Transit Week, Day 1: TranspoCamp

It’s a new year and what better way to start it off with a week of great transportation events! Starting today through Jan. 27, I will be reporting from Washington D.C. for what I’ve declared “Transit Week”. Things are off to a great start – I spent today going through a quasi-social media/marketing/outreach boot camp at Open Plans’ Transportation Camp, held at the School Without Walls at George Washington University. The so-called “un-conference” brought in not just transportation professionals, but tech gurus, local transit riders from the D.C. area, and students to name a few to discuss (among several topics):

• the use of social media by transit agencies
• improving the rider experience on public transit
• methods to improve outreach methods to the public
• collecting and using data for planning and operations
• mobile transit apps for mobile use

Topics were suggested by participants that morning on-site and then Transpo camp staff created a schedule of all sessions for the day. The un-conference method really gave the impression that there is both a desire to see more work done towards improving the experience of taking public transit and the use of social media tools to enhance the public’s perception of transit.

My first AM session hosted by social media gurus Meghan Makoid (@mamakoid), Andy Palanisamy (@transportgooru) and others reviewed the usefulness of generating hashtags via Twitter to get users to share their positive experiences using transit. #transitmemory asks for people to tell a 140 story about a good experience, #TranspoHaiku allows for creative verse and #transitpickuplines…is self-explanatory! The #TranspoHaiku was particularly sucessful – even Ray LaHood couldn’t resist making one (note: he was not at the event). Attendees were asked to come up with their own, my earnest stab at creative writing is below:

traffic is no fun | why drive when you can subway | get there quick today

After lunch, Editor-in-Chief David Alpert (in the photo above) and Assistant Editor Matt Johnson from Greater Greater Washington led a session on the use of blogging in advocating transit campaigns that re-energized me to keep improving this blog. Alpert opened with 5 things blogs can do well:  inspire, inform, organize, coordinate, and critique. Take a look at GGW‘s site and you will see that Alpert and Johnson do all five very well for the Greater Washington D.C. metro area.

Out of all Big takeaways from TranspoCamp, the biggest one is that the use of social media is growing rapidly – both within the transit realm and beyond BUT tansit agencies have been slow to test out Twitter and other social media tools. What implication this may have is readily apparent, as the general feedback found on sites like Facebook and Twitter is negative towards public transit systems. Furthermore, individuals employed by transit agencies feel pressure or are prohibited from being (too) openly outspoken about their employers – thankfully some have created their own internet presence absent of their daily work lives and shared their successes and frustrations in their efforts to get agencies to embrace social media at TranspoCamp.

Tomorrow is a first for me: heading over to Wooley Park for the start of the Transportation Research Board’s 91st Annual Meeting. If there is any organization that has analyzed the relationship between social media and transportation with great care, it would be TRB! Will be posting (hopefully) on-site at the convention center during sessions, wi-fi and computer battery life pending…