S.F. BART interview: Making the web, social media, and the developer community work for transit
San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) provides approximately 375,000 passenger trips every day. Since BART operates in the S.F. Bay Area region, just north of Silicon Valley, these passengers include many technologically creative and demanding people.
BART has often led the transit industry in their understanding, use of, and experimentation with online and mobile media. For example, BART responded to rider needs and the opportunities of their unique market by communicating through online social media, releasing schedule and arrival data in open formats, and reaching out to third-party software developers.
The agency was recently recognized by the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association with a 2009 “Excellence in Digital Marketing” Award. BART’s open data initiatives were featured in an Atlantic Monthly article on “iGovernment” in Winter 2009.
I was honored to have the opportunity to ask BART’s web team, Timothy Moore and Melissa Jordan, about lessons they’ve learned and successful strategies and tactics for transit websites.
Update (19 June 2009): A pretty PDF version of this interview as it will appear in More Riders Magazine is now available.
Aaron Antrim: Hi Tim and Melissa. Thanks for agreeing to participate in this interview and share your work and insights with us. First of all, I want to compliment you both on the new BART website; it’s really beautiful. The BART website looks different from a lot of other transit websites that I’ve seen. One thing I am curious about is what happened to the BART train on the home page?
Tim Moore: That’s a good question. I think it’s really common for transit agencies to put shiny equipment or put a cool destination where there’s some borrowed influence and good visuals front-and-center, but the bart.gov redesign was a very user-centered exercise where everything was about the customer, including the front-page visuals. We’re literally putting customers front and center, and even using a lot of authentic rider-contributed images. In fact, a lot of the images that we’re using are licensed under creative commons, directly from Flickr. We’re using them all over the site, particularly in the “Stations” section, because using these real images adds a level of authenticity and reality to the presentation.
