Nobody Cares About Your Bus Lane

A few years back, I sat in a conference room watching a sharp team of planners and engineers unveil the rendering for a new mobility hub. It was fantastic. Clean lines, integrated transit connections, EV charging, bike share docks, the whole nine yards. The kind of rendering that wins a design award and ends up framed on somebody’s office wall.

The lights came up and there were smiling faces and satisfied nods across the room. Somebody said “exciting.” Someone else asked about the project timeline. Then I leaned forward and asked several questions that, judging by the silence which followed, clearly had not occurred to anyone else.

Who are we building this for? How will they know it exists? And most importantly, will they use it?

You would have thought I asked where babies come from.

I have spent more than two decades in real estate, parking, and mobility. I have managed 22,000 parking spaces. I helped put the first commercial deployment of independent autonomous shuttles onto public streets in an American urban core. I helped build an employee commute program the World Economic Forum recognized in its Corporate Mobility Transport Challenge. I have sat through more planning meetings than I can count. And the single biggest blind spot I see in this business, over and over again, is not a shortage of good infrastructure. Nor is it a shortage of smart engineers or committed planners. It is the quiet assumption that if you build something useful, people will find and use it on their own.

They will not.

And the research is blunt about it. In 2019, marketing researchers Maarten Gijsenberg and Peter Verhoef published a study in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing testing whether promotion actually moves the needle on transit ridership. Their finding, from rigorous time-series analysis, was that firm-initiated marketing actions are useful and effective in fostering public transport usage. Then came the part that should sting. When they went looking for prior work, they found that public policy research within marketing had almost entirely ignored public transport as a subject. A search of their own journal returned zero studies.¹ If the academy was not looking at this, it is not shocking that the industry was not either.

Let me be straight about something first. Building mobility systems and transit-oriented developments is brutally hard work. Getting a rail line from a napkin sketch to a ribbon cutting takes political courage, billions in capital, decades of planning, and an army of people who refuse to quit when the project hits its fifteenth delay. The folks who do that work deserve enormous credit, and I am not here to take a single ounce of that acknowledgment away.

But the job is not finished when the trains start running or bike lanes open.

Our industry has spent decades thinking like engineers and accountants. Build the thing. Price the thing. Optimize the thing. All of that matters. All of it is necessary. None of it is sufficient. The missing piece is not a replacement for infrastructure. It sits on top of it. It is the failure to answer the only question a human being considers when you want them to change a habit. What’s in it for me?

That is not a soft skill that one can easily bolt onto a hard accomplishment. It is the other half of an incredibly difficult challenge. You can build a ten-billion-dollar rail line, and if people do not see why it makes their Tuesday better, you have invested in a very expensive train set. The Federal Transit Administration’s own National RTAP marketing toolkit names the three primary barriers that keep people off transit: a knowledge gap (they do not know the service exists or how to use it), a perception gap (they think transit is not for people like them), and a service gap (it genuinely does not meet their needs). Two of the three are communication problems, and no amount of concrete and steel will span that gap.²

I made this case in “The Generational Skip.” The infrastructure is getting built. Los Angeles Metro has estimated it needs roughly 26 billion dollars in additional funding to deliver its Olympic-adjacent project list on time. The D Line, which most people still call the Purple Line. The K Line. The Regional Connector. Mobility hubs. Bus lanes for days. Incredible work by incredible people. The infrastructure, in other words, is close to inevitable. Whether anyone changes their Tuesday commute behaviors because of those systems is anything but. And behavior change starts with a message that lands.

Running parking operations in Detroit taught me something I see in practice daily across all of the communities and assets we serve through our consulting work. Every single person who walks into one of your facilities carries their own definition of a “good experience.” Some want speed. Get me in, get me out, and don’t make me think about it. Some want value. Give me the cheapest option and I will happily walk the extra block. Some want to feel safe and cared for. Well lit, clean, an attendant at the booth who can help if things go sideways. And some just want to know they are not walking back to a violation notice on the windshield.

Same parking asset. Different customers. Different definitions of a win.

