Month: September 2017

As Metro evaluates fare simplification, one thing is clear: getting more riders to use ORCA would be a win.  ORCA speeds up boarding times and makes for more efficient bus service. Unlimited ORCA passes, such as PugetPass and the employer-provided Passport, make people more likely to use transit, by reducing the marginal cost of a trip to $0.

Yet 29% of Metro riders currently pay cash.  How might we reduce that number? Eliminating cash altogether, as London has done, is one option.  A cash surcharge, as Brent has discussed, is another.  Reducing the $5 card fee is a third, which we have long advocated for and which KC Exec Constantine is proposing as part of his overall fare-simplification scheme. Metro’s mobile ticketing app may also help.

But there’s a simple, proven way to get more ORCA cards out in the world, reducing cash payments: install more ticket vending machines (TVMs).

Currently the main ways to get an ORCA card – if you’re out and about downtown – is from a partner business (such as Bartell Drugs) or* from a TVM.  TVMs are located at Link and Sounder stations as well as a half-dozen suburban park-and-rides.

But there are no vending machines at the busy bus stops in greater downtown.  Aside from the Union Station / International District Station area there are no street-level TVMs downtown at all.   You have to know to go underground to a tunnel station (which soon won’t have any more buses) or across the street to the drug store (which entails leaving the bus stop and perhaps getting stuck in a checkout line). A vending machine at the bus stop would be a superior solution.

(Consider that just 35 TVM locations generate three times as much ORCA revenue as all 100+ retail locations).

Metro knows that vending machines are in short supply.  When the Ride Free Area was eliminated a few years ago, their mitigation report suggested adding vending machines to downtown bus stops as a time-saving measure.

According to Sound Transit, TVMs cost $58,000 each (not including maintenance).  Putting 20 of them downtown would cost just over a million dollars.  To put that in perspective, Metro estimates that buses spend over a million hours a year at the bus stop while passengers get on and off — an annual cost of $150 million.  If a couple dozen ORCA vending machines reduce dwell time by a single percentage point, they will have easily paid for themselves in the first year of use.

With ORCA2 on the horizon, it’s understandable that agencies are reluctant to invest big money in TVMs right now. And certainly street-level TVMs would be subject to substantial wear and tear.  But if One Center City is truly the all-hands-on-deck emergency that it’s being promoted as, then increasing TVM deployment ought to be part of the discussion.

Update 9:09PM: Upon re-reading the list of ORCA retail locations, it turns out you can’t even buy an ORCA card at a downtown retail establishment. Even more reason to add TVMs!

Tuesday Metro presented a list of proposed services changes slated for next March to members of King County Council’s Transportation, Economy and Environment Committee. The proposal includes adding over 50,000 hours of service and eliminating bus Route 99.

As the proposal added service to only one Eastside bus route, Councilmember Claudia Balducci criticized the proposed changes.

“The Eastside took the brunt of the hits during the downturn,” Balducci said during the committee meeting. “And we haven’t seen that service back, yet every time one of these maps comes through, I don’t see it. So where is it? Why don’t we get made whole?”

Balducci said there’s a tremendous amount of demand for bus service east of Lake Washington north and south, and “it seems like pulling teeth to get service.” Councilmember Kathy Lambert echoed Balducci’s remarks.

The proposed changes needing council approval are:

• Route 74:  Additional trips added between University District and Sand Point portion of the route to provide every 30-minute midday service on weekdays
• Route 99: Route deleted
• Route 102/101: Reassigns eight peak Route 101 trips to Route 102, which will add five northbound AM peak period trips and three southbound PM peak period trips to Route 102
• Route 153: Adding every 30-minute midday service (currently there is no midday service)
• Route 183: Adding every 30-minute midday service and 60-minute weekday night service (currently there is no night service)
• Route 930: Additional weekday hours so every 30-minute service extends later into the morning and begins earlier in the afternoon

Continue reading “Modest service changes proposed for March 2018”

• SDOT finished its sidewalk survey. There’s a lot of work to do.
• West Seattle Transportation Coalition provides its ST3 input to Sound Transit. Most readers won’t like the conclusions: park and rides! driverless cars! tunnels everywhere!
• This 11-lane monster ($) in Bothell is an abomination.
• Uber discounts for Link riders.
• The trouble with bike helmet laws.
• The dream of per-mile vehicle taxes ($) will not die. Just raise gas taxes!
• Misplaced Limebikes are probably part fun mischief, part malice, but they’re not good for people that are hoping for better mobility options in Seattle.
• Kitsap fast ferry broken again ($).
• Two new Jarrett Walker lessons: the cost of peak service and the problem with transit as the school bus.

This is an open thread.

