Google Transit: Some numbers from Missoula, Montana
In June of 2008, Mountain Line transit in Missoula became the first (and still only) agency in Montana to participate in Google Transit. Recently, I reached out to find what kind of ridership increase, if any, they can attribute to Google Transit.
Jordan Hess is a planning student at the University of Montana in Missoula. He has also contracted with Mountain Line to put them on Google Transit and maintain the information. Here’s what he has to say about ridership trends since the Google Transit launch. What stood out to me was that ridership for July of 2008, one month after the Google Transit launched, increased by 31% from July of 2007.
We went live with Google Transit on about June 1st of last year with a rather soft launch (i.e. no immediate press releases, etc.) Our first press coverage was on June 25, with a front page article in the local paper, available at http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/06/25/news/local/news04.txt
In the four months following our initial press coverage of Google Transit, ridership jumped 20.08% from the previous year. As much as I would like to attribute this exclusively to Google Transit, there were other complicating factors. Of course, in 2008, gas prices were climbing so that brought more people onto the bus.
Also, in 2008, a local business sponsored “Fare-Free Fridays;” essentially they paid the cash fare equivalent for every Friday that summer. In 2007, however, there were a number of fare-free days due to poor air quality. We had a terrible forest fire season in 2007, and when air quality drops below a certain threshold from smoke or particulate matter, the county health department subsidizes the fare. I’m trying to look into the total number of fare-free days each summer, as that may have had an effect.
Additionally, in October, the adult cash fare went from $0.85 to $1.00. This seemed to have an effect on ridership as well. For the entire period from July 1 to Feb 28, we had a total ridership increase of about 12.78%, with ridership this winter nearly the same as last winter.
Interestingly, in July, the month immediately following our launch of Google Transit, we had an increase of 31.58% from 2007 to 2008. For the sake of comparison, the month of May saw only a 7.83% increase from 2007 to 2008.
Thanks for the info, Jordan! Does anyone know of other agencies on Google Transit with interesting ridership numbers?
Transit agencies: Have you looked at your website’s statistics lately?
There’s a lot to be learned from looking closely at your website’s visitor statistics. I recommend to my clients that they use Google Analytics to track visitors on their websites because it’s free, easy-to-implement and use, and provides a lot of information (much, much more than I’ll breeze through here).
Recently, I was digging around in the statistics for Redwood Transit System and thought I would share some of the things that stood out (with the manager’s permission, of course).
First, here are redwoodtransit.org visitor statistics for roughly the past year.
73,770 visits is significant traffic for an agency that posts about one-half million boardings per year. If people successfully find the information they are after, each one of those visits would probably result in at least two boardings — one to get there, and another for a return trip.
Note the “bounce rate” — that’s the number of visitors who immediately leave the site because they haven’t found what they are looking for or are at the wrong site. 16% is a low bounce rate. And note that once people are on the site, they stick around, looking at an average of 4.2 pages. Imagine the cost of printing all those 306,555 pages viewed, or answering those questions by phone.
Second, here is an “overlay” that shows the links visitors clicked on.
As I would expect, schedules are, by far, the most popular piece of content on the site. But one thing that stood out at me is number of people that click the button to flip start and end addresses. It looks like this (
). You can’t see it above because it’s obscured by the overlaid visitorship statistic (11%) after (”End”) in the trip planner box.
Anyway, statistics for the number of trips planned using the Google Transit trip planner are not available because trip planning happens off the RTS website, at maps.google.com. But that 11% figure gives a clue. If 11% of people who visit this page click that little button (which I’ve rarely used), then many, many more are clicking the “Get Directions” box without ever clicking the flip start/end address button.
And, don’t forget the people who plan transit trips by going to maps.google.com without ever visiting the RTS website.
Third, here’s a breakdown of the top pages visited on the site.
Note that the Redwood Transit System website includes a feature that shows service schedules by stop. The visitor statics show the relative popularity of these stops online, and, unsurprisingly, their popularity corresponds with the relative instances of boarding/alightings documented in the most Recent Transit Development Plan for Redwood Transit System.
This points to an interesting opportunity. Transit agencies could use logs from trip planners to assess customer needs and wants. That may supplement the picture that comes from demand statistics on existing scheduled routes.
Does anyone know of agencies that do this already? Or want to implement this?