Transportation works exactly the same way. Every individual who might change their commute routine has a different pain they are trying to ease, and a different motivating trigger that will lead to shifting behaviors. For some it is money, a monthly downtown parking permit quietly bleeding their budget. For some it is reclaiming time, the sixty-plus minutes a day stuck in traffic they will never get back. For some it is stress, the white-knuckle freeway merge that is genuinely wearing them down. For some it is freedom, the idea that their teenager can get to soccer practice without either parent moonlighting a personal chauffeur. And for a surprising number of people, the trigger is simply not wanting to deal with parking. That one I happen to know something about.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point in an article where people reach for a study that does not quite say what they need it to. The Tennessee DOT ran a serious experiment on nudging commuters toward mode shift, published in 2024. It tested emotional framing, normative framing, and gain framing, and what it found was that one message outperformed the rest across the whole sample: the health gain. That is a real finding and a useful one. It is not evidence that different messages work for different segments, because the study did not test that.⁷

So let me make the segmentation case from the garage instead, where I have watched it play out for twenty years. The person who wants speed and the person who wants the cheapest space are not responsive to the same pitch, and no amount of insisting will make them so. The same piece of infrastructure delivers different value to different people, and if you only tell one story, you only reach one audience. Worse, if you do not tell any stories about your compelling mobility and transit programs in a publicly accessible manner, you do not reach anyone.

Here is the trap, though. Having five stories in your back pocket does no good if you tell them badly. A confusing benefit is the same as no benefit at all to the person hearing about it. If you cannot put the value in plain language that a real person would use in a real conversation, your work is not finished. You must articulate all of the potential value propositions in relatable ways so that your audience can receive the message. People know what motivates them; you just need to help them receive your message.

Let me put some faces on this using Los Angeles as a backdrop.

Maria works the night shift at a hospital in West LA. She pays $290 a month to park. She’s heard that a new train line is coming, but she does not know when it opens, what it costs to ride, whether it runs during the hours she works, or whether there will be a stop close enough to avoid a long walk home alone after midnight. Every one of those unknowns is a reason to keep paying the $290. Not because the train is bad. Because nobody answered her questions.

Cameron is 24 and lives downtown. He does not want a car. He grew up riding the bus with his mom and has zero hangups about transit. But the last time he tried to reach a friend’s place 12 miles away, it took two transfers and 75 minutes for what a car does in 20. He is not anti-transit. He is anti-hassle. Show him a route that works and he becomes your best ambassador.

Linda is 58, lives in the suburbs, and has driven everywhere for 35 years. She is not changing, and that is fine. But her granddaughter is 14, and the system we build today decides whether that girl grows up thinking a car is a requirement for adulthood or just one option among several. Linda is not our customer. Her granddaughter is. But Linda has to believe the system is safe and reliable before she will let her granddaughter near it.

Marcus flies into LAX twice a month for work. He does not know that the LAX/Metro Transit Center station opened in June 2025, or that reaching it from his terminal still means a shuttle bus until the SkyLink people mover opens, currently targeted for October 2026 after five slipped dates. He has never heard of the K Line. He does not know he could get from the airport to a meeting in Inglewood without ever touching a rental counter. He would love that option. Nobody has told him it exists.

You do not need to know which story will land with which person. You need to tell enough of them, well enough, that the right message finds the right person.

A confusing benefit is the same as no benefit at all.

Kevin Bopp

Here is a question that keeps me up at night. How many people in Los Angeles County can tell you that the D Line will connect downtown to Westwood and UCLA when its final section opens? How many know what the K Line ties together? How many could define a mobility hub if you put them on the spot?

I will be honest with you. I have been doing this for 20 years, and half the time somebody says “mobility hub” I still want to ask them what exactly they mean. If the professionals cannot keep it straight, what chance does the public have?

