65% of riders on LRT1 are mostly young, research profiling shows

Riders of the Light Rail Transit (LRT)1, one of the most used metro systems in the country, are mostly young, with 65 percent aged 18 to 29 years old.

Half of them are males, 50 percent females and everyone average 62 minutes per day in LRT 1 trains and stations.

This was the findings of a recent study by marketing agencies PHAR Philippines Inc (PHAR) and TNS (part of Kantar Media) to put a human face to passengers, entitled, “Unlocking LRT-1 Riders: Research and Data on Consumers."

The study covered 5,500 LRT-1 passengers interviewed between 2015 and 2017. This was the second installment of the research conducted by PHAR and TNS in 2016. Their latest study registered a 16 percent increase in daily riders and a 37.5 percent increase in passengers from socio economic classes A, B, and C1. The passengers used different applications to get them through the day. About 36,000 riders use Grab and Uber services to get to and from home to the station every day. About 95 percent of LRT-1 passengers use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The increase in ridership can be linked to improvements made in the LRT-1 stations. In the study, with the cleanliness factor going up 177 percent. So far, the stations at Abad Santos and Gil Puyat have garnered the highest cleanliness scores.

Riders also cited that the ticket buying experience had become more efficient. According to the study, LRT-1 was rated with 260 percent improvement in terms of ticket queues. The Vito Cruz station was singled out as the most improved in terms of convenience in train ticket purchasing.

The study also delved on the brands that are used most often by LRT-1 riders. For telecommunications, about 50 percent prefer Globe Prepaid sim cards. When it came to gadgets, 10 percent owned Cherry Mobile phones, while there was a 200 percent increase in use of brands Oppo, Vivo, and Huawei mobile phones. The switch pulled down Nokia phone ownership among riders by 75 percent.

In beverage, Kopiko was a leading brand for coffee while Coca-Cola is the softdrink of choice. For shampoo, Clear and Dove are preferred by the LRT-1 riders. Interestingly, the study confirmed that LRT-1 commercials made a difference in ad recall for brands such as Cherry Mobile, Coca-Cola, Smart, Dazz and Happee.

The research methodologies combined LRT-1 fieldwork intercept, call back, and NCR (national capital region) representative sampling.