Transit stories: How hearing about others’ experiences impacts transit use and satisfaction

To reduce the environmental footprint of urban transportation, it is important to understand mechanisms that can help or hinder the transition to more sustainable travel behavior. Prior research on social influence suggests that the influence of people in one’s social network may be one such mechanism. This may be why researchers and public transportation agencies alike have focused on encouraging transit users to recommend service to others as part of efforts to increase ridership in transit systems. However, there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy, and while those in our social networks often share stories with us about their experiences using transit, the impact of these stories on our own willingness to use transit has not yet been explored. Our research is the first to evaluate how hearing about someone else’s transit experience influences one’s own willingness to use transit. Using survey data from N = 291 transit riders in the central Ohio region, we investigate the influences of others’ transit experiences and one’s own transit experiences on future transit use intentions. We also examine the roles of experience valence (positivity vs. negativity), transit experience forecast, and predicted transit use satisfaction in this relationship. Through a series of sequential mediation models, we show that hearing about someone’s (good or bad) transit experience affects a traveler’s own forecasts of how pleasant their transit experience will be, which in turn influences their predicted satisfaction with transit, and ultimately, their intentions to use transit. The models replicate using the traveler’s own experiences. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.