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MONCTON – Codiac Transpo has launched a new marketing aimed at getting people out of their cars and onto the bus.

As part of the marketing strategy, the transit operator has put up three billboards — one on Vaughan Harvey Boulevard one on Champlain Street and one on Mapleton Road — and is also doing radio ads.

It is also offering free transit access for high school students with a valid student ID in July and August, and will be offering 10-pass punch cards for half their regular price in October.

“The goal over this year is we’d love to be able to increase ridership by two per cent,” said senior transit planner Marie-Claire Pierce.

She said Codiac Transpo currently has about 6,000 riders per day and this is the first time it has tried an integrated marketing strategy to boost ridership.

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“We’re really looking at tactics to try to get people to consider and just try us,” she said, even if it it’s only a few times per week.

During budget deliberations in December, Codiac Transpo revealed it had collected $401,785 less than budgeted in fares from the City of Moncton. It blamed teh shortfall on a slower-than-anticipated recovery from a five-month transit lockout in 2012.

Yves Bourgeois, director of the Urban and Community Studies Institute at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, said research shows total time is the most important factor for getting people to use public transit.

“If it take you 10 minutes by car, but it takes you 50 minutes by bus because you have to go to a shopping mall and then wait 20 minutes for a transfer, then that’s where you lose the critical mass,” he said.

Bourgeois lives in Moncton but commutes to Saint John for work. He said researchers are now advocating a move away from a hub-and-spoke model of transit like the one used in Moncton.

In Moncton, bus routes congregate at the Old Highfield Square on Main Street in Moncton and at Champlain Place in Dieppe.

He said research has shown direct routes are better for gaining riders, but that’s only feasible if transit needs are considered when making city-building decisions.

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“We’re sort of shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said.

“If you’re not taking into account the built environment, if we’re approving the building of new schools or hospitals, of new residential properties out in less dense areas where it’s difficult to be served by buses, then we don’t create that critical mass of people who would be potential riders.”