The evidence that these gaps are real and expensive keeps piling up. AARP surveyed 2,141 San Diego County residents aged 40 and over in May 2025, publishing the results in February 2026. Forty-three percent were completely unaware of the accessible transit services available to them. And here is the number that should straighten every planner’s spine: 72 percent said they would be open to using those services if or when they could no longer use their primary transportation. That condition matters and I am not going to strip it out to make the number sound bigger. But read it plainly and it still says the same thing. The demand was sitting there the whole time, waiting for somebody to say the words out loud.⁸

A study in the Journal of Transport & Health found the same pattern during COVID. Surveying riders and former riders in El Paso, Bian and colleagues found that only 45.7 percent of participants were aware of the safety measures their own agency had put in place, and that more than half of previous riders did not know about them at all. The ones who did know had lower risk perceptions and were likelier to keep riding. The agency had done the work. It just had not told anyone.¹⁰

The flip side shows up fast when agencies do communicate. When Milpitas, California launched its SMART microtransit service in October 2022, it paired the launch with a real multi-channel campaign. RideCo, the vendor, reports installing 250 flyers in high-traffic spots and at bus stops, alongside social media and community outreach, and reports a 60 percent ridership increase that same month against the month prior. Those figures are the vendor’s own and have not been independently audited, which I note because this is an article about measuring things honestly. The service went on to take first place in APTA’s 2024 AdWheel Awards for marketing and communications to increase ridership. The service was solid. The communication is what unlocked the demand.¹¹

I have lived the other side of this, not just studied it. At Bedrock, my parking and mobility team built an employee commute program we called MyCommute, in partnership with Quicken Loans. It did exactly what I keep preaching here. It gathered every commute option into one place, explained each one in plain language, and paid people a small daily incentive to try something other than driving alone, with team members self-reporting their mode to earn it. The World Economic Forum recognized MyCommute in its Corporate Mobility Transport Challenge in 2019, a global search for programs that genuinely move employees toward more sustainable commutes.¹⁶¹⁷

Let me give you the actual numbers rather than the flattering version. Over eight months in 2019, the number of team members logging a non-solo commute grew from about 1,400 to nearly 4,200. It tripled. Non-drive-alone mode share, which is the harder and more meaningful measure, rose 3.5 percent. In Detroit, that is not nothing. We also reclaimed roughly 300 parking spaces in owned properties, which has a dollar value any operator can calculate. We did not earn that recognition by pouring concrete. We earned it by treating awareness and incentive as infrastructure, and the behavior followed.

This is where the comparison to consumer brands earns its keep. Not because a transit agency should behave like a tech company, but because the principle is universal. People need a reason to engage before they will change. Apple does not build an iPhone and hope people notice. It treats the product and the story about the product as two halves of one job. One without the other is unfinished.

Our industry routinely spends billions on infrastructure and pennies on helping people understand why it matters to them. That ratio does not need to flip. It needs balance. And balance is not the job of a communications team working in a silo three floors from the people making decisions. It is the responsibility of planners and industry leaders to become storytellers. Hess and Bitterman surveyed transit branding and marketing across North America in 2016 and came away distinctly unimpressed with how the field compares to other commercial sectors. We are not losing the marketing game by a little. We are barely playing it.⁹

In our working paper on the Olympic transportation legacy, Andrew Sachs and I named a fifth and final test for whether an investment produces lasting change or just a spike during a big event: the behavioral mechanism criterion. The logic is simple. Add infrastructure without shifting the relative cost, convenience, or awareness of the alternatives, and demand drifts right back to where it started. Build a beautiful train, change nothing else, and you get a beautiful train that not enough people ride. The word doing the quiet heavy lifting in that framework is awareness. And in practice, the industry treats it like something the intern handles once the real work is done.¹⁸

Let me address something head on, because I have watched it play out in meeting after meeting. There is a cultural resistance inside the planning and engineering world to the very idea of marketing. Not hostility exactly. More of a quiet dismissal. We build things, we do not sell things, as if communicating value to the public were beneath the work of designing a corridor or running an operation.

I understand the reflex. The word “marketing” carries baggage: slick campaigns, manipulative sales tactics. That is not what I am talking about.

What I am talking about is translation.

