By: Dierdre Gregg
Puget Sound Business Journal
August 1, 2008
For riders of King County’s jam-packed buses, there’s good news and bad news.
The good: The Transit Now program, which voters approved in 2006, will add 15 percent to 20 percent more service over the course of 10 years.
The bad: That growth pace doesn’t come close to matching the growth in ridership. The number of people climbing aboard Metro has gone up by 20 percent in three years. Moreover, the number of full buses that bypassed waiting passengers jumped by 45 percent in just the last year.
“Are we meeting the demand for bus services? The answer is no,” said King County Executive Ron Sims.
Despite the ardent desire of regional leaders like Sims to boost ridership, they have not carved a clear path for meeting the demand. Instead, local politicians are divided over whether to add transit taxes, fees and fares. One of the options most popular with transit advocates - using a slice of car-toll revenue - is under threat from a Tim Eyman initiative on the ballot this fall. Meanwhile, there’s conflict over the way the system divvies up service between districts.
Yet, many of the region’s top policy goals - from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to cutting traffic congestion - call for ramping up bus ridership.
“Clearly some folks are taking the bus for the first time, and we should make that experience as positive as possible, and that’s not happening,” said Bob Ferguson, a King County Councilmember and rider of the Route 41 bus.
To be sure, ridership growth may well slow from its current rate, particularly if gas prices fall. The crowds alone may deter potential new riders, and potential passengers may turn to other methods, such as walking, riding bicycles or taking Sound Transit’s light rail line, whose first leg is slated to open next summer.
But in the short term, it’s hard to see alternatives to crowded rides. And in the long term, most agree, the growing region will face gridlock without more transit.
Meanwhile, the same soaring fuel prices sending hordes of new riders aboard the system are also hitting Metro’s own pocketbook, straining the system’s ability to keep up.
Metro Transit has a limited number of options for expansion, each of which face their own obstacles:
Raising taxes
In November 2006, voters approved Metro’s Transit Now program, raising the sales tax by a tenth of a cent. Metro figured the additional cost at about $25 in the first year for a median income household.
That increase, which raised Metro’s share of the sales tax to 9 cents on a $10 purchase, essentially maxed out the agency’s funding stream. Metro can’t ask local voters to approve additional funding without specific authorization from the Legislature.
Metro plans to use that money to add as many as 800,000 annual hours of bus service by 2016. By year-end, about 100,000 of those hours will have been added.
But demand is surging faster. For example, Metro Transit in February added two more morning trips on the Route 41 from Northgate to downtown Seattle, but riders are still getting left behind by full buses.
And many leaders are wary about pushing for a further increase in the sales tax.
“There’s only so much more you can put on people with the sales tax,” said Sally Clark, vice chairwoman of Seattle City Council’s transportation committee. Councilmember Jan Drago, who chairs the committee, said it’s not the right time to ask for more sales tax funding.
Siphoning off tolls
Sims, meanwhile, wants to see a small percentage of future tolling revenue, likely 10 percent or less, dedicated to transit. That seems to be one of the options most palatable to regional leaders.
A federal grant awarded to King County last summer would provide funding to buy 45 new buses, but the money to operate those buses would have to come from tolling.
Sims lobbied the Legislature this year and will lobby again in 2009 to make sure some toll money goes to transit.
But Eyman’s Initiative 985, which would direct certain taxes and revenue into a fund for reducing traffic congestion, would also mandate that any tolls collected on a road go only toward replacing or improving that road.
What does Eyman say about I-985 impeding transit funding from tolls?
“You betcha. Absolutely, and proud of it,” he said. “It’s a complete corruption of the word toll to say it can be spent anywhere on anything.”
Rob Johnson, policy director with the Transportation Choices Coalition, a nonprofit that supports transit, said a coalition of environmental, health care, business and labor leaders will oppose Eyman’s initiative.
“We’re very concerned about the impact,” Johnson said.
Looking elsewhere
At a recent Sound Transit board meeting, when the board discussed this November’s $18 billion rail and bus ballot package, Sims proposed an amendment to use some Sound Transit funding for Metro buses.
The Sims amendment would have speeded up implementation of Transit Now by about three years.
But other board members raised concerns about whether Sims’ idea fit Sound Transit policies that require that taxes raised in each district be spent in that district. The amendment was voted down 15 to three.
The measure that board members decided to place on the ballot will have some bus service ” a 17 percent increase in ST Express bus service in 2009.
Other funding ideas to expand Metro service are still in their infancy. One is a sales tax on gasoline, as distinct from the existing gas tax, Johnson said.
That idea seems unlikely to be popular with drivers paying $4.20 now ” or $8 in 10 years, as some King County economists are projecting.
Teaming up
Metro is stretching some of its Transit Now dollars by striking partnership deals with large employers and cities, in which Metro provides two-thirds of funding for new service and the partner picks up the rest.
For example, the city of Seattle will chip in $1.5 million a year to get about 45,000 additional service hours, on 19 different Seattle bus routes, over the next three years, said Rick Sheridan, spokesman for the Seattle Department of Transportation. The Transit Now fund will contribute another $3 million.
Seattle will get another 5,000 service hours in about 2011 in return for street improvements it is making to improve the speed and reliability of bus service on city streets, said Bill Bryant, city transit planning supervisor. Those changes include reconfiguring bus stops so buses don’t have to pull in and out of traffic, and bus-only lanes that allow cars to cross them.
Metro has similar partnerships with eight other cities and with Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center. But here, too, Metro Transit is reaching the limit. The service hours set aside in the Transit Now program for these partnerships have been used up.
Dividing the pie
Some Seattle leaders would certainly like to see change in the way Metro Transit divvies up new service hours. The controversial formula Metro now uses allocates 40 percent of new service hours to the Eastside, 40 percent to South King County and only 20 percent to the Seattle-Shoreline-Lake Forest Park area.
“Metro is the only transit agency in the United States that allocates service hours in such a political way,” Seattle City Councilmember Drago said.
But Sims said Seattle has such a large portion of existing bus service that distributing new transit hours to suburban areas is only fair. Even after Transit Now is fully implemented, he said, the Seattle area will have about 58 percent of bus service.
And with a majority of King County councilmembers representing the south and east portion of the county, few people think that formula is likely to change.
Getting more efficient
Many leaders are pushing Metro to find efficiencies in its existing budget ” including Ferguson, who sponsored a performance audit.
Drago said the 40-40-20 formula for allocating bus service among areas creates inefficiencies. For example, she said, 167 buses each day carry passengers from the Eastside to Seattle and return to the Eastside empty.
Other transit systems approach the issue differently, she said. Pierce Transit and Snohomish County’s Community Transit park buses during the day and shuttle drivers back to their origin, reducing driver hours and wear and tear on buses.
Even if Metro did manage to squeeze out some inefficiencies, regional leaders looking for more transit service seem to be pinning most of their hopes on Sound Transit, which is going to the November ballot with a plan to expand the light rail system to 53 miles.
“The best thing we can do for transit is to pass Sound Transit,” Drago said. “The further it gets, the more people are coming into Seattle on transit, and that’s a benefit to us.”
dgregg@bizjournals.com | 206.876.5424
