Delays in a public transit system are nearly inevitable – road construction, weather delays, and crashes can slow down a bus or force a detour, sometimes at a moment’s notice.
But delays and detours, whether inevitable or not, negatively impact the rider experience. Delays can force people to stand in the rain or cold for longer, and a detour might mean the stop a person is at won’t be serviced. One way to ameliorate the situation is to keep riders informed of those changes with transit alerts, so they can adjust accordingly.
That’s the exact issue the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) was aiming to solve. The Cincinnati-based transit system was using Twitter to send out rider alerts, but that meant anyone following the account was bombarded with information about routes that they didn’t necessarily care about. In addition, with a seemingly endless stream of tweets about bus reroutes and delays, their timeline made the system look dysfunctional.
They wanted a better way to target riders with up-to-the-minute information on the bus routes that they used, so they did their research and decided to launch Cincy EZAlerts (using the govDelivery solution). Now, when a bus driver runs into an issue, the dispatch center can send email and SMS alerts within minutes to those that have signed up. Thousands of people have registered for the service, and they’re better informed about the most-basic of questions: “Where’s my bus?”
Interested in learning more about how SORTA used govDelivery to keep riders informed? Check out the full success story.
