This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Here’s a question for the readers of this blog: can anyone point me to a thorough policy argument for or against Seattle’s Ride Free Area?
The RFA has come under attack in recent months on a number of fronts:
- Metro wants Seattle to pay more for the RFA to help close their budget gap
- A recent study noted that it may lead to increased fare evasion
- That same study polled Metro drivers, who seemed eager to ditch the RFA
As far as I know, there are three potential policy justifications for the RFA and the City of Seattle’s continued funding of it (though there certainly may be more):
- It provides mobility for residents around downtown, especially low-income ones
- It speeds loading and unloading of downtown commuters in the evenings (which, as John Jensen has argued, is something of a unique problem to Seattle, for a number of reasons)
- Downtown businesses like it because it makes it easier to work and shop downtown
I think all three of these are decent arguments, but I’d love to see a really in-depth policy analysis of all of them in context. For example, while #2 is a good reason for the RFA, is it really a good reason for Seattle to pay for it? Are there other ways at solving #1? Is #3 even true anymore? Has anyone polled downtown businesses on this since the RFA was implemented decades ago?
If SDOT has done a thorough policy review on this, I’d love to see it.
I have not heard of one. And if one existed I’d expect Sightline to have blogged about it, but a search revealed nothing.
Ah, here’s the downtown merchant’s response that tells us “The Downtown Seattle Association’s public policy committee is still reviewing the proposal and has not taken an official stance on it, spokesman Randy Hurlow said.”
I’d actually argue #3 is a very strong reason to keep it. I currently have a work-provided monthly pass and it’s no longer an issue, but at my previous job I’d pay for bus fare myself (the monthly pass really doesn’t make sense unless you plan to use the bus every single day). As an engineer I’d have meetings almost every day at some architect’s office or site visit in one part of the city or another, and our office culture included walking and buses with taxi’s thrown in only when the location was far away. I’d also take the bus tunnel to the International District frequently for lunch.
I’d say my previous office is the norm for downtown business, rather than the exception. I see taxi’s in use far less than I’d expect for a city our size. I see plenty of business people on the bus throughout the day, not just at commute times. Would we still use buses without the RFA? Some of us. Others would switch to taxi’s. This is fine, but either way it’s a barrier to business and shopping. Now I’d have to hunt for change to take the bus, and whether I took the bus or taxi’s I’d have to start collecting receipts and filing expense reports. This would be one more headache for workers, and one more expense and paperwork headache for employers as well. I’d skip going to the ID for lunch, since it would add $5 to my lunch costs.
How did you get into downtown for your previous job, Matt? Carpool? Walk? Bike?
The reason I want an analysis is that I want to get some numbers on exactly this. How many people drive into downtown and then use the RFA, for example? Is that the kind of behavior we should be encouraging?
Overall, I do think that we need to hit a critical mass of transit pass users before eliminating the RFA becomes reasonable to consider. I guess one simple metric would be knowing what percentage of people working downtown have transit passes.
Depends on the year and the time of year. At first I’d carpool in the winter with my wife (city carpool parking was really cheap), and bike or bus in the summer. Then we switched to purely bus commuting when they raised the fee for carpool parking, but on sunny days we’d bike in or share a scooter ride (my wife has free scooter parking in her building).
However, each of my bosses drove in (top boss had company-paid parking, others paid themselves), yet walked and bussed for everything except long-distance trips. But I don’t think it matters how one gets to work. It’s a pain to drive anywhere in the city, and the RFA encourages people to move around the city rather than stay in one place.
Interesting. The reason I ask is that the RFA is irrelevant if you have a transit pass, and so it matters very much how you get to work. If you have a transit pass to get to work, then you can move around the city all you want during the day. The percentage of downtown workers with transit passes would tell you how important it is to keep the RFA for the purposes of downtown mobility, like you suggest.
Resisting change of any kind is human nature. If no RFA existed, would the pro/con arguments sound pretty much the same as the current discussion? I doubt it.
Back when it was implemented, buses were very high with narrow doors and big steps. Today’s buses load and unload much faster.
Back then, fare evasion was non-existent. Drivers ‘expected’ the correct fare and enforced the rules, slowing things down. Today, most riders have an Orca Card or pass of some sort. Few fumble for change.
