Service Data by Subarea
As a follow up to my piece earlier today I wanted to quickly share a breakdown of Metro’s current service hours by service type because I found it extremely illuminating. My initial take away is that the Eastside is saturated with “local” service. Before I get too in depth the Regional Transit Task Force has really focused on clarifying and better understanding Metro’s “products”, “family of services” or “service types” (p.6). Metro staff have broken down their service into the following four categories. More after the jump.
- Frequent Arterial: These routes have peak headways of 5-20 minutes, with a maximum headway of 30 minute for 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. I wouldn’t really call 20 minute peak headways “frequent” but that is another discussion. Obviously they follow major arterials and Rapidride is included in this category.
- Peak Commuter: These routes operate during peak periods and target employment centers. They leverage the regional HOV system and are typically fed by park and rides.
- Local: These routes have headways of no better than 30 minutes during any time of the day, and may operate less than 7 days a week. These routes favor accessibility and coverage over speed and directness, using secondary arterials or even local city streets. Headways are determined by policy, not demand.
- Hourly: These routes are “lifeline” services for transit dependent populations and mostly run in rural or very low density areas of the county. Productivity wise they are extremely inefficient but use up less than 3% of Metro’s service hours.
I have not seen this grouping used in previous performance review from Metro. The most interesting data pertains to the east subarea, where 43% of service hour are allocated to local service, twice as many as frequent arterial service. Furthermore, excluding hourly service, east subarea local service is the least efficient service Metro offers. So while consuming 7.3% of Metro’s service hours it only carries 3.5% of Metro’s riders, a ratio of 0.48. The next highest values are 0.56 and 0.57 for peak service in the south and east subareas respectively. All other service types have a ratio above 0.80.
The take away is that what you see in the draft service reduction plan, or will see in any plan based on productivity is a shift of resources from local routes to frequent routes, with a mixed effect on peak commuter routes. This will be most pronounce for the east subarea simply because it has the most local service as a percent of subarea platform hours and because that service is the least efficient service offered in all subareas.
Not surprising, then, that the Eastside is disproportionally hit by the new cuts concept.
Yes certainly. The Eastside has always had the least productive service in the county. The Eastside will have the most cuts but I also think that the excess local service is a results of Metro’s focus on having high coverage, which ignores that fact that most (but certainly not all) areas of the Eastside are very affluent compared to the Southend or some parts of Seattle. I my opinion Metro should adapt it’s service to reflect this.
Adam, do you have the tax revenue generated by the three sub-areas? That, in my opinion, will weigh heavily on how the council votes on future cuts and service allocations. That’s not to say it right, but that’s politics.
It’s tricky:
http://seattletransitblog.com/2008/11/19/subsidy-is-a-loaded-word/
My point down the thread is that Service Hours is not directly proportional to Passenger Miles (or other measures of productivity).
Yes very true. Esp with relation to peak hour service that deadheads and involves extra buses and drivers.
Many of the local routes on the Eastside have their rush-hour productivity cannibalized by one-seat commuter routes that aren’t all that productive either. I see it all the time – a 222, 236, or a 238 goes by half-full while I’m driving by in a 252, 257, 210, or a 211 that’s not completely full either. 2 buses, 2 drivers, and probably enough passengers for a bus and a quarter or so.
At least some of the cuts could come from consolidating service at certain Park & Rides and linking already existing routes together at those park & rides. Kingsgate P&R is a good example – Consolidate the 252 & 257 into an every 15 minute route into Seattle starting from Kingsgate. Modify other local routes in the area for easy transfers.
It’s not perfect, but in today’s tight fiscal environment, I don’t think we have a lot of good choices. Route productivity has to go up.
BTW: Can we kill the 219 already? Geez… :)
How many of the Eastside routes characterized as “Local” really belong in the “Hourly” category – either because they are hourly, or because they don’t have nearly enough ridership and are only being run at 30-min frequency because of subarea equity?
And are the Eastside “frequent” routes really frequent? Is the 255 included as frequent, when it is hourly after 9 pm Mon-Fri and after 6pm on Sun, and at best 30 mins except in the peak direction during rush hour?
You can find the data in this spreadsheet.
