Respect the Ride

Target Audience: Existing bus and train customers.

Strategy Objective:To call attention to various undesirable customer riding behaviors in a way that was firm yet not scolding. The top vote-getters from the social media campaign were turned into interior bus/train cards, rail platform and bus station advertising and social media ads. The campaign went into market in late 2017 and has remained in market throughout 2018.

Situation Challenge: Metro Transit Customer Relations department pointed out that there had been a recent uptick in disrespectful customer behavior. The marketing team developed a plan for addressing the top concerns by creating a number of visuals built around the theme of "robots behaving badly" and posted them on social media for customers to vote on their most disliked behavior.

Results Impact: The campaign highlighted the top behavior problems and showed customers that Metro Transit is aware of these issues. In the year after the campaign went into market, police complaints about customer behavior on buses dropped from 110 to 96 from the prior year, a nearly 14 percent decrease in reporting.

Why Submit: The Respect the Ride campaign addressed some of our customers' top riding pet peeves in a way that was bold, engaging, fun and was also free from age, gender, race or ethnic references. It subtly showed customers that they weren't alone in having these pet peeves and gently ' but firmly '' reminded all customers of the accepted Code of Conduct.