Promoting downtown shopping back then was a big deal with Nordies and the Bon. Now, most shoppers don’t spend much time in the CBD looking for shoes, and the charge to Seattle and Downtown Assn was minimal. Light rail in the tunnel charges a fare, but Metro doesn’t. Link will eventually overtake Metro in CBD boardings, and I doubt they plan to join in the fun.
The drivers see the light. Seattle can’t or won’t pay what it cost in lost revenue. Dump it!
Would you get any traction today trying to eliminate fares in the downtown, and have a RFA? I think most peoples reaction would be “Are you kidding?” No way.
Great point. “Status Quo Bias” is definitely at work here. Typically only a crisis causes us to reevaluate the status quo, which is why i think this is an interesting time to look at the rfa.
Frank,
Some good info about the RFA can be found in Sound Transit’s staff report R2009-01 which eventually turned into the resolution that established Link’s fare structure: http://www.soundtransit.org/documents/pdf/about/board/resolutions/2009/Reso2009-01sr.pdf
Some key info from the report:
– Sound Transit estimated that honoring the RFA on Link would have cost about $2M in annual lost fares. (p. 2)
– In order to reach their target farebox recovery ratio, the base fare (for trips outside the RFA) would start at $2 and also require an additional fare increase before 2017. (p. 2)
– Nearly 50 percent of Link riders are assumed to have a pass that
makes them indifferent to a fare charge inside the DSTT. (p. 3)
– The other 50 percent of customers would have incentive to ride buses in
the RFA, reducing Link ridership (p. 3)
As a part of their process, they collected comments from outreach efforts and these are some of the results (on p.4):
Of 200 comments collected:
– 54 percent of those who filled out written comment forms preferred charging a fare in the tunnel in exchange for a lower base fare.
– 49 percent of the total comments received favored a lower base fare and charging for trips in the DSTT
– 51 percent of all respondents favored offering free rides downtown.
– 16 percent of the those that answered in favor of free rides in the DSTT cited a desire for consistency in paying fares among all modes in the tunnel.
And, “A theme in the results of our outreach is a general desire for simplicity” (p. 4).
Personally, I think we have things backwards and that the current system misses the mark for simplicity. I understand Sound Transit’s rationale for charging fares within the tunnel, but what we have now is not simple. Pay when exiting buses with a policy that changes based on direction and time of day is overly complex, not to mention conflicting policies in the tunnel. I would rather see the RFA isolated to the tunnel, and honored for both buses and trains until the buses are entirely displaced.
Sound Transit is better equipped to deal with the proof-of-payment system, and limiting the RFA (and pay as-you-leave) to tunnel buses could reduce some of the fare-evasion issues while also giving non-passholders a free option to get from one end of downtown to the other.
In answer to your question about the downtown merchants, there’s this from p. 4: “In staff’s conversation with the Downtown Seattle Association, a representative of the DSA expressed that both pricing options being examined for Link were acceptable, and noted that Sound Transit’s decision to charge fares in the DSTT or to offer free rides should not impact downtown retailers as long as surface buses remain free.”
Speaking of which, I’m curious to know how Matt’s trip to the ID be a $5 ride for lunch. I’m sure some downtown employees have lunch during peak-periods, but there would still be time for a pretty long lunch with a transfer as opposed to paying for two bus ride (or a round-trip Link ticket).
What I would do during frequent trips to Salt Lake is buy day passes. Granted, that was on UTA which sells $5 day passes that work on buses and trains: https://buyapass.rideuta.com//
If only we had day-passes that worked on Link and Metro.
Wow, it’s way past my bed-time…
The next human behavior at play is ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
Eliminate the RFA, and when problems crop up, which some surely will, and someone will be tasked with solving it. It may be at the driver level, or street supervisor or the County Exec himself, but someone is going to try to fix what’s broken.
Too Slow Boarding in the CBD? (driver-open all doors), (supervisor-hand wave the buses out of the zones to make room), Metro(roll out POP in the CBD in addition to RapidRide routes, maybe even system wide {oops, “Too much change?” you say}. OK, I’ll back off.
You get my point though.
[Rob] Sorry, $4.50. But that’s still too much to tack on to lunch.
Great numbers though. 50% with passes sounds about right. Though I would have expected more to dislike the RFA (since I would guess less than half of riders use it).