The 255 is counted as frequent, as are the 221, 230, 233, 234, 240, 245, 248, 253, 271, 522, 540, 545, 550, and 554. Of those, the only ones that seem to have productivity (in riders/platform hour) even close to the westside routes are the 253, 550, and 230 (Bel-Red segment). It’s no coincidence that these are the routes scheduled to be replaced/augmented by RapidRide and/or Link.
The spreadsheet is pretty interesting, actually. For example, the 545, which they consider a high-ridership route, is actually much more productive by the miles/hour metric than by the riders/hour metric. Same goes for the 101. In contrast, the commuter 74 and local 42 (for example) look better under riders/hour.
I wonder if they would be better off having two dimensions rather than one: classify the stopping pattern as <a href="http://www.humantransit.org/2009/06/slippery-word-watch-express.html"local/rapid/express, and classify the frequency as frequent/peak/infrequent. This is more complex, and not all the categories exist (in particular, I don’t think there are yet any buses with rapid stop spacing), but I think it would be more revealing than assuming that all arterial service has local stop spacing.
The 271, 522, 545, 550, and 554 all have very healthy all-day ridership and tend to be rather full during commute hours.
While the 242 and 555 don’t look very productive the buses are full, especially the later runs in the morning. In fact I’d say the demand is there for an all-day Northgate/Bellevue bus at least. Perhaps the 271 and 542 should extend to Northgate, at least until North Link opens. Of course frequent express service between the U-District and Northgate could provide similar service with a relatively painless transfer.
With Eastside service there are two sources of funding for specific routes that change the equation somewhat. One is the routes Microsoft subsidizes like the 242 (and other routes serving the main campus). The other is the 520 mitigation money which is already programmed to fund the 542 and increased service on the 271.
I take the 545 every day, and there’s no question that it’s a busy bus. But still, it’s undeniable that the 545 looks much more productive under express-route metrics than it does under arterial-route metrics.
I would love to see North/East Link shadow service start tomorrow. Put a super-high-frequency express route between Northgate and downtown (replacing the 41/71/72/73), have half of the trips (maybe more during peak times) go to Bellevue/Overlake via I-90 (replacing the 550), and turn everything else into a tail route.
The 550 can already get pretty screwed up during rush hour when I-90 or 520 get backed up. (Many 550s deadhead across 520 during the peak hours). Adding the complexity of the 550 with the mess that is Southbound I-5 would spell disaster for reliability on both routes, especially during the afternoon commute.
I do like the idea of combining the 41/71/72/73 routes into frequent express service between Downtown, UW, and Northgate. The other legs of the 70′s could be served by transfers to other routes that could hopefully pick up some additional service hours for increased frequency. I still don’t know the Northend routes well enough to give a detailed proposal though – working on it…
Also, I’m not convinced that the Local/Hourly distinction is actually meaningful. A route which never runs more often than 30 minutes is a route that very few people will take for granted.
(Note that the spreadsheet I linked to above is from 2008, before the Local/Hourly distinction was invented.)
Thanks for the link.
I can only count 2 of 9 SOLID votes on the council for anything resembling efficiency as the primary metric for allocating service(district 2 and 4). Even district 1 and 8 have enough rural population to split the districts.
So no matter how you classify routes, it gets back to how much money is going to be spent in the 3 sub-areas, then jiggle the criteria until you’re satisfied with the answer.
I suspect the Task Force is already being spoon fed something that resembles one of those outcomes.
I can’t imagine a predominately non-Seattle council is going to vote to give away huge chunks of their constituents bus service to Seattle which contributes far less in tax and fare revenue than the cost of the service they receive.
But, that’s just my opinion.
South King gets fairly dense near Seattle and has a higher mode share (and more transit dependent population) than East King.
The 4 members who’s districts include Seattle plus district 5 is enough for a majority.
Still it will be interesting to see how things bake out when it is time to vote.
I looked back in the archives of the Seattle Times for when the budget crisis and economic downturn were starting to be discussed. It was October of 2007. In the intervening years, capital reserves have been taking huge hits, and the budget keeps looking worse.
It seems like 3 years would be adequate to make significant adjustments to spending and revenue to get transit on a sustainable financial footing. I wish the Task Force well, but worry it’s another blue ribbon study that will get little read and less action.
Well it depends on how you look at it. In the reduction scenario Seattle takes 50% of the cut, but if you compare the cut hours to total house it comes at best, only losing 10% of its hours while the east subarea loses something like 18% of its hours.