Text and email alerts provide one of the best methods to reach transit riders concerning changes in service. And yet there are still many agencies that aren't using them. More mystifying is why some of those who have the alerts do not use them to go directly to riders' devices, even when they have alerts posted on their homepage and/or tracking app.
I decided to look over the text/email alerts performance of peer agencies of Erie Metropolitan Transit Authority (EMTA) (When PennDOT is doing evaluations of PA transit agencies, it uses peer agencies for comparison. PennDOT and EMTA agree on peer agencies used for this comparison).
The
most recent EMTA evaluation I'm aware of is from 2020. That means the pandemic could have changed things after the evaluation. I'm going with what I have available to me.
There were 14 EMTA peer agencies listed in the 2020 evaluation of EMTA. Of those, I found six that offer rider alerts via text and/or email.
I subscribed to alerts offered by all six of those agencies that offered them. I was surprised to find such variation in quality. Obviously, I cannot evaluate them as accurately as if I were a rider living in any of these locales. This is what I observed from my subscriptions to these agencies' alerts:
Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) Text alerts. Knoxville TN Seems to have stopped maintaining the alerts, but their format is still worth checking out. Especially like that previous alerts are archived so that you can pull them up in the event they caused a problem. They apparently have an ongoing workforce shortage, so that may be why text alerts are not being maintained? Worth finding out why.
Below: Recent screenshots of text and email alerts from transit agencies that PennDOT considers "peers" of EMTA.
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| Chatham (CAT) |
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| Chattanooga TN (CARTA) |
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| Duluth (DTA) |
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| Knoxville TN (KAT) |
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| Anchorage (People Mover) |
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| Quad Cities (MetroLINK) |
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