Today, King County Metro unveiled a new website that displays monthly ridership, service quality, safety and security, financial, service effectiveness data. The data is aggregated system wide, not route or subarea specific. From Metro’s press release.
King County Metro Transit now has performance data online that provides up-to-date information about bus ridership, vehicle breakdowns, accident rates, and even how often buses show up on time.
“As a public agency, Metro Transit is accountable to the people we serve,” said Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond. “We want to make it easy for our customers and others to find information about our performance, and see how we are measuring up to our targeted goals.”
The new “Monthly Performance Measures” website currently features graphs and data about ridership trends, service quality measures, safety and security data, and some financial information. Navigation through the website should make Metro data and reports more accessible. Desmond said this is just a beginning, and he hopes the website will evolve over time with more data and other information the public will find interesting or helpful.
The rest of the release is after the jump…
Desmond and his staff developed the new website over the past year, and it was one of the recommendations in recent work done by the Regional Transit Task Force. It also supports King County Executive Dow Constantine’s goal to provide greater accessibility to government and improved government transparency.
“In the final Task Force report, members emphasized the importance of Metro having clear performance indicators that would be readily available to the public,” said Desmond.
The new dashboard-style website launches today, and some statistics will be updated monthly and other reports on a regular basis.
Good on Metro for getting this data out there.
Good job Metro – I hope the data becomes more granular in the future. The data seems to be stored on google spreadsheets, which is very cool. Unless your employer blocks access to google docs. Such is the case for me :-(
Same here Brett. From the picture above – does anyone know why Metro’s vehicle boarding target for 2010 is lower than boardings in 2009? That seems like the wrong direction for a target.
The economy?
Other than the first few months of ’09, unemployment has been pretty stable over the past 2 years. I suppose it could make sense for them to adjust their target downward if they weren’t meeting their goal, but they were well above it throughout most of ’09 an ’10.
Fear of service cuts? Full year of Link operation?
I’m confused. It only shows 2010 target.
Isn’t the blue 2010 actual?
Strike that. I see what you’re saying now, Adam. Sorry.
I think he’s wondering why the goal for 2010 would be lower than the actuals from 2009
What [Amy] said. If I’m making a salary of $50k, it’s a bit strange to have a goal next year of $40k. Unless I’m either intentionally setting my goal low so it’s easy to meet, or I forsee a paycut.
Two ideas: 1) fare increases, 2) link light rail. I don’t think the target is important and I suppose I’m happy that it was lower than 2009 totals because so far the 2010 targets haven’t been met.
“so far the 2010 targets haven’t been met.” ??? The chart above says every month in 2010 the targets have been met.
Not for the transit ridership target, not pictured.
I think it is an interesting correlation between the rapid decline in service effectiveness and the April 2010 unionization of the contracted employees of the Metro Accessible Services call center. Metro contracts the reservations, scheduling, and dispatch and rider customer service for Access transportation with First Transit. This First Transit office is notorious for a high turnover of employees even unionized in the worst recession since the great depression.
It’s nice that they’re putting the time and energy into making this data available. I think it speaks well of Metro.
Completely agree. This is the type of behavior from a transit agency that I’m looking for. For way too long metro has been an insulated agency that is very hard to understand unless you have contacts who are on the inside.
Great first step, but it definitely calls for a lot more drill downs on the data.
Per station or station to station data would be great.
I like having the spreadsheet data. It would be interesting to do crosstabs on unemployment rates, Seatac airport traffic, sporting events, and so on.
Some clarifications to questions asked in this thread:
The 2010 ridership forecast/target was established in Metro’s budget, which is part of the overall King County budget. This forecast is important since it establishes the fare revenue target for the budget. 2010 was forecast to be lower than 2009 due to: 1) the January 2010 fare increase, because there is usually a drop when fares go up; and 2) lower countywide employment projections.
Specifically, the 2010 ridership forecast included an employment forecast of negative 0.7% compared with the 2009 actuals. Now, it’s looking like 2010 employment will actually will be about 1.8% lower than 2009. And, yes, we also factored Link into our lower ridership forecasts for 2010. We actually forecast somewhat higher gas prices for 2010, and that came true. But it did not offset the other factors significantly.
And for those looking for route-specific performance, there is route level data linked from the home page of the Monthly Performance Measures (“Reports & Publications” bullet on right side of page).
–Linda from Metro
I would like to see peak hours on-time performance as well. I think that would be more meaningful than all routes at all times of day.
Good job, Metro