This week, Portland’s Tri Met, the regional transit agency for greater Portland, continues the challenging task of deciding which bus service to cut. Tri Met is faced with a $13.5 million budget short fall, which means it will be forced to reduce service starting in September of 2009, leaving many people in the service area wondering how they will get to work, school and even church.
By the same token, King County Metro Transit is facing a $100 million shortfall in revenues in 2010 along with a $29 million short fall this year. Cities in the region are already girding themselves for the battle to keep as much bus service as possible.
In King County, part of the reason for the huge shortfall is the over-reliance on volatile sales tax revenues to fund transit. In an interview Kevin Desmond, General Manager of King County Metro outlined the dire straights that local transit is in. Just as ridership has started to increase, says Desmond, revenue from sales tax has taken a huge fall as people tighten their belts because of the recession. That’s a big problem when sales tax revenues account for 70 percent of the funding for bus service.
Making matters worse, bus service in King County is apportioned to cities based on how much sales tax they generate. Currently, bus service is allocated on the 40-40-20 rule, which that means 40 percent goes to east county suburbs like Bellevue, 40 percent to south county suburbs like Kent and Des Moines, and 20 percent to Seattle. But why should transit service be allocated based on sales tax revenue? Most advocates agree that this scheme doesn’t make much sense.
Certainly there are more rational ways to make decisions about transit. For example, Tri Met is considering its cuts based on “ridership levels, access to school/jobs, transit equity issues and the availability of alternative service nearby.” Those seem like some of the right factors to consider.
Portland’s Metro, is also engaged in a prioritization process for future high capacity transit. (Metro is the elected regional government that serves the more than 1.4 million residents in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties, including 25 cities in the Portland region.) As part of the process, they have a really cool interactive website that allows riders to play with different high capacity routes, and even compare possible choices based on capital cost, operating cost, ridership, and environmental benefit.
As I played with different routes on Metro’s Build-a-System Tool I found myself tracing previous trips I had taken to the outskirts of Portland. So I added a high capacity along Powell Boulevard east of Portland remembering a seemingly endless bus ride I took a to the edges of the city. Then I added another high capacity link out to Saint John remembering the time I had to rent a car to get to a site visit there. (There was no transit option so I was forced to drive.) But no matter which route I chose there were winners and losers in the larger regional scheme. Forest Grove and Oregon City, both within the Urban Growth Boundary, were losers in my imaginary system.
Yet the zero-sum game of cutting transit service misses out on an important opportunity. In the era of transit cuts perhaps we should ask a more fundamental question: ‘what is the larger purpose of transit?” In The Car and the City, Sightline’s 1996 book, Alan Durning tried to clarify this point in a conversation with Vancouver City Councilmember (and now Sightline board member) Gordon Price.
‘Transportation,’ says Gordon . . . ‘is a means, not an end. The end is access.’ People want to have access to things—services, locations, facilities. They want to stop at the health club, pick up some groceries, drop by a friend’s, and still get home from work at a reasonable hour. Most of North America has sought to provide this access through better mobility; the West End (of Vancouver) has provided it through greater proximity.
Gordon Price’s point was partly about the importance of walkable neighborhoods, but it can apply equally to transit service. So how can a city provide proximity? The answer isn’t about transit service allocation, which is a question of mobility, but about better land use policy, which is a question of access. Transit ends up being a supply and demand problem. Basically, if the demand is too spread too thin geographically, then it gets more expensive to supply bus routes. But concentrate the demand, or spatial accumulation of people, in compact communities and the demand for bus service should be easier and less expensive to meet.
In a way, the current discussions about transit cuts are asking the wrong question. Rather than asking how to increase the supply of bus service, we should be asking how to concentrate demand so that it can be met more efficiently. As one consequence of focusing too much on the supply side of the equation, the discussion about transit cuts can become ugly and political; pitting towns against cities, suburb against suburb and even generating racial and class conflicts. In King County, for example, Seattle riders feel they provide the most ridership but get allocated fewer buses and the greater share of cuts. In Oregon, Westside suburbs in Washington County feel unfairly targeted over Portland.
