What Kind of Metro Should We Have?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

As a young-ish, healthy bus rider, I’ve long ago accepted the fact that the Metro bus system isn’t primarily designed for me. If it was, the buses wouldn’t stop every two blocks, for example, nor would it travel through the city more slowly than I can walk.

The bus system is designed to serve a plurality of people with different needs, and it takes a lot of empathy to come to terms with that. It also takes policymakers — who ought to have that empathy — to create a broad vision for the agency that reflects those diverse needs and make the tradeoffs necessary to implement them.

Doug MacDonald — with whom I’ve disagreed in the past — has a long, thoughtful piece up on Sightline on King County Metro and the policy choices it faces going forward.

MacDonald doesn’t offer many discreet recommendations, except to say that the bus service we have is the result of broad policy decisions that we’ve made (or not made) over the years. It’s not just about increasing service hours or decreasing them, but rather articulating what the agency’s priorities should be. Should we focus so much on on-time performance? What is our obligation to the disabled? Should service to new areas take priority over existing areas? Should we invest in IT infrastructure in the short term to have better efficiency in the long term?

The case made in the article is that these policy tradeoffs are not being discussed by the elected officials who should be addressing them. the Regional Transit Committee. It’s worth reading.