Passengers as part of the decision-making process

31 March 2016

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), out in San Francisco, is currently procuring new rolling stock. It’s undertaken a large-scale public consultation exercise on the design of the new trains, involving future passengers in the decision-making process in a similar way to our HS2 passenger panel.

This is the result of one of BART’s ‘seat labs’ where it asked passengers to comment on different designs of seats.

It’s vital that passengers have a say in the design of rolling stock because they’re the people who are actually going to use the trains, some of them almost every day. They will know what could make a journey more comfortable and what functions they’re going to need, for example more hand rails or luggage racks. That’s why it’s important that the industry reaches out to its customers for advice on its rolling stock.

This is the kind of exercise that should be practised across the industry in the UK.