BRT Education Video Series

Target Audience: Primary target: Atlanta transit riders, stakeholders, and elected officials who may be skeptical of supporting bus rapid transit projects. Secondary target: Audiences of featured BRT transit systems in other cities.

Strategy Objective:We needed to break the stigma around BRT by showing how it has successfully delivered improvements to other communities in other cities. We partnered with other APTA-member transit systems to create in-depth video content about their BRT lines, including interviews with their project staff, community stakeholders, riders, and some elected officials. We focused on three cities to get a wide range of communities and types of BRT systems: San Francisco, Houston, and Indianapolis. We set out to show that BRT does indeed deliver reliable service with rail-like features while also enabling pedestrian corridor improvements and spurring economic development. Eventually, we even took our elected leaders to see BRT in action while capturing their favorable reactions on video.

Situation Challenge: MARTA announced earlier this year that several planned capital expansion corridors would be built with bus rapid transit instead of rail. This led to significant backlash from the public and some elected officials. We knew we needed a BRT education campaign to arm our supporters with facts and information. Since BRT doesn't yet exist in Atlanta, we needed to show how it's working successfully in other cities. We searched for, but did not find, any existing video content that shows how BRT delivers rail-like service and features, so we set out to create it.

Results Impact: We launched the videos as they were created – starting in July and lasting through December of 2022. Engagement levels were higher than usual on these video social posts, with numerous comments and questions. While there certainly remained opposition from those who are fans of trains, the videos provided critical content to push back on false narratives. Eventually, MARTA hosted several trip with Atlanta-area elected officials so that they could ride these BRT systems. This led to the Clayton County Commission unanimously supporting BRT for the SR-54 corridor, which was previously slated to be a rail project. Once convinced, our elected officials told us that they needed support to sell it to the public and we were ready with our video series. Full campaign: www.itsmarta.com/brt.aspx

Why Submit: This video series is a good example of collaboration between APTA members and how video content can be created that is mutually beneficial to multiple transit systems. There is no branding on these videos since authentic messages work best – and seeing real testimonials from other cities helps our Atlanta audience see what is working elsewhere. The lack of branding also allows both transit systems to use the same video content for each their communications needs. We have also created a spreadsheet with unique links to various clips by topic so that others may easily pick select videos from the full series. The transit industry is embracing BRT, but public education has previously lagged. We hope this series can help the industry to move forward with better informed public support.