WSDOT has posted some new information about the high speed rail study funded by the legislature this session to the tune of $300,000. The final report is due on December 15, just three months from now.  Five “conceptual corridors” will be studied between Vancouver and Portland. The team of consultants is led by CH2M and includes EnviroIssues, AECOM and Deutsche Bahn International Engineering Consulting.  WSDOT’s site dryly notes that “Hyperloop technology also will be reviewed, but it currently lacks complete data needed for a full comparison.”

As part of the effort the agency has also unearthed a 28-page 1992 feasibility study. Read it and weep at the notion of HSR between Vancouver, Portland, Seattle and Spokane up and running by 2020.  Spoiler alert: the challenges to HSR in the region are not primarily technical in nature.

If you want to know more about the tradeoffs between various alignments between Vancouver and Seattle, check out our 4-part series on the subject.

After a long listening process, Metro settled on a flat $2.75 adult fare for all regular bus trips. Riders asked for a simpler system, and they got one. On Saturday Brent lamented the missed opportunity to accelerate ORCA adoption with a slightly more complicated fare system. But that’s only one example of how the fare restructuring process was a giant missed opportunity to change Metro for the better.

It turns out Henry Ford may never have said that asking his customers would have resulted in a faster horse, but there’s some truth in that cliché. In isolation, a simpler fare system is better. But a more complicated system could have achieved goals valuable to the region, not obviously connected to the fare schedule in a survey. The only goal this process achieved was to reduce direct reasons for customers to complain — an important goal at any public agency, but so much less ambitious than many other things.

It doesn’t appear that Metro had much else in its framework for thinking about how fares are structured. When discussing fares people often end up appealing to fairness, which doesn’t get you very far. I’d propose the following approach.

Revenue Impact

The most fundamental decision is whether the reform will be revenue-negative, revenue-neutral, or revenue-positive. Cutting fares increases demand while decreasing supply, as Metro can’t put as many buses on the road. Raising fares does the reverse. It might be especially desirable to raise fares when the system will have service cuts otherwise, or if the agency wants to show that riders are “paying their own way” before asking for a tax increase.*

In this case, King County appears to have decided to make things roughly revenue neutral. Raising fares might have made the restructure appear to be a money grab. Cutting fares, likely possible due to the ever-improving tax picture, might have sweetened the pot.

Differing Objectives

Continue reading “What is Fare Policy Trying to Accomplish?”

After hitting an all-time low in 2010, bicycle deaths have risen 12 percent nationwide, the largest increase in two decades and outpacing the overall rise all traffic fatalities, according to a new report by the Governors Highway Safety Association. But contrary to four decades ago, adults rather than children are more likely to die in a bicyclist-vehicle crash today.

According to the report, which received funding from State Farm Insurance, in 1975 younger bicyclists accounted for almost 80 percent of fatalities, but in 2015 that number dropped to 11 percent. In 2015, 720 adults were killed bicycling, up from 212 in 1975. After steadily rising over the past four decades, today the average age of a bicyclist killed in traffic is now 45.

While bicycle deaths are often undercounted, the report contributes part of the decline in bike deaths among children and teen to a massive drop in biking and walking trips taken to and from school. It linked the tripling of adult bicyclists killed to low car ownership rates and rising bike ridership among millennials.

According to a press release accompanying the report, “A unifying theme in many of these crashes is that the motorist often fails to see the bicyclist, while the bicyclist expects the driver to give way and is unable to stop in time to avoid a crash. This illustrates the need for all people to pay attention to their surroundings whenever they take to the road.”

Continue reading “Bicyclist Deaths are on the Rise”

Opening Day for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit‘s new train was Friday, August 25.

This is an open thread.

The $2.75 flat fare just proposed by County Executive Dow Constantine is a big step forward for the simplicity of King County Metro’s fare system.

But consider if the cash fare were $3 instead, with the electronic fare left at $2.75.

Paying $3 is simpler and faster than paying $2.75. You just pull out three dollars and slide it into the farebox. $2.75 involves either a two-step process of pulling out two dollar bills and then fishing for three quarters, or, fishing for eleven quarters.

The speed-up of paying in dollar bills only, in and of itself, should significantly reduce the time impact of cash fumbling, by removing the change element of the fumbling. That is before calculating the time savings from cash payers converting into ORCA tappers.

Having the two different fares doesn’t create complication. Those paying the regular fare with cash would pay $3, any time, on any Metro bus. The fare for those paying with ORCA would be $2.75, any time, on any Metro bus. The actual cost to the ORCA tapper would be somewhere less than $2.75 if the rider is using a pass or has an electronic transfer from another transit ride within the previous two hours.

Seven other US bus agencies with smart cards charge higher cash fares than smart card fares, and all of their smart cards are much cheaper than the ORCA Card, which costs $5 to get.

Continue reading “$3 Is Simpler and Faster Than $2.75 Cash Fare”