If you’ve ever read through the transportation improvement plans of any city or county, you’ve probably noticed a huge laundry list of projects that nobody really expects to happen any time soon. But they have to be in the plan, or else when someone comes to town offering stimulus dollars or a new grant program or some other new funding source, you have to get the project into the plan before you can even apply for the money.

What transportation improvements
can be funded by a TBD?
A TBD can fund any transportation improvement contained
in any existing state or regional transportation plan that is
necessitated by existing or reasonably foreseeable congestion
levels. This can include maintenance and improvements to
city streets, county roads, state highways, investments in high
capacity transportation, public transportation, transportation
demand management and other transportation projects
identified in a regional transportation planning organization
plan or state plan.

Can a TBD fund maintenance and
preservation activities?

Yes. A TBD may fund the operation, maintenance, and
preservation of the programs and facilities noted above.
Additionally, maintenance and preservation activities are
noted in many state and regional transportation plans. For
example, preservation of existing transportation facilities
is the number one priority within the Washington State
Transportation Plan. Eliminating the backlog of asphalt
pavement projects and maintaining chip seal paving, along
with many other maintenance and preservation activities, are
specifically noted as priorities in that Plan.

However, keep in mind that any transportation improvement
also needs to be “necessitated by existing or reasonably
foreseeable congestion levels”. Consequently, not
every street, road, transit program, etc. will qualify as a
transportation improvement.

If the single run peak trips were largely eliminated, and part-timers allowed to do 6 hour runs, the cost would drop a significant amount.

Of course, this won’t happen.

On the other hand “board in the front leave in the rear” might actually speed up loading and unloading somewhat.

I also agree with your other points about fare zones and peak/off-peak. I’d say creating premium services with anything other than Rapid Ride or BRT adds back confusion that was eliminated by simplifying the fare structure though. The flip side is peak express routes are exactly the place where you can get away with demanding a high fare.

This is also why riders don’t mind rail to rail or bus to rail transfers so much but don’t generally like rail to bus or bus to bus transfers.

The effect can be seen most obviously with Link Light Rail. Everyone knows that the initial segment is going to have modest ridership, but projections expect a 3-fold increase in ridership once U-Link is complete and a substantial boost beyond that once the rest of the system is in place. This is despite the fact that U-link amounts to a mere 20 percent increase in system size. Of course the segment between UW and downtown is the most productive in and of itself, but if we had ONLY built downtown to UW it would also be of little value. Essentially, each extension makes all the existing track more valuable because you can get to more places. Thus, the network adds up to more than the sum of its parts. As such all networks go through a long phase of increasing returns, in which additional routes actually increase the productivity of existing routes because they feed potential riders into the system. For example, the routes from downtown to UW (the 70 series) seem to be really productive, but without all the routes south of downtown that feed people into the south end of these routes, the 70 series alone would be unproductive.

This presents the danger of a downward spiral, in which service cuts not only eliminate ridership on the routes you cut, but eliminate ridership on other routes due to the network effect. You then end up with less revenue than you thought you would and have to make more cuts leading to still more declines in ridership until you suffer the fate of the streetcar systems of yesteryear.

This issue applies to all routes, but it definitely applies to some more than others. There are no doubt many routes where their cost well exceeds their benefits even if you include the network effects and these routes should be cut. My point is merely cautionary, cutting the wrong routes could break the entire system.

TBD’s are very flexible. They can be created by counties, they can be created by cities, and they can be created for groups of cities or a defined service area that included parts of cities. They could be a good way for Seattle to tax itself, or for a subarea to form a taxing district.

They can access several different revenue mechanisms. Some of those can be enacted without a public vote (and some people assume that means only those tax mechanisms are feasible). Others can be enacted with a vote within the proposed taxing district.

What I’ve wondered, and haven’t gotten a good answer to, is whether they can be used to fund ongoing operating expenses. TBD’s were set up as a way to fund capital projects, and they are supposed to go away once those projects (and their financing, if any) is paid off. The language seems squishy enough (to me, a non-lawyer) not to know whether an ongoing tax can be enacted using this method and applied to operating expenses.

I’ve also wondered whether a TBD could be crafted to appeal to a cross-section of people (say, transit, sidewalks and potholes) and packaged as an initiative.

Still County or City TBD it still is more money for transit. In Seattle’s case the money can be used to pay for some of the lost Metro service or for streetcars. For Bellevue they might be able to use some of the money for that Link tunnel they want.