The benefits here are real and substantial. Exposed car ownership costs in this country run to $11,577 a year for a new vehicle. The average American commuter loses 63 hours a year sitting in traffic, which the Texas A&M Transportation Institute describes as nearly eight full workdays. Fourteen percent of the land in incorporated Los Angeles County, some 18.6 million spaces, is given over to storing vehicles that sit parked roughly 95 percent of the time. Staggering numbers, all of them. But they live in the language of planners and economists. The nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift is not thinking in vehicle miles traveled. The student choosing between a car payment and next month’s rent is not modeling mode-share elasticity. The retiree who just wants to reach a grandkid’s soccer game without a fight on the freeway does not care about your induced-demand research. They care about their lives. The job is to connect what we build to the lives people actually live, in the words they actually use.¹³¹²¹⁴

The behavioral science backs this up, and it is a little humbling. Most daily travel is habitual and automatic, barely conscious. Verplanken, Aarts, and van Knippenberg found that people with strong travel habits process significantly less information about their alternatives. They are not weighing options every morning. They are on autopilot. You do not interrupt autopilot with a brochure nobody reads. Benjamin Gardner sharpened the point in 2009. What he showed is not that habit beats intention in a fair fight, but something stranger: where travel habits are strong, intention stops predicting behavior at all. The relationship between what people mean to do and what they actually do simply breaks down. Sit with that. Even when people believe transit is the right choice, the habit runs the morning regardless. Good infrastructure does not market itself. The habit of driving is strong enough to render a genuine preference for something better irrelevant at the moment it matters.⁴⁵

I wrote in “The Generational Skip” that habits form around what exists. True. But habits also form around what people believe exists, and a transit option nobody knows about is functionally identical to one that was never built.¹⁹ Perception is infrastructure too.

Every city, operator, and agency is in the business of selling a behavior change, whether they use that word or not. If the framing makes you uncomfortable, I get it. But you are also going to keep wondering why ridership never matches the projection. That gap is not an engineering problem. It is a communication problem.

Perception is infrastructure too.

Kevin Bopp

Now, before anyone accuses me of claiming a clever Instagram campaign can fix American transit, let me flip the coin over.

One side: benefits nobody knows about might as well not exist. Build the best mobility hub in North America, and if the neighborhood around it thinks it is a fancy parking garage with a new sign, then that is precisely what it is. Awareness is the price of admission. Full stop.

The other side: brilliant marketing is worthless if the product does not deliver. Talk somebody into trying transit for the first time, and if their experience is a 45-minute wait, a baffling transfer, a broken fare machine, and a last-mile gap that strands them on a sidewalk with no idea where to go, you have not just lost a customer. You have manufactured an ambassador against your product. They will tell ten friends “I tried the train, never again,” and all ten drift a little further from ever trying it themselves.

Gijsenberg and Verhoef saw a version of this in the data. Satisfaction fell as distance traveled rose, an effect they attribute to capacity constraints rather than something they tested directly. More riders, same service, worse experience for everyone. Their warning to policymakers was direct. You cannot ask an agency to grow demand and satisfaction at the same time without funding the capacity that makes the experience hold up. Marketing that packs trains past their limit is marketing that breeds its own backlash. Word of mouth runs both directions. It builds trust or it burns it, and burned trust takes a very long time to rebuild.¹

Which is why message and experience have to be built together. Not in sequence. Not build it first and tell people later. Together, from the start. The marketing people belong at the table when the route maps are drawn. The operations people belong at the table when the outreach is designed. The story and the product are not two workstreams that meet quarterly to compare notes. They are one workstream.

When I was at Bedrock, the most valuable thing we did was not a new parking technology. It was sitting down with the actual people using our garages and asking what mattered to them, not what we assumed should matter. The answers surprised us more than once, and they changed how we ran the place. That loop between the experience and the way we talked about the experience was the whole ballgame. The same holds at the regional scale. You cannot afford right message and wrong experience, and you cannot afford right experience and no message.