The starting point for transit service ought to be the one Gordon Price mentioned: creating better access through proximity. That means land use policy that hews to the principles of growth management and that fosters compact development. The current economic downturn means that, in the short term anyway, transit agencies will face the same tough decisions many other governments are facing.
But looking ahead, it’s important to hold the line on growth management. Sightline’s target of 62 percent of residents living in compact communities is achievable if local leaders in the Seattle and Portland areas hold the line on sprawl. There are many benefits to boosting compact communities, including making transit service more cost-effective over the long term.
joshuadf
Roger, this all sounds great but I’m not sure I understand it. I think you (and Gordon Price) are making basically the same argument as the New Urbanists—zoning reform can unleash compact walkable communities. Is that accurate? It seems like Seattle at least is trying to achieve that with the Urban Centers, some of which like Uptown/Queen Anne, First/Hill Capitol Hill and the University District are existing neighborhoods with fairly good proximity between jobs and housing. Others like Northgate and South Lake Union are being built almost from ground zero and in my mind at least will take 10 or more years to really succeed or fail as compact neighborhoods (as opposed to disconnected job and/or housing centers).
Roger
Yes. The major point here is that right now jurisdictions are trying to take the buses to people rather than putting more people where its cost effective to provide service. The numbers vary but something happens after an urban areas increases its density beyond 12 people per acre. Check out our report on Vancouver’s approach to sprawl. This approach doesn’t generate funding to solve these tough cuts today but it could save us from having to do this in the future by putting future growth in places like the ones you mention.
Gordon Price
Here’s an even more concise way to say it (credit to Richard Register): The shortest distance between two points is achieved by moving the points closer together.
Doug MacDonald
40/40/20 is a huge problem for Metro. It needs to be fixed. I heard something the other day that very much is along Price’s point of connecting the dots, but in a slightly different context.The epiphany came in the form of a statement that 25% of sales tax revenues in WA State come from the sale of automobiles. Is that true? If so, it is a bizarre and unintended affect that Metro service is “pulled” by the formula to the areas away from dense neighborhoods to Car World strip cities where car lots and auto dealers have settled. The more people in denser neighborhoods manage to live their lifes without being captive to a new SUV every three years, the less transit they get in their neighborhood, so to speak. That’s nuts. Metro needs help on this issue in the form of citizen insistence on a better way to allocate transit service in order to built service frequency, reliability, customer appeal and ridership. Now, if the 25% number I heard was wrong, that changes a foundation for the argument a bit, but the argument still must be pressed.
Alan Durning
Doug,Agreed about the 40-40-20 rule. In fact, I think the appropriate rule is to allocate transit supply in response to transit demand—with certain outrigger rules to provide basic transit service everywhere possible. If transit service goes where transit runs full, jurisdictions have one more reason to favor compact development: concentrating transit riders will bring them more transit service. It’s also more socially equitable, insofar as low-income families tend to use transit more than others, and low-income neighborhoods tend to be denser than others. Under the 40-40-20 rule—or just about any other allocation rule that follows political power rather than transit demand—bus lines in working-class neighborhoods run full and turn a profit, while lines in more-fortunate neighborhoods run empty and pull in subsidy. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.I have never seen a breakdown of sales tax revenue by product, but I’d be surprised if car sales amount to such a large share of the total.
Charlie
The idea of addressing the demand side of urban transit, before working out the supply side, seems very smart but a bit longer-term than could help the current situation. Funding mechanisms for transit must be very difficult—I’d be interested in Roger’s or Alan’s take on what would make more sense. Here in Portland, cutting bus service means in some cases cutting lines, which force residents in areas of the city to find alternatives (cars, mostly). It seems a regressive move to cut transit, to the extent that the folks who need it most have less income, probably time/inclination to fight for it, and have the most to lose. In down economic times, it seems to me transit becomes MORE important to the civic good, and that this might be a good time to look at how to improve the funding mechanisms.
becks
In Metro Vancouver, everyone is being allowed ot have their say with regards to urban transport and funding. TransLink is responsible for cars, roads, bridges, transit, cyclists and pedestrians and has set up a series of discussion forums and workshops across the city, where the public can comment on its 2010 10 year plan:http://www.bepartoftheplan.ca/upcoming-consultations