With the whirlwind of news, One Center City, potential restructures, and proposals for fare policy revisions, there has been no shortage of public surveys lately. Below are five surveys from Metro and Sound Transit that you should spend a few minutes of your Saturday filling out.
Link Customer Satisfaction
A general survey of Link customer satisfaction, covering fares, access, speed, reliability, and more. (Link)
SR 520 Link Connections Survey
A survey encompassing all riders in the SR 520 corridor in the context of One Center City and possible Link truncations. (Link)
Sound Transit 545 Riders Survey
Similar to above, but a Sound Transit survey limited to riders in the 545 corridor. (Link)
King County Metro Fare Revisions
A survey asking riders to respond to Metro’s Options A and B for fare simplification. (Link)
King County Metro General Bus Satisfaction
A coordinated survey done with 14 other transit agencies for comparative purposes, this survey gauges general customer satisfaction with Metro’s services. (Link)
Main problem with all of these surveys is that none of them get anywhere near the main problem with transit:
Over about the last three years, exponentially worsening traffic conditions have rendered LINK the only part of the system with a snowball’s-chance-in region-wide-
traffic of getting you to an appointment on time.
Anywhere in the region outside of biking and walking distance of either destination or LINK. Have never used Uber or Lyfft, but have needed taxi rides along busy bus routes to get me to doctors and dentists. Off peak. Rush hour, would’ve had to reschedule.
Not bragging,kidding, or being whimsical about a three hour dawn drive to Angle Lake. Winding several miles several directions from an Interstate with bus routes I used to be able to use and enjoy. “Mobility for the Region?” So are plate tectonics. “We’ll Get You There?” Same seated on a rock on Iceland.
My car? Hybrid. 50 mpg. No pollution checks required. And try to minimize my share of congestion blame by route choice and time when I don’t see headlights in my mirrors. But also unsustainable. Conditions I’m trying to avoid should overtake me year after next.
Suggest survey of trucking companies and their industrial customers as to what our traffic is costing them. Same for employers, employees and the self-employed. And another one for disaster relief agencies as to how many people are going to pay with their lives when a few fender-benders lock this region solid at the wrong time.
So my own next choice for a survey? How are we going to get one single corridor’s worth of transit that can keep schedule? Voters’ personal choice which one. Because failing that- any survey less just kills trees and blows out servers.
Mark Dublin
I filed out the ST Link survey. I am happy with the service. I would like to have had an opportunity to fill out a open comment section. It could have included escalators, long off-peak headway, and upset ST did not have more LRV in 2016 so SR-520 could have restructured earlier. It is sad to run on the I-5 general-purpose lanes so much.
I rated everything to do with LINK top quality. Making it well worth the amount of personal driving I have to do to reach it.
But making it all the worse to lose the excellent express bus routes I used to reach it with, the IT 600 series and ST 574, to a permanently blocked freeway in the space of less than four years.
Can’t fault Sounder over freight and track construction delays. But number of mechanical failures in the bulletins are a different matter. And freeway conditions have become a major non-negotiable loss of my tax-supported right to travel.
eddiew, I think you can tell me. If we could get the money, what’s shortest amount of time it would take us to get a full network of diamond lanes along all four freeway corridors? And get LINK to Tacoma?
The problem of financing the work is purely political. Meaning the balance sheet allows what transit’s elected enemies forbid. Reason I’m getting deliberately unreasonable is that I do see our travel situation as an emergency. And also, that on the political front, the general silence confirms the smell that something is dead.
The recent transit-related behavior of the our Democratic Party State delegation shows the need for some different election results next year’s primary.
But remembering some key figures in the formation of Metro itself, I think that for our country’s whole politics, what’s really needed is to replace the current majority of the Republican Party with Republicans.
And for both parties in Washington State, first platform plank being an emergency angioplasty for our every highway with a Federal shield for its signs. And also learn the one valuable lesson the Far Right has to teach:
Better chance to get up from getting knocked down than from lying down and getting run over.
Mark
UW Station and Capitol Hill escalators and elevators are back to their old tricks. A couple weeks ago at UW both northern surface escalators were closed one day, and the southeast elevator at CH was closed. Last week the southern long down escalator was closed for a day. Two or three weeks ago there was an oddity: I went down and the long up escalator was closed at the top, but as I was going down I saw the other escalator was moving and people were getting on at the bottom: there was no barrier there. So at the top they must have had to move the barrier to get out, although from my perspective I couldn’t see it.
But luckily the escalators/elevators have been the only really bad thing happen to Link. The trains don’t have outages like the escalators do. I’ve only been stuck in a train outage once that I can remember, when I was waiting on the UW platform and the signs said trains are coming, then they aren’t, but never when they would come. I wasn’t in a hurry so I didn’t take a bus right away; I watched to see how others reacted and ended up giving people some information, because they didn’t notice the signs saying the trains weren’t running.
I dinged ST a bit on their link survey on access and communication. Last week I was caught at UW station after the accident occurred at Columbia City station. I follow ST on twitter (and my phone was working) so i could get some information, but there really has to be much better communication when the non routine happens.