The Transportation Research Board looked hard at this question in TCRP Report 27 back in 1997 and reached a conclusion worth quoting for what it actually says. The researchers found the evidence too thin and too disparate to declare which strategies reliably win, and reported successful and unsuccessful implementations in every category they examined. What they did conclude, unambiguously, is that transit-side strategies alone are insufficient to achieve a large modal shift. Service by itself does not do it. That was the finding nearly thirty years ago, and we have spent most of the intervening time acting as though service by itself would do it.³

Enough philosophy. Here is something you can carry back to the office.

1. Lead With the Individual Benefit, Not the Collective Good

“Save 45 minutes on your commute” beats “reduce VMT” every time. “Keep 200 dollars in your pocket every month” beats “contribute to sustainable urban development.” People are not selfish. They are busy, juggling jobs and kids and rent and a hundred things that feel more urgent than regional transportation policy. Give them a personal win that also happens to advance the collective good, and everybody comes out ahead. Lead with the collective good and ask individuals to sacrifice for it, and you will be waiting a long time.

2. Segment the Audience, and Tell Each Story Clearly

The money pitch lands for some, the time pitch for others, then stress, then freedom, then “your kid can get around without you running a full-time unpaid taxi.” You do not have to choose. You have to tell all of them, and each one has to be specific and concrete. “Save time” is vague. “Get from Westwood to downtown in 22 minutes without touching a steering wheel” is a picture somebody can hold in their head.

3. Make the First Experience Frictionless

You get one shot at a first impression, same as a restaurant or a job interview. When someone tries a new option for the first time, whether during the Olympics or on a random Wednesday, that experience is your marketing. The clean station, the clear wayfinding, the reliable schedule, the easy payment. Every touchpoint is building trust or breaking it. Invest accordingly.

4. Use the Messengers People Actually Trust

An agency running an ad about how great its transit is? Expected. Wallpaper. People tune it out like a car dealer swearing it is the best time to buy. But a coworker saying “I started taking the K Line, I save 150 bucks a month, and I read on the train instead of screaming at traffic”? That changes behavior. Peer networks, employer commute programs, community ambassadors, neighborhood groups. The best marketing for transit does not come from transit. It comes from the people who ride it.

5. Measure Awareness, Not Just Ridership

This one may ruffle feathers, but it needs saying. If nobody knows your service exists, low ridership is not a demand problem, it is a communication problem, and the two call for completely different fixes. You do not solve a communication problem by adding trains. You solve it by asking, honestly, whether the people you mean to serve have any idea what you are offering. Run awareness surveys. Track how people learn about new service. You may find the biggest obstacle to ridership is not the schedule or the price or the route. It may just be that nobody told folks it was there.

Nobody ever changed a habit because of a ribbon cutting.

Kevin Bopp

We are in the middle of the largest investment in American urban mobility in a generation. From the Olympic buildout in Los Angeles to transit expansions across the country, billions of dollars are going into infrastructure built by talented, dedicated people doing genuinely hard and important work. The technology is being deployed. The concrete is being poured. The track is being laid.

The question that will separate the winners from the cautionary tales is not whether we built it. It is whether we helped people understand why it matters to their lives.

I have said it before and I will keep saying it until it sticks. The answer to that question depends as much on the stories we tell as the track we lay. Nobody ever changed a habit because of a ribbon cutting. They changed because somebody showed them a better way to live their Tuesday.

Isn’t “marketing” the wrong word for what a public agency does?

The objection is about baggage, not substance. What this piece describes is translation: connecting what gets built to the lives people actually live, in the words they actually use. The nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift is not thinking in vehicle miles traveled, and the student choosing between a car payment and next month’s rent is not modeling mode-share elasticity. Calling that work marketing makes some planners uncomfortable, but refusing the word does not remove the job.

If the infrastructure is good, why doesn’t it market itself?

Because most daily travel is habitual and barely conscious. Travelers with strong mode habits acquire less information about their alternatives, and where habits are strong, intention stops predicting behavior altogether. That means a genuine preference for something better still loses to the habit at the moment of decision. Good infrastructure does not interrupt autopilot on its own.

