Tag / king county metro

by Adron

17% Service Reduction?!?! Seriously?

Ok, this sucks. Straight from Metro.

County Executive calls on County Council to enact two-year funding for Metro or face 17 percent service reduction

King County Executive Dow Constantine this morning asked the King County Council to make important decisions about the future of Metro Transit: approve a two-year, $20 congestion reduction charge to help maintain Metro service near current levels for two years, or begin the process of reducing the transit system by 17 percent.

The poor economy has hit Metro hard, causing a drop in Metro’s funding from sales tax. Over the past four years, Metro has cut costs, raised fares four times, dug deeply into reserves, found new operating efficiencies, canceled the purchase of replacement buses, and negotiated cost-saving contracts with its employee unions. These actions have generated nearly $400 million to narrow Metro’s budget gap for 2008-2011 and about $143 million annually for the years ahead—but Metro still faces an ongoing shortfall of $60 million per year.

The two-year congestion reduction charge would be $20 a year on vehicles licensed in King County. The proceeds would be used to preserve transit service while King County works with regional leaders, legislators and the Governor on a long-term funding solution for transportation needs.

In case the congestion charge is not approved, the Executive also asked the Council to authorize a reduction of about 100,000 annual bus service hours in February 2012. This would be the first in a series of reductions totaling 600,000 service hours that the Executive would ask the Council to authorize for the next two years if new funding is not approved.

These reductions would shrink the Metro system by about 17 percent, leading to the loss of an estimated 9 million passenger trips annually.Overall, a reduction of this size would affect 80 percent of Metro passengers—meaning four out of five bus riders would have to walk further, wait longer, make an extra transfer, stand in the aisle, or even see fully loaded buses pass them by.

Other areas have balancing budgets at this point? Why is Seattle still getting hit so hard? Can we stop serving the areas that barely use transit and bulk back up where we get real ROI already?! This is insane.

The other question I have though, is what in the world is this $20 congestion charge? How would it be applied? It appears that this isn’t a concrete idea or maybe somebody knows something more about it?

by Adron

King County Metro’s Best Website Enhancement Yet

I’m am not a big fan of King County Metro’s Website. It follows some really BAD UX and UI design standards and guidelines. Almost like a committee or a bunch of bureaucrats designed it. Some of it is obtusely idiotic. But there is hope, there is a gleaming gem among the dirge of a zillion clicks, oddball readability, poor SEO, hard to find routes, and other things.

King County Metro

King County Metro

King County Metro recently released the Annual Performance Measurement section of the site. I had been wanting a good, readable, easy to understand charting and graphing of the Metro Transit ridership statistics and King County Metro has given it to me! I’m stoked! These are actually readable charts that can be used to ascertain real and legit information about the bus system.

The financial section and the ridership section really have some great numbers. This is where you can go to really dig into how your tax dollars and fare are going to build, support, and operate the transit system. Seriously, go check it out.

I love that this information is readily and easily available. Sound Transit also offers some of this, but should really take a look at what Metro is doing with this and do some of their own charting and reports online like this. In addition they really should work together with Metro to determine real transit ridership for the entire Seattle + Tacoma Metro areas and respective routes. There are some good arguments, and good data there, that could seriously help move forward the Seattle area and transit in general.

So with that stated, cheers to Metro & especially the web team that put this part of the site together!  Great job.

by Adron

Introducing The Morning Commuters

I boarded the bus again on a not so normal bright and sunny morning in Seattle. Day #X of my Ballard commute into Seattle. The #17 Express and #17 came spot on time. The #17 Express, as usual, packed em’ in and filled every single seat at this stop. I waited the extra few minutes for the #18 Express. Upon boarding I saw a lot of the familiar faces. It is, in some ways, reassuring to board the bus in the morning and see a lot of familiar faces.

Biz Magazine Gal – One young lady is always reading a magazine of sorts. Looks sort of like a business magazine, but she always folds it back at the spine. This makes it impossible to really see what it is.

Rich Red – Another young woman is always reading a thriller or some type of exciting top 40 looking book. She raises it up so barely a soul could see her face.

Grumpy Frunk – A fella in the back is always sitting, partly stooped over from lack of sleep, and makes a failing attempt everyday at catching sleep on the bus.

Chicky Shades – Another gal boards the bus, and always strikes me as having hit the bong or maybe drank a few to many rounds the night before. Fortunately she’s plenty professional, as everyone aboard this express bus at this hour is.

Suit Guy #1 – This guy usually read a newspaper. That’s this thing made of paper, which is made from a dead tree. It looks like he has transit experience because he politely folds it up via the “quadruple fold” method and reads it that way.

Suit Guy #2 – Almost the same guy, except looks a little more like the “business suit killed the rock star” guy. He’s always got his face pulled into his phone, reading whatever it is that he reads.

Serious Fighter Guy – This guy probably doesn’t fight at all, but one never knows. He looks like he was built for fighting championships. Strapped like a guy out of 300.

Burlesque Lady – Often a girl, looking shockingly hot and wearing a coat over her burlesque outfit is off to ?? I’ve no idea in Seattle. Wasn’t sure the city had anything like this that a young lady would be going to at 7:52am in the morning.

Spunky Hair Dude – This guy is some type of office worker. Has great taste in shoes, but the worst taste in the history of men in shirts. Usually some nonsensical assault on the eyes like pink (salmon? whatever, it’s pink) stripes. One has stripes with dots!? I’m appalled that a designer of any sort would have the notion that this is a good combination to put on a single piece of clothing. Blagh!? 😦

Condom Man – Yup, we have one of those guys get aboard. Loads his bike and boards in about 3 seconds. Real military like, but always wearing the funny look bicycle spandex cloths (or whatever the material is, I’ve no idea). He looks like a man wrapped in a condom. Thus I’ve dubbed him the Condom Man.

