U.S. TRANSIT WEBSITES STATUS AND POTENTIAL

Two major goals of marketing for transit are to attract ridership to transit and to encourage riders of rail transit to also ride buses. In support of these goals, transit agencies develop a variety of print media, as well as customer service phone numbers, and more recently web sites. This paper describes the current status of transit web sites in the United States, discusses issues contributing to the poor quality of many sites, and identifies steps for improvement. The paper draws on the results of research including several reviews and rankings of transit, traffic and multimodal web sites, the development and testing of draft usability guidelines for transit web sites, and discussions and interviews with transit agency management and staff in conjunction with these projects. These projects were and are being conducted for the United States Department of Transportation, Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, Federal Highway Administration, and Federal Transit Administration.