Total Metro Revenue (tax + farebox) / Total Metro service hours = Gross cost per service hour.

$513 M / 2.19 M = $233.74 / hour

Seattle farebox revenue / Seattle service hours = farebox revenue per service hour in Seattle.

$55.6 M / 1.27 M = $43.69 / hour

Suburban farebox revenue / suburban service hours = farebox revenue per service hour in the suburbs:

$29.7 M / 921 K = $32.28 / hour

Taxpayer subsidy per service hour = total cost per hour – farebox revenue per hour.

Seattle: $190.05
Suburbs: $201.46

Percent subsidy by area = Subsidy per hour / total cost per hour

Seattle: 81.3%
Suburbs: 86.2%

So there you have it, the suburban routes are more heavily subsidized than urban routes by about 5%.

In order to equalize this subsidy, 156,539 hours would have to be shifted from the suburbs to Seattle. By your own numbers.

:-)

The real question is, how do you want to define equality? Does transit serve land or people?

Of course one can slice numbers however one wants to, but think about this: the vast majority of suburban residents in this county never ride the bus, yet they pay taxes, and often they vote for transit service even though they themselves never use it.

So one has to wonder, what deployment of service best fulfills the wishes of this kind of taxpayer, the kind of taxpayer than gets no private bennefit, the kind who really is subsidizing the rest of us, city or suburban.

What is the priority for the non-transit using suburbanite:

1.) Get the most cars off the road, cut the most congestion, create the largest reduction in pollution, help the most people, or…

2.) Provide service disproportionately to transit riders that live closer to him/her as opposed to transit riders who live farther away.

I would hazard that the non-riding taxpayers of this county, no matter where they live, want to see their dollars being spent in the most cost effective way.

Other interesting facts: they collected $67M from “grants”, though the source isn’t mentioned. Sound Transit kicked in $56M. Wow, the SLUS alone collected $.7M last year (not included in the fare number above). Not bad for a 1.3 mile route. (see p. 10 of the QMRyearend PDF)

It’s not really penalizing the 70′s, since those buses are going to turn around and run another route a lot faster than some meandering bus from Snoqualmie will — right? But you make good points.

But as far as I can tell the pass numbers are included in the fare collections. I have no idea how it is distributed. The fact that the passes are often PugetPasses might complicate things slightly.

1)Sales tax–all governments are hurting on sales tax projections. Nobody thought the economy would fall so far, so fast. The difference is that governments have other taxes they can levy, but Metro is heavily dependent on sales tax as a funding source. The legislature decides what taxes governments can levy. Cities have many tools–sales taxes, property taxes, utility taxes, and business taxes–and they tend to balance their revenues to not make them too dependent on one. Counties are in far worse shape because they get less sales tax and property tax revenue because cities have grabbed all the revenue generating areas. Mr. Eyman has further reduced property taxes. And counties have no business or utility taxes by law. The sales tax projections for the next year are truly horrific.

2) Fuel–here is where Metro catches a break. Fuel is the second largest cost driver in the system. This year Metro was hit hard by fuel costs when diesel was over $4.00 and they had budgeted a little more than half that. But now diesel is back to $2.20 and big buyers like Metro can buy futures and lock in a price. This will save tens of millions, but the sales tax numbers are still getting worse.

3) Labor–every bus requires a driver whether it is full or empty. Health costs and cost of living increases are affecting Metro just like all businesses. But Metro is very labor dependent. This is by far the biggest cost driver for Metro and contributes to the first two reasons to put Metro in a bind.

We can’t do anything about the first reason. But we are doing the right thing to meet the challenges of the second two. A light rail train to the UW can carry 800 riders with ONE driver on electric fuel. To carry the same amount on buses you would need SIXTEEN drivers and a lot of non-renewable diesel.

As for Rapid Ride, I wouldn’t be so pessimistic, John. I believe there is more pressure to complete that program than many other elements of Transit Now. The routes in West Seattle and Ballard also have the potential to capture state money in viaduct mitigation.

Excellent post and I think you’ve made some great points. However, I still argue that you can look at the numbers several different ways. Why compare Revenue to Service Hours? Why not Passenger Miles, as we did for Proposition 1? Using Service Hours favors long routes in the suburbs and penalizes heavily used express service like the 71/72/73/74 from the U-District. This is what Matt was saying, I believe.

Personally I don’t think either comparison is “fair” as such, and I hope that by the time Central Link opens next year money for transit will be already coming from Congress. I also have no problem subsidizing (or being subsidized by) suburbs during good times.

Here are a few other random observations that bear on this topic.

There is a lot of concern about the 40-40-20 policy, which allocates 80% of new service hours to the suburbs in order to get closer to parity countywide. But that policy only applies to service increases. If there is a service reduction, a different policy applies. In service reductions, service must be cut in proportion to the existing portion of service in each subarea. So if Seattle has 60% of the service, then 60% of the cuts must be made in Seattle. Then, when the economy recovers, you can’t just add those hours back — new hours would be service increases, which need to be allocated 80% to the suburbs. So hours cut in Seattle during hard times would not come back when times improve. I have a hard time with that.

I have some sympathy for the concern of suburbanites, who pay an equal share of taxes but get less service per capita. At the same time, I have a hard time with the notion that public services should be allocated with total disregard for need, just to satisfy political distribution requirements. We are at one extreme end of a spectrum balancing technical need against political distribution, when we ought to be seeking a position that tries to strike a balance.

When we get to the point that we don’t care that people are being turned away on transit routes in Seattle because we have a political need to distribute money regardless of need, I think that government is on the wrong track. And when we focus only on service hours and not on the quality of service – including reliability, speed and loading – we are missing part of the equity equation.

A different way of thinking about equity would result if we had standards that defined what “need” is, based on performance as well as factors that influence ridership, like density and pedestrian access. If we agreed on a consistent basis to define transit needs, including both quantity and quality of service, then equity would be measured based on how well needs are met.

We still might find that Seattle has more than their share of service in that case, but we wouldn’t turn a blind eye to flagrant violation of service standards. Seattle residents may want a higher service level than the baseline the rest of the county is willing to pay for – and if so, there should be some way for Seattle to pay more for the premium service we need. But any measure of equity will be arbitrary. How do you decide what route is “in” each subarea? Is the residential end more important than the business end? Should we be looking only at transit, or at the distribution of all transportation? Should we only look at the physical location of capital facilities, like ST, or only at the distribution of hours without regard to quality like Metro?

I think so-called equity is overblown, and we should start talking about good government again. We should plan based at least partially based on need. That means we should have service standards that define appropriate service level needs based on performance and land use, and monitor how well we achieve them.

Your numbers look good. Yes, it’s difficult to ascertain the percentage of sales tax that goes toward capital instead of operating, but it is not required for very useful analysis and discussion.
Next step is to look at the boardings per sub area. The West will show up stronger than the service hour proportion, meaning the hours are more productive in Seattle-Shoreline-Lake Forest Park. Now, as for passenger miles per boarding, the west subarea will be naturally shorter, since density drives shorter trips, but that means that cost per user is also lower.
Ultimately, I would argue that the local trip making that transit facilitates in Seattle is critical to supporting good densities and urban form. If transit were about maximizing passenger miles, then sending more trips to North Bend may be more important. But then transit would serve less people (because seats are consumed for longer distances) and would not help support urban densities.
I agree with John, subsidizing transit in Seattle is good for the region. However, I think Seattle deserves more transit than the region is willing to provide and therefore must turn inward to a local tax for transit. Maybe the Surface + Transit alternatives to the viaduct could prompt this change?