King County Metro, greater Seattle’s main transit agency, is in a budget pickle. The recession has trimmed the agency’s sales tax receipts; the decline in gas prices—at least compared with 2008’s sharp spikes—has eaten into ridership and farebox revenues; and labor costs keep inching up.
The 1-2-3 punch has knocked Metro back on its heels—and, like many transit agencies across the country, Metro is considering cutting bus service to remain solvent. Of course, the natural instinct for the politicos who oversee Metro is to treat service cuts as a political decision, not an analytical one. With political decisions, officials choose service cuts by asking themselves “who’s going to scream the loudest?” The tendency is to spread the pain around, cutting service a little bit everywhere—even if it means trimming relatively productive routes and sparing routes that aren’t doing as well.
But I’d argue that Metro should take a more analytical approach: if it’s got to cut service, it ought to cut the routes that are the least productive — particularly those that don’t attract many riders or offset much car travel. That can lead to some politically contentious decisions—such as cutting bus service to wealthy, politically active neighborhoods. But in my view, it’s the honest and responsible thing to do.
Luckily, Metro is awash in data to use for this kind of analysis. Take, for example, this chart, taken from 2008 route-by-route ridership data for peak route buses. (Click it for a larger version.) Each dot represents a single route or major route-segment that runs during peak hours. The higher up the dot, the more riders the route carries per hour. The routes with lots of riders per hour are the stars, and the routes with only a few riders are the stinkers. So if your goal is to minimize the impact of service cuts on actual riders, you save the stars, and cut the stinkers.
Clearly, there are stars and stinkers throughout the 3 different regions that Metro serves. But if you look carefully, the routes in the West subregion, which includes Seattle, have far more stars, and fewer stinkers, than the East. The South subregion lies between the two. So if you were basing your cuts on how productive the routes are, you’d find that a disproportionate share of the “stinker” routes, at least by this metric, are in the East.
But that means that if you’re a politician representing a jurisdiction in the East subregion, you’d be tempted to argue against using route productivity to gauge service cuts. You’d be more inclined to cut equally from all subregions—even if that means cutting more deeply from productive bus routes serving Seattle and Shoreline.
And that’s basically where the debate stands right now. Metro’s structure and governing rules pit the three subregions against one another. So rather than focusing on maximizing the productivity of the bus system as a whole, some officials are focused on protecting their home turf by arguing, in effect, for deeper cuts from productive routes in other subregions.
There’s a lot more to be said about all of this—and I’m sure I’ll have more later. But it’s odd to me that it’s taken so long for the idea that Metro should use productivity metrics, rather than arbitrary rules (like the infamous 40-40-20 rule that has targeted service increases to the places where existing ridership is low) to guide basic decisions about where and how often buses should run. For a system that serves up over 110 million rides per year, even a small improvement in efficiency can mean millions of additional transit rides served, without adding any new buses or bus drivers. A focus on improving service efficiency would have been every bit as welcome when the economy was booming as it is now that times are tough.
Bus photo courtesy of Flickr user pdxjeff, distributed under a Creative Commons license.
Michael Lewyn
Why not just spread the pain equally by raising fares and maybe even improving service a bit? For a more detailed statement of the argument, readhttp://www.planetizen.com/node/36466
VeloBusDriver
It might actually be more cost effective for the system as a whole to cut certain commuter routes that have relatively high productivity and focus on providing good transfers to less productive “core” routes at park and rides. A good example would be the 210. Virtually the entire 210 route is overlapped by other “core” all-day routes like the 222 and 271. This type of cut would preserve service coverage of a larger portion of the Eastside while improving the financial performance of these “core” routes.Commuter routes also tend to include long dead-heads which contribute to lower productivity. An example comes from my afternoon work on Wednesday which was a 210 followed by a dead-head from Issaquah into Seattle and finally a 266 from Seattle to Redmond. 2 partially full trips took me 3 hours and 53 minutes to complete.The trouble is that people like their one-seat rides from Seattle to the suburbs so any move to cut commuter routes like the 210 will probably result in torches and pitch forks being seen outside the council chambers…
charlie
Transit agencies… Clark—does transit really HAVE to be public? Or a public monopoly? Here in Portland’s less-dense SW quadrant, the topic of private-sector transit options has come up in public “Portland Plan” meetings, particularly as TriMet’s service shrinks and its fares climb. The planetizen.com argument is strong except for the funding piece—fares would be FAR higher if they made up today’s funding shortfall. Would I pay $5 to board a bus for a 20-minute ride downtown, where I can park all day for $12? Maybe not. And I think that’s outrageous for the lower-income/aging/disabled population. But I’d love to see the numbers: What would it take for TriMet or Metro to make up their shortfalls with fare increases, along with much more aggressive service-optimization efforts?
Anirudh Sahni
A nice idea to graph the routes this way.Your horizontal axis is one dot per route. But not all routes are equally served. I suggest replacing the dot for each route with a horizontal line whose length depicts the number of service hours that route gets.Here is another statistic that supports your point: Each dollar of transit subsidy spent in the West subarea gets about 1.5 times as many riders as in the South subarea, and 2.6 times as many riders as in the East subarea. (I calculated this in 2006 from 2005 ridership data.)
Matt the Engineer
[Velo] “The trouble is that people like their one-seat rides from Seattle to the suburbs” I’m finding it really hard to care about these riders’ problems. I work just over 2 miles from my home, and have a 3-seat ride – 2 of those “seats” are almost always standing.
guy
Michael Lewyn, fares have increased several times recently, and ridership drops each time. These increases really hurt those who can least afford it.
Jon Morgan
Metro’s fares cover 22% of its operating costs. If you wanted a single system-wide fare hike to make the farebox recovery 100%, you’d have to raise the base fare from $2 to almost $10. Then you’d lose riders, so you’d have to cut service or raise fares further. (An alternative would be to rank all routes by fare recovery ratio and cut those at the bottom. At least before Link, the 7 made a 3% profit; the labor and diesel costs to Snoqualmie and North Bend are hard to justify.)WA already has (arguably) the most regressive tax structure in the nation. Higher transit fares inflict the most pain on those least able to absorb it, and they discourage transit use which is anti-environment. Given the quality of Metro bus service, I’m not sure a $1.50 base fare is justifiable.Long term, Metro needs to merge with ST to share the much higher fare recovery of rail, and electrify more routes to keep operating costs down as diesel prices climb.