San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (CA) surveyed its customers about their experience with Foursquare, and 38% of the customers who used the location-based application said it made riding BART “more fun” and 14% said they used BART more often as a result. Foursquare is a mobile application that allows users to broadcast their location (called “checking in”) and accrue points for doing so. BART partnered with Foursquare last fall as a way to increase ridership. These results are encouraging for BART, although the survey also showed that the app did not change the BART experience for 45% of respondents and fully 82% did not ride more (or less) as a result.
Tech Crunch focused on the glass half-empty aspects of the survey, saying that more than half of the people who answered the online survey did not use Foursquare. (This is true, and BART reported findings only for the 446 respondents who used the app.) From Tech Crunch: “The results are interesting. Not really interesting in substance, but interesting in that they seem to mean almost nothing.” So are the findings meaningful for transit agencies? You can download the 10-page survey report and decide for yourself.
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