What’s missing in this discussion is a way to relate fares to distance. Charging someone $4.50 to ride a few blocks and back will keep them from riding, and isn’t terribly fair. We already have a system designed more for long-distance commuters than short-distance city dwellers. It also just doesn’t seem like a good business decision (empty buses passing this person that wants a ride). What we really need are distance based fares. Say, $.25 a mile. ORCA + GPS could do that.
Oh, and just today I rode a single stop with my wife to go shopping downtown at lunch. She doesn’t have a pass. Would we have still gone if we had to walk the extra 10 minutes each way? Probably, but we would have been late coming back from lunch. On average we’d take fewer trips and do more shopping online.
@Rob – thanks! That’s a great start. One interesting fact is that ST estimates the cost of the RFA to them at $2M/year in lost revenue. That compares with the $400K the city currently pays to Metro for far, far more “free” service hours than Link would provide.
@Matt – There’s no doubt that eliminating the RFA would cause some people to change their behaviors. But the question is about policy trade-offs. Maybe you’d start eating at, say, Pike Market more and the ID less. Maybe different restaurants would spring up in the rest of downtown to serve you.
I also have to say, distance-based fares using ORCA and GPS seem insanely over-complicated. And when you take into account capital costs, are short distance trips in the urban core actually cheaper to provide than longer-distance trips out in the ‘burbs? I’m not so sure.
I’ve come to think that distance-based fares, though logical, are too confusing for end users. However, I would support a simple zone-based system. I’d support moving to a 3-zone system in Seattle, with a new Zone 1 for, say, Georgetown to Green Lake, and Zones 2 and 3 for riders further out.
“And when you take into account capital costs, are short distance trips in the urban core actually cheaper to provide than longer-distance trips out in the ‘burbs?”
That’s an interesting problem, and I’m not sure how to analyze it – but I’ll try. Ignoring fuel costs, maintenance costs, and driver costs (even though those are much higher than capital costs, and strongly favor short trips), and just looking at the cost of a bus to move you around:
We probably size equipment based on peak capacity. So for each person getting on at the most crowded section, say 1/100th of a bus is purchased. So short trip users should be charged higher if this is the section they’re riding on. However, short-trip riders should be charged nothing for capital costs if they don’t ride this one segment.
Where is this segment? Of course it varies per trip, and I can only extrapolate from my experience. Generally, the most crowded section in the morning is the last section in a neighborhood or city being served before you get downtown. Once you reach downtown there are more people getting off than on. This reverses in the evening. So for capital costs, this section is where all of the costs should lie. Also using only my own experience, this section is generally the longest section in the route (especially express buses).
So it seems capital costs should be quite low for short-trip users. Let me know if you see a flaw in my logic (I really haven’t thought about this before).
Hidden costs with the RFA is the fact Matt mentions above; that peak load determines how many buses are placed on a route. This is generally somewhere in the CBD/RFA for most downtown routes. Eliminating the RFA reduces these spikes somewhat, allowing for fewer buses to service the the route on the same headways. (how many times have you seen a 1/2/3/4 fill up at Belltown, only to discharge a lot of those riders at the last stop before leaving the RFA?)
Another point I’ve made for some time now, without much success, is that ‘time is money’. We tend to price transit by the distance (stops or zones), and measure efficiency by time (cost per revenue hour, service hours allocated, etc)
Aren’t we really selling a block of time to the public to ride the bus. Who cares where your going, or get off at, or what zones you traveled in?
Sell me a ticket for X amount of time. An hour or two, or all day if you wish. When my ticket expires, I’ll buy another. The parking guys figured this out long ago. Hell, even add a button to the parking TVM to sell me a transit ticket for 2 hours.
We don’t pay the drivers by the mile, do we?
[Mike] I love the time idea. We could implement it using the current system. Pay in cash, get a transfer (no change). Swipe once with an Orca, get charged a full fare (no change). Swipe on your way off with an Orca, get back a credit for time not used. This encourages people to use Orca, and brings fairness back to short trips.
With a small change of equipment we could improve on this. Let even cash users pay for short trips, just print out a reciept instead of having a standard transfer. Verify payment using roaming officers, removing bus drivers’ of their enforcement duty.
Regarding the 1/2/3/4, my experience is different – it always seems the most full just before arriving downtown. People start leaving at Pine, and the bus is half empty by Spring. The 2X is even more extreme – in the evening the bus is overfilled by Pike – sometimes leaving people on the curb. The first stop after the RFA (Roy), a third of the bus empties out and it’s reduced from there.