Understanding Transit Riders in the Moment: A New Perspective on the Customer Experience
Transit is experienced in real time. So why do we often wait until after the journey to ask riders about their experiences?
Every transit journey is made up of moments that influence how riders perceive the system. Waiting at a stop, transferring between routes, navigating a station, checking for delays, or deciding whether it feels safe to travel after dark can all shape the overall experience. Some moments are positive, while others create frustration, uncertainty, or discomfort.
Traditional customer satisfaction surveys remain essential for understanding transit performance, measuring satisfaction, and tracking changes over time. However, they do not always capture the circumstances and experiences behind those ratings.
This is where in-the-moment research, particularly mobile ethnography, offers transit agencies a different perspective on the customer journey.
Making Research Part of the Journey
Take a look around any bus, train, or transit station, and one thing quickly becomes apparent: people are already using their smartphones.
Riders use their phones to plan journeys, check schedules, communicate with others, access information, or simply pass the time. This everyday behaviour creates a natural opportunity to engage riders in research while they are actually experiencing transit.
Mobile ethnography takes advantage of this familiarity by inviting participants to document their journeys through short diary entries, photos, videos, voice notes, and brief questions delivered through their smartphones.
Rather than asking someone days or weeks later to recall a particular experience, researchers can capture their observations, reactions, and emotions while the experience is still fresh.
Importantly, participation does not necessarily require a lengthy interview or a significant interruption to the journey. Riders can share a quick observation while waiting for a bus, document an issue during a transfer, or reflect on an experience immediately after it happens.
When thoughtfully designed, these activities can be engaging and relatively effortless for participants, while providing researchers with considerably richer contextual information.
Going Beyond What Riders Remember
Traditional telephone and online surveys provide valuable information about satisfaction, perceptions, and service performance. However, when respondents are asked to reflect on previous experiences, their responses inevitably depend on what they remember.
A rider may recall that a journey was frustrating without remembering the specific circumstances that contributed to that feeling. Another may provide a positive overall rating despite encountering several minor challenges along the way.
These smaller moments can be important because they help explain why riders feel the way they do.
In-the-moment ethnography helps bridge this gap by capturing experiences closer to when they occur. In addition to mobile diaries, this research may involve accompanied journeys, observations at transit stops and stations, ride-alongs, and follow-up interviews.
The objective is not to replace traditional surveys, but to complement them with a deeper understanding of the circumstances, behaviours, and decisions that influence the rider experience.
Surveys help us understand what riders think. Ethnographic research helps us understand what they experience and why.
At Pivotal Research, our work with transit agencies has included large-scale customer experience tracking, research into safety and security perceptions, regional transit experiences, and the broader journeys of people using different modes of transportation.
These projects have reinforced an important lesson: the transit experience extends well beyond the time someone spends on a bus or train.
For example, perceptions of safety and security can be influenced by lighting, crowding, the presence of other passengers, station conditions, time of day, and the visibility of transit personnel. A rider may feel comfortable during most of their journey but experience uncertainty while waiting at an unfamiliar stop or transferring between services.
Similarly, regional transit users often experience transportation as a single connected journey rather than as separate transit systems. Their trip may begin in a surrounding municipality, involve a connection to another service, require another transfer, and continue to their final destination.
From the rider’s perspective, the quality of that experience depends on more than individual routes or schedules. Transfer coordination, availability of information, wayfinding, fare payment, and confidence in making connections all contribute to the overall journey.
Research that follows these experiences as they unfold can help agencies identify where riders encounter challenges, how they respond, and which improvements could make the journey more convenient, comfortable, and predictable.
Capturing the Complete Rider Journey
One of the most important advantages of ethnographic research is its ability to examine the journey as a whole.
A transit trip may involve walking or cycling to a stop, checking an app, waiting for service, boarding, transferring, and completing the final portion of the journey. Each stage involves interactions and decisions that influence the customer’s experience.
A traditional satisfaction survey may identify lower ratings for reliability, personal safety, or ease of transfers. In-the-moment research can help determine what is contributing to those ratings.
Is a rider concerned about an actual delay or the uncertainty of not knowing when the next bus will arrive? Is a transfer difficult because of the distance between stops, unclear signage, or insufficient connection time? Does a perception of safety change depending on the environment, time of day, or presence of other passengers?
Understanding these distinctions is important because each issue may require a different response.
This approach can be particularly valuable when studying occasional riders, non-riders, youth, seniors, persons with disabilities, newcomers, and people making multimodal journeys. Their needs, expectations, and experiences can differ significantly from those of frequent transit users.
Turning Rider Experiences into Actionable Insights
The real value of ethnographic research lies not simply in collecting more detailed information, but in using that information to support better decisions.
When combined with quantitative customer experience tracking, ethnographic research provides a more complete understanding of transit performance.
Quantitative research helps agencies measure the prevalence of issues, identify differences between customer groups, monitor trends, and prioritize areas requiring attention.
Ethnographic research adds the context needed to interpret those findings, explore the underlying causes of challenges, and identify practical opportunities for improvement.
Together, these approaches can inform decisions related to service design, customer communication, wayfinding, safety, accessibility, and the overall rider experience.
For transit agencies seeking to attract new riders and retain existing customers, understanding these experiences is increasingly important. Improving the journey requires understanding not only whether riders are satisfied, but what makes a trip feel convenient, reliable, comfortable, and worth repeating.
Continuing the Conversation at CUTA 2026
At this year’s Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) conference, Pivotal Research will be sharing insights into how in-the-moment ethnographic research can strengthen our understanding of transit riders.
Our presentation, “Understanding Transit Riders in the Moment,” will explore how mobile ethnography and other observational approaches complement traditional satisfaction surveys, with examples drawn from our transit research experience.
We will discuss how capturing feedback throughout the journey helps reveal moments of friction, uncertainty, and confidence that can be difficult to identify through conventional research alone.
As transit agencies continue to focus on improving customer experience, building ridership, and strengthening public confidence, finding more effective ways to listen to and understand riders will remain essential.
Better transit decisions start with better understanding. And sometimes, the most valuable insights come from the moments when the journey is actually happening.
We look forward to connecting with transit professionals at CUTA 2026 and continuing the conversation about how research can help build better transit experiences.
