Bus Priority Lanes - Social Media

Target Audience: The target audiences for this campaign were current Metro riders, potential riders and countywide residents more broadly. Many of the riders within the corridor are transit-dependent and low-income and need access to reliable and speedy transit service on a daily basis. The campaign aimed to promote awareness of the lanes and their benefits among county residents in order to bolster support for the implementation of future lanes. Finally, it aimed to educate drivers along the corridors to avoid parking in the lanes.?

Strategy Objective:Our campaign strategy was to visually showcase the bus lanes' transformative impact of accelerated bus speeds, increased frequency and improved reliability. To achieve this, we created a total of six videos to announce the lane openings, illustrate their efficiency, and educate drivers not to park in the lanes, all with a strategic approach that leveraged social trends as well as humor to boost reach and engagement. We utilized short-form video not only because it is the most effective way to show evidence of bus lanes' efficacy but also based on our social analytics, which show that short-form video content above all other formats tends to be shown to high numbers of non-followers. By taking advantage of this algorithmic tendency, we were able to reach a far larger audience.

Situation Challenge: All too often, Metro buses are stuck in congested traffic, reducing their reliability and speed. Metro operates these buses but does not have jurisdiction over the roads; therefore, in order to develop a more efficient bus system for the county, we partnered with the Mayor's Office, LADOT, and the City of Los Angeles' Bus Speed Engineering Working Group to restructure the county's entire bus network with quick-build bus priority lanes. But in order to continue implementing these lanes across the county, we need to garner public support. Thus, we launched a social media campaign to demonstrate the benefits of bus lanes to all road users with secondary objectives on awareness and education to not park in the lanes.

Results Impact: In total, our social media campaign racked up close to 2 million organic impressions across Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok.? It also received thousands of mostly positive comments.

Why Submit: "The best advertisement for public transportation is seeing a bus whoosh past lines of cars stuck in traffic," said an editorial in the L.A. Times, in an apparent reference to videos we posted to our social channels of buses doing exactly that. In a region known as the car capital of the world, swapping out "car" lanes for transit lanes is never without controversy. Our approach to show instead of tell demonstrates that bus lanes can help all road users move more efficiently. Furthermore, the posts received thousands of engagements (likes, shares, saves), illustrating that the content may have positively influenced sentiment around the issue.