Formed in 1957, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is a public transit rail system that serves the San Francisco Peninsula, East Bay, and South Bay. Its network operates in five counties and includes 131 miles of track, 50 stations, and support for 405,000 trips on an average weekday.
In 2021, Civic Edge was selected as part of a team of consultants to lead communications and community engagement for BART Metro 2030 and Beyond, a study to evaluate future service ideas as part of planned or underway upgrades.
For the BART Metro 2030 and Beyond study, the Civic Edge team supported two robust rounds of public engagement to gain insights about BART users’ service preferences that would inform BART’s strategies around forecasted future regional travel demand, especially as travel patterns change post-pandemic. Civic Edge helped develop community surveys and outreach strategies for two rounds of outreach for the study, the first identifying current travel needs, priorities, and feedback for potential future service scenarios. This feedback was assessed to create new future BART service concepts, which were presented to the community through a second survey developed by our team.
Tasked with assisting the implementation of a community survey, Civic Edge developed and delivered an outreach plan that helped BART Metro 2030 receive almost triple the survey responses they initially aimed for. Our team played a key role in each step of the survey development, promotional outreach, and reporting for the study by drafting and designing materials, conducting over 40 hours of in-person outreach, and drafting of a robust summary report with survey results and crosstabs.
After designing BART service maps that were used in the survey, as well as the palm card used for in-person survey promotion, the BART team asked for additional design support for study’s final reporting documents. Our graphic designer helped beautify the design for the study’s final Briefing Book and created over 30 unique graphics of BART service maps and scenario evaluation charts by translating raw data from technical reports into coherent visualizations.