What Advertising Techniques Increase Stated Preference for Microtransit

Abstract:

Microtransit is a form of responsive transit options (e.g., vans, minibuses) that connect transit customers to the main components of the network (e.g., scheduled bus lines, rail). The promise of microtransit in the United States and Canada is that it could connect otherwise disconnected parts of the city (e.g., low density suburbs) to the transit network thereby expanding the transit user base. However, expanding the user base to areas (and people) that traditionally have had a low propensity to use transit involves more than a connecting to the system: It requires effective advertising. We have ran a randomized trial testing the effectiveness of social and personal financial advertising messages. We find that while both are more effective than a baseline ad, the personal financial advertising message is the most effective. To do this, we have expanded the statistical technique proposed in Smith & Wooten (2023) and Smith & Wooten (2024) such that it can be used with survey data with censoring on both the top and bottom box, a common problem in Likert scale data.