Those are all the notable people, that I see, almost everyday riding the #18 Express into Seattle.

In the near future I’ve been pondering taking a more round about trip, just to enjoy different scenery and see who the “regulars” would be on that route. Until then, cheers!

by Adron

Green Transit

I was pondering recently, even with all the fussing the naysayers have about transit, what was accomplished when TriMet finished the Green Line connecting another couple of neighborhoods to the light rail system plus multiple park and rides.

The first thing was the system picked up another 17-18k riders per day. The riders on this line were almost entirely new at first. At least 10-15k of them. The busiest bus line in the city, the #72 plying up and down 82nd Avenue, saw almost zero change to the ridership. Being only about 1-6 blocks at various points from the light rail one might have thought some of the riders would have switched modes. The simple explanation is that the #72 serves a specific constituency and the light rail serves another constituency.

There is however one huge difference. After a period of 18-20 years Trimet will have spent – including infrastructure – less on the light rail service than on the bus service on 82nd Avenue while getting a growing ridership on the green line that will even surpass those estimates.

What does that mean?

It means Trimet will have more money to spend, operationally and for infrastructure, on other parts of the system.

Fast forward to my current city I’m living in. The light rail that Sound Transit is building is almost 10x the cost of what Portland is building. Primarily because Seattle’s Sound Transit is getting the light rail built in raised and subterranean infrastructure. This type of infrastructure is inordinately expensive. A cost, that at this point is unneeded.

Recently Federal Way requested that Sound Transit make sure the promise of light rail doesn’t disappear from the future. Right now, from a money perspective, Sound Transit has basically told the city it won’t be getting light rail. I see two massive problems here.

1. There isn’t money for the current plan to get light rail into Federal Way. That’s the plain and simple reality of the matter.
2. Sound Transit and most of the area Governments are inflexible on building light rail more cost consciously.

Now these are the two problems at the surface. Looking a little deeper, just below the surface, one will immediately notice the real problems. Both of which I’ve raised here at Transit Sleuth a number of times over the years.

The first problem is that the Government assumes the economy will do X and has almost no plans to mitigate when Y happens. Our currency is hosed, so an individual citizen of Seattle can safely assume that all plans moving forward that aren’t already under contraction and paid for are on the chopping block. Yes, EVERYTHING. Increasing funds and taxes won’t particularly help either until some politician in the White House gets the balls to do something about our currency and valuation against the global markets. Right now we’re sunk. That’s the summary position of problem #1.

Problem number two is a different beast. With the money that is allocated so far Sound Transit could do a lot of infrastructure investment. They could, in all honesty, get to Federal Way. The problem lies in Federal and State Regulation that causes Sound Transit to be rather inflexible in how or what they can do with that infrastructure money. This inflexibility we as citizens we do want and don’t want.

Either way, I digress, I hope that Seattle and Sound Transit can find a better way to get real infrastructure with high quality transit built. Right now the ambitions look good, but more reality needs brought to focus. This massive high cost light rail infrastructure probably is not the best way to go about getting higher capacity and higher quality transit to the Seattle area.

by Adron

Rethinking Transit #2: Make the Route Transitions Transparent

Ok this might actually take some effort on behalf of King County Metro. But seriously, it would help tremendously for anyone traveling through downtown. Most routes come into the city from the north, south, or east (the ferries come in from the west). One example is the #18, which arrives downtown from the north and then becomes another route. Sometimes it becomes the #56 or something else that then heads south, but I’m not always sure what it becomes. It isn’t entirely obvious without doing research on a regular basis and studying the schedules (which again is mostly nonsense). So what’s the solution I proffer? Stop making these routes independent. I understand they’re “different routes” or whatever, but you don’t actually transfer. Not in a physical way. It also doesn’t make sense to any logical person, if you paid when you got on and then when you get off again they want you to pay again. The confusion is stupid. However, I’ll leave the fixes to the fare collection system for another day, so don’t get tangled in all that nonsense.

What I suggest, is keep a route number (or whatever designates the entirety of the route) the same. If the #18 starts at North Beach, goes through Ballard, and generally becomes a #56 that heads south to SW Alaska Way or whatever, just pick a number for that route and stick with it. Stop being all bi-polar about what the route number needs to be as soon as a bus gets downtown. This only serves to confuse regular riders and people that don’t regularly use the system are screwed. Those individuals have no chance of understanding at first glance what in the world the system is doing. If the #18 however changes to another route, say #21, then just change that routes number to #21 from the get go and give it a full north to south alignment.

What other problems does this bi-polar splitting of the route? It makes bus drivers have to deal with passenger confusion all the time. Passengers come up all the time and ask, “where does this bus go now?” or if they know a little bit about the system they ask “what route is this bus changing to?”  Once you’ve boarded there is no way to know without harassing the bus driver. I’m pretty sure they’d be cool with simplifying it for the passengers and just saying this is the #18 route from north to south or the #21 route from north to south. Also, don’t give me some nonsense about this being some normal way to run a bus system, it may be but its a crappy thing to do. For once, act like it actually matters that the passenger has a usable product (the transit service) and make it work for them.

Anyway, that’s solution #2. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them! There are lots of improvements to make and I’d be more than happy to be a sounding board for the ideas!

Until another time, happy riding!

In case you want more information about King Count Transit.