What does a communication problem look like, as distinct from a demand problem?

Awareness data separates them. In the AARP survey of San Diego County residents aged 40 and over, 43 percent did not know accessible transit services existed, and 72 percent said they would be open to using them if or when they could no longer use their primary transportation. That is latent demand sitting behind a knowledge gap, and adding service would not have touched it. Measure awareness separately from ridership and low ridership resolves into two different problems with opposite fixes.

Can marketing make things worse?

Yes, in two ways. Packing trains past capacity drives satisfaction down for everyone, which is why growing demand and growing satisfaction cannot be asked of an agency without funding the capacity that holds the experience up. And a bad first experience turns a curious rider into an active detractor who tells ten friends. Message and experience have to be built together, or the message does the damage.

Sources

1. Gijsenberg, M.J. & Verhoef, P.C. (2019). “Moving Forward: The Role of Marketing in Fostering Public Transport Usage.” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 38(3), 354–371.
2. National RTAP. “Transit Marketing Strategies.” Federal Transit Administration / National Rural Transit Assistance Program.
3. Transportation Research Board (1997). TCRP Report 27: Building Transit Ridership: An Exploration of Transit’s Market Share and the Public Policies That Influence It. National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
4. Verplanken, B., Aarts, H. & van Knippenberg, A. (1997). “Habit, Information Acquisition, and the Process of Making Travel Mode Choices.” European Journal of Social Psychology 27(5), 539–560.
5. Gardner, B. (2009). “Modelling Motivation and Habit in Stable Travel Mode Contexts.” Transportation Research Part F 12(1), 68–76.
6. Garcia-Sierra, M., van den Bergh, J.C.J.M. & Miralles-Guasch, C. (2015). “Behavioural Economics, Travel Behaviour and Environmental-Transport Policy.” Transportation Research Part D 41, 288–305.
7. Mishra, S., Golias, M., Brakewood, C. & Aravind, A. (2024). “Influencing Mode Shift through Behavioral Change Strategies.” Tennessee Department of Transportation, Research Report RES 2023-06.
8. Binette, J. (2026). “Accessible Transportation in San Diego: Awareness, Usage & Opportunities.” AARP Research.
9. Hess, D.B. & Bitterman, A. (2016). “Branding and Selling Public Transit in North America: An Analysis of Recent Messages and Methods.” Research in Transportation Business & Management 18, 49–56.
10. Bian, J., Zhong, S., Towne, S.D. Jr., Lee, C., Ory, M.G. & Li, W. (2022). “Perceived Risks of Transit Use During COVID-19: Correlates and Strategies from a Case Study in El Paso, Texas.” Journal of Transport & Health 27, 101491.
11. RideCo / City of Milpitas (2024). “Keys to Driving On-Demand Transit Success: The Impact of Marketing on Ridership.” Vendor case study.
12. Texas A&M Transportation Institute (2025). 2025 Urban Mobility Report (2024 data year).
13. AAA (2025). Your Driving Costs, 2025 Edition.
14. Chester, M., Fraser, A., Matute, J., Flower, C. & Pendyala, R. (2015). “Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint on or Opportunity for Urban Redevelopment?” Journal of the American Planning Association 81(4), 268–286.
15. Shoup, D. (2011). The High Cost of Free Parking, revised edition. APA Planners Press.
16. World Economic Forum (2019). Corporate Mobility Transport Challenge. Geneva.
17. Luum (2020). “Bedrock Detroit Recognized in the World Economic Forum’s Corporate Mobility Transport Challenge.”
18. Sachs, A., Bopp, K. & Ching, F. (2026). “Parking, Transit, and the Olympic Legacy Problem: A Spectacle vs. Service Framework.” Parkonomics working paper.
19. Bopp, K. (2026). “The Generational Skip: Why Urban Planners Should Primarily Focus on Tomorrow’s Commuters for Multimodal Programs Instead of Trying to Convert Today’s Drivers.” Parkonomics.