity, so how do we get
people who dont need to, want to ride the bus. My course of action-- marketing.

Get gains; avoid losses

Look for a moment at how Cheerios became the top selling cereal brand in America. They
marketed their product. Cheerios commercials have a uniqueness to them that sets them one step
ahead of their competition. Add in a recognizable brand and an overall quality product that is
both tasty and healthy for us, and we have a perfect cereal. Now apply that same theory to our

four-wheeled waiting rooms. If we take a product that is overall good for people and the
environment around it, add in a unique style to it, and top it off with an iconic brand, we have a
better way of getting to where were going.
Obviously the way Im spelling it out should pay to a huge benefit, If we could up each
demographic by 5% this would stimulate bus revenue by nearly 1/3rd and reduce the number of
cars on the road by approximately 3 - 4%. Imagine if other companies used marketing to
generate a 5% turnout in each demographic. They would be blown away by how terrible the
marketing was. 5% isnt a great outcome, unless were talking about a heavily underutilized
system, in which case it is huge. Take those numbers up to 50% and bus drivers will have to roll
a red carpet out just to walk to their brand new lamborghinis.
When speaking environmentally, this push would be huge. Looking at our graphs from the US
census bureau, roughly 80% of Americans drive alone to work. The average bus can
accommodate upwards of 40 passengers depending on the size. This directly reduces the number
of cars on the road from 40-1 if not higher. I dont need to be a statistics professor at M.I.T to say
that that ratio is spectacular. It almost seems like a no-brainer to increase the marketing for our
public transit systems.
Quantifying the costs however is slightly unpredictable. Obviously there is money behind
marketing. Renting out billboard space or producing commercials costs big bucks. The larger
issue at hand is that there is no real data proving that marketing works. Unless we survey each
person who steps onto the bus about why they did so (which would be more counter-productive
than beneficial) we cant really find out how many people viewed marketing as an effective
scheme. Although no quantifiable data is possible to find, we can take a moment to learn from
the thousands of people who run marketing for highly profitable companies. These people dump
millions of dollars into marketing anything from a new type of basketball to a political candidate.
These people also arent stupid. They put money into something they view will give them a
return. I have enough trust in greed-filled rich people to blindly follow their lead when it comes
to making money.

Fin
Were five pages into an in-depth look on why nobody cares about buses. If everything Ive
stated has no effect, I dont know what else to say. Not only is riding the bus cost efficient and
environmentally friendly, it provides a good social environment, a relatively fast mode of travel,
and an overall favorable travel experience. It is within all of our best interests to convince as
many people as we can to use this system. We do this by marketing buses as a wonderful mode
of transportation, better than driving a car, better than walking, and much better than those
backwoods paths through pine forests on the way to grandmas house. To some, riding the bus

may seem like a way of the past, but that is objectively untrue. Riding the bus is as modern as
any other form of transportation, and its time we started treating it not like the way of the past,
but the way of the future.

Those helpful guys

Below Ive listed all of the articles and research I used in this proposal (other than the proof that
Cheerios is the top cereal brand). This information was retrieved just through google searches of
generic phrases mostly found in the URLs of the articles and some meticulous sifting through
layers of cat videos and reddit threads.
http://flowingdata.com/2015/01/20/how-americans-get-to-work/
http://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2014/acs-32.pdf
http://chartingtransport.com/2012/06/24/what-sorts-of-people-use-public-transport-parttwo/
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2012/07/race-class-and-stigma-riding-bus-america/2510/
http://uctc.net/research/papers/701.pdf
https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf