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ChineseMadrid Metro Television Spot
Click the above image to watch the commercial.
I found this commercial for the Madrid Metro via the Carfree USA blog. This stunning ode to urban life and subterranean transit shows that in some places the kind of money and time that goes into car advertisements also goes into promoting mass transit. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Madrid Metro, the 12 lines that serve Madrid’s 3.5 million people (6 million in the larger metropolitan area) span 175 miles and make it the 8th longest urban rail system in the world. Los Angeles, a city of 3.8 million people and a metropolitan area of 12.9 million people comes in 18th place, with 73 miles of urban rail.
Contrast with:
Discussion
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Madrid Metro’s commercials, just like car commercials here in the U.S., appeal directly to people’s emotions and lifestyle. It’s too bad public transit here is struggling enough as it is to provide enough service, and we only have enough to scrap together half an Expo line here and there, or a handful of cheap “rapid” lines (e.g. Orange County’s upcoming Bravo! BRT and Santa Clara VTA’s sole rapid line).
That was quite lovely. Really hammered the message home.
Hmm. I’ve never thought of metro as one to skimp on adverts, I’ve seen the “Miss Traffic” and “make a resolution you can keep” ads more times than anyone should have to. Perhaps Fred is bucking to do some 3D renderings of underground LA for Metro? I kid.
The role of advertizing in raising public awareness is worth discussing. It’s a bit of a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg” situation: do we build an awesome Madrid-style metro and plug it, or do we plug first and let the enthusiasm build us a better transit system? I think the answer is somewhere in between, but if the end goal is to win converts to the transit lifestyle we need a better rail system. Trains are, as Fred put it, a “gateway drug” which will inspire users to try other car-free modes of transport. Good advertizing without a decent system will lead to disillusionment and the perception of metro as “all hype”. Good advertizing with a decent system will hopefully lead to public outcry for a better system.
On a side note, I’m happy to see LA’s metro do as well as it did. 117 kilometers baby! Now once we get that subway to the sea, we can get working on some awesome new metro commercials.
Well as you may know, my interest has always been in the public relations side of public transit. That’s why this blog exists, it’s an attempt to build the “transit oriented lifestye” (a P.R. buzz phrase if I’ve ever heard one) not through infrastructure or political power (things I have no power over) but through awareness. The power of advertising and public relations is not to be underestimated. Of course it goes hand in hand with a good product, no amount of flashy ads can save a crappy product. Like you said, “Good advertizing without a decent system will lead to disillusionment”.
But, Metro does have some good products. We have 117 kilometers of rail, I think that deserves something more than some clown running around town doing lame intereviews…as Steven Chan noted, ads have to appeal to a consumers emotions and lifestyle. While Metro’s photographer takes some great photos, do the “Miss Traffic” and “Make a Resolution You Can Keep” ads really speak to anyone? Would those ads sell cars?
I tried to earlier this year, the bastards never got back to me.
One way we can do this is encourage the businesses and organizations we patronize to include public transit directions in their advertising. No business in New York or London would have an ad without stating either what rail line or station/stop they are near.
My church 2 short blocks from Vermont/Wilshire, conveniently near red/purple lines and rapid bus lines on Wilshire and Vermont. They recently started including that information along with driving directions.
It’s part of the destigmatization of the public transit lifestyle. When only auto directions are given, it’s a way of implying that those who don’t drive shouldn’t bother patronizing their establishment, or are sub-society for not having an automobile.
It’s just an adjustment and way of thinking. While our rail system is underdeveloped, and people often think of what they can’t get to easily, they don’t realize what they CAN get to easily. I’m in Santa Monica and it’s much easier for me to get to Silverlake on the 704 or downtown on the BBB Express 10 than it is to get to places on the Westside by local bus. Some of my friends express amazement at how easily I get around without a car.
People will only treat us with pity about not having a car if we act like we deserve pity for that. Rising gas prices increase interest in looking for an alternative to driving. It’s really sad that many businesses near rail stops don’t mention that in their advertising.
That auto-only mentality will change and is changing one person, one business, one establishment, and one transit improvement at a time.
That Tom Rubin idea that public transit is just a form of welfare for the poor is an old idea that’s declining alongside the quality of the car culture in Southern California
If we’re at #18 right now, we’ll be going up pretty soon.
With Gold Line East L.A. and Expo Phase 1, in 2.5 more years (optimistic) we’ll have 95 miles of trackage.
Where does that put us worldwide? I know we’ll be fifth in the USA, after New York, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco.
Okay, I just now checked on it myself.
By 2010, we’ll be 15th biggest urban rail system in the world. That is, if Beijing doesn’t build anything else, but the way they’re tearing up the ground, I don’t find that likely at all. So, probably we will stay at #16.
However, by number of stations, right now LACMTA is only a lowly number 29, with 62 stations, by my count. (I only counted shared stations, like 7th/Metro and Imperial/Wilmington once each.)
However, after Expo and Gold line are done, we will be up to 79 unique stations, lifting us up to #25, just behind Hong Kong. If we keep going, and build STTS, the Regional Connector, and even a light rail down Crenshaw, then, who knows. We’ll probably add about 40 more stations, bringing us up to 120 stations, putting us #14 worldwide, just behind Boston. We’re already ahead of Boston right now in track miles. (Their stations are spaced much more closely together.)
Now, there’s a decent sized system!
Also, by that point, we’ll have about a 200 km system, (right now we have 113 km, so it is not totally out of the question) vaulting us ahead of Chicago (!), placing us #2 in the USA, and at #12 in the world, just behind Mexico City. We’ll have two heavy rail subway lines (Red, Purple) and 5 light rail lines (Blue, Green, Gold, Aqua? and Pink?), probably with 8-10 different routes total. WOW! (Oh yeah, and the Orange Line. But that’s a bus. Doesn’t count.)
Well what we also have to remember Scott is the land area served by rail. Madrid has half the land area of Los Angeles but more than twice the rail. This of course means much better service. Los Angeles is closest in size with Moscow, which is #5 with 292.9km of rail on 12 lines. We may beat Boston in rail mileage, but when you look at Boston’s land area (125km, you realize they are killing us in the land to rail ratio battle) (Vienna (#2) is simply stunning, with a land area of 414km and 448km of rail!
Here’s a quick break down of some ratios:
1. Vienna: 448km rail/414km land = 108%
2. Berlin: 447km rail/892km land = 50%
3. New York: 368km rail/786 land = 46%
4. London: 408km rail/1577km land = 25%
5. Moscow: 293km rail/1081km land = 27%
Los Angeles (City): 117.6km rail/1290km land = 9%
Los Angeles (County): 117.6km rail/10518km land = 1.1%
Of course, there was a time when Los Angeles was #1 with over 1,000 miles of track.
Fred, the funny thing is that Los Angeles is likely the only transit system I can think of (besides the London Underground) that only recently have placed such a huge emphasis on the design of their buses, their trains, their maps, and all their publications, so much that they had multiple pages of praise heaped upon their internal design studio in a 2006 issue of Communication Arts magazine. If you look at their media relations’ photograph file, their newer bus designs, their “12-minute maps”, and more, they really do try to make Metro Rapid, Metro Local, and their other services look sexy.
Metro can go one step further and do something that appeals to people’s emotions and concepts of the public transit lifestyle, instead of the usual “dollars-and-cents”/practical approach that most public transit agencies take with their advertisements. e.g. “National Dump the Pump Day”: http://www.apta.com/media/releases/060605_national_dump.cfm
At least Metro’s design is light years beyond some of California’s transit projects. Have you looked at what other agencies are doing? Santa Clara VTA’s rapid bus branding (http://www.vta.org/projects/line22brt.html) and OCTA’s Bravo! BRT branding (http://www.octa.net/pdf/112607/bravo.pdf) are hailed as an evolution … but they still look ugly.
There’s no doubt Metro’s design studio does quality work. Cleary I love their design so much I’ve tried to emulate it on this site with the bold colors, grid, and font choice (Scala Sans). But like johnny said, there needs to be a cohesion between the advertsing/visual design and the reality of the system. When I speak of this I mean that while the design of the buses might look great, they better be clean and as graffiti free as possible inside. Obviously this takes coordination from other parts of the agency, but it really would go along way to connection the visual design to the operations.
And yes, it is time to go beyond “dollars and cents”. They’ve got to address the “lifestyle” and “culture”. One of the campaigns Metro did that I was disappointed with was the “global warming” campaign. Everyone and their grandmother has been jumping on the global warming marketing wagon, and I was waiting for Metro to realize the opportunity, and was let down when I saw that there attempt was some strange surreal photograph that didn’t really appeal to the emotions involved in the global warming debate. I think it could have been done a lot better. I mean, look what British Petroleum (BP), and damn gasoline company, has done with their image. Look at this television ad from BP, it’s stunning! Makes me want to get a car and fill ‘er up to save the earth! And it’s pathetically honest too, “a little better”.
I completely agree with the clean-and-graffiti-free idea, Fred. We should ideally have all service be comfortable and great-looking; alas, we don’t have that. Although design is a band-aid, it *can* serve to attract new riders.
It’s too bad that most transit agencies weren’t as active as the gas companies (yikes!) on the hot “global warming” topic. Now that global warming is politically out of the spotlight, Metro (and other transit agencies) should capitalize on the issue du jour: the nation’s recession! Low low prices, always.
[...] really give a lot of room for creative freedom. To get an idea of what 100 words is, check out this brief MetroRiderLA post about the awesome Madrid Metro advertisement… it rings in at 110 words. i-Ride gives you the [...]
I love that Madrid Metro ad; can anyone translate the voice over at the end?
My Spanish is still a work in progress, but I did catch “one of the best metros in the world” toward the end. And having been to Madrid, I can agree with that.
Hi fellow LA citizens.. I somehow found this commercial on my city metro here… not seen it before on the local TV’s … some people here asked for translation, well, here it is:
Spanish:
Cada vez son mas los que ven en madrid una ciudad sin limites para moverse, por eso, en Metro De Madrid, no dejaremos de mejorar, de crecer, de llegar cada dia mas lejos, porque te mereces uno de los mejores metros del mundo. Metro De Madrid: Vuela.
English:
Everytime more and more people see in madrid a limitless city to move around. That’s why in Metro De Madrid we won’t stop improving, growing, we won’t stop trying to reach further everyday. Because you deserve one of the best Metro Systems in the world. Metro De Madrid: Fly (the slogan)