All posts by Jason Shindler

A lot of digital ink gets spilled here and on other transit oriented sites about the “transfer penalty.” As most of you know, a transfer penalty is the time you spend waiting for your 2nd (or 3rd!) bus or train after exiting your first bus or train. So if you are going from your house in West Seattle to downtown, you hop on the 50, and then take the RapidRide C downtown. The time you spend getting off the 50, walking to the next stop (not far in this case) and waiting for the C to arrive and depart is your Transfer Penalty.  According to a 2013 Metro survey, half of all riders frequently take trips that involve a transfer and the average penalty in time is 14-15 minutes.

As Metro’s Park and Ride permanent large lots are almost all at 100% utilization, the only way to aggressively grow Metro’s ridership is to encourage more trips to be 100% transit, both in Seattle and in the suburbs.  How do you encourage people to do something they don’t do now? You pay them.

Enter the Transfer Bonus.

The idea is to give people who transfer a small ($0.25 or $0.50) reduction on the cost of the overall fare. It should be significant enough that people notice the difference but not enough that it encourages people to transfer for no other reason than to save some money. Metro could make it almost revenue neutral (or even revenue positive) by hiking regular fares by a similar amount. This would not apply to cash transactions, because — Metro shouldn’t still be doing paper transfers in the first place!

Charging more for direct trips may sound crazy, but in fact it happens everyday in the airline industry. In London, the Heathrow Express is faster and more direct but cost an arm and a leg more than just taking the less direct tube.

You could roll it out for a 1 year pilot, and accompany it with an ad campaign encouraging people to use transit for the whole trip (“Go All The Way with Metro!”). You could measure success based on overall ridership and by percentage of riders who use a transfer.

This would be superior to charging for parking in the Park & Ride lots in several ways. First, it has few implementation and ongoing costs. You would need to do a fare change and update a few signs, and you would need to create a procedure to stop people from using the off-board payment options in the tunnel and at RapidRapid ride stations (my guess it is a routine that runs monthly that debits peoples accounts for the $0.25 if they take more than a certain number of phantom trips that don’t involve a return trip at the same location). That compares to a lot of signs at the Park & Ride lots, and the ongoing customer service costs of answering peoples questions and dealing with problems and hiring people to patrol the lots and write tickets for violators.

Second, the “Transfer Bonus” would also be aimed to get Seattle residents who aren’t using the Park & Rides to use transit instead of driving. The accompanying ad campaign would show non-transit users that transfers aren’t so bad.

Third, a “Transfer Bonus” would be more popular than charging for parking. According to SoundTransit, last year’s pilot of charging for parking was not popular – it received hundreds of complaints about the pilot or paid parking in general.  A “Bonus” is positive, where paid parking is a negative.

What about you? Would you drive less if there was a small fare decrease for transfers?

The average new car costs about $33,000. For the 630 people using the Sounder North line, your tax dollars are spending almost $8,000 ($5 million per year in subsidy divided by 630 people) a year to help these people get to Seattle in the morning and back home in the evening.  That’s equivalent to getting a new car for free every 4 years.

This is not intended to attack the people taking Sounder North. They didn’t make the decisions to continue to run this service. They are simply using the best options available to them and they are keeping around 600 cars off of I-5 in the morning by using Sounder North. So bravo to Sounder North users! 

Why does Sounder North still run?

It short, because politicians in Edmonds, Mulkiteo and Everett want it to keep running. It is providing high quality (at least during the summer, numerous landslides have cancelled service in the winter in recent years) transit service from the northern cities to Seattle and back.

The bus options are really just more buses down I-5, which gets busy during the rush hours Sounder runs, making the buses slow and less reliable. Here’s a comparison of Sounder versus similar transit service in the morning.

* There was no similar bus service at that time, so I used an estimate.

These comparisons look bad, but I wonder how many of the people taking these service actually need to get somewhere else downtown, and are taking additional transit service to get there. If they were taking an I-5 bus, they would have other stops downtown. The worst situation is in Mulkiteo, where comparable bus service is an extra 1/2 hour each way.

How does this get fixed?

In short, SoundTransit needs to listen to its own Citizen Oversight Panel. In its latest report, it wrote:

As it has in previous reports, the COP continues to recommend setting ridership benchmarks in the corridor and identifying actions to take if specific targets aren’t met.

I can’t see a scenario where ridership benchmarks would be made, so the next step would be identifying actions to take:

• You could expand Sounder North with more frequent service, perhaps 8 trains over 3 hours instead of 4 trains.  I can’t see how this makes the situation any better, and it stands a good chance of making the subsidy much worse.
• You could cut Sounder North all together and replace it with bus service. In order to make this at all palatable, you would need to invest in some HOV lanes and transit priority, particularly in Mulkiteo. You could make these steps revenue neutral over the course of 3-4 years by re-purposing the massive subsidy into improvements in bus service.

What would you do to fix Sounder North?

I happened upon this sign while visiting SafeCo Field today. Some interesting problems with this sign, mostly as a result of it being dated.

– It refers to CenturyLink Field as Qwest Field.
– The Greyhound Bus Terminal is in the wrong location (it moved!)
– Chihuly Garden and Glass  (currently the #1 thing to do in Seattle on Trip Advisor) is nowhere to be found.
– The MOHAI is missing too (#23 on Trip Advisor).
– It designates the “Ride Free Area” for buses, which no longer exists.
– It tells you where buses run and roughly how often, but gives no indicator of where these buses go.

You may think of this as nitpicking a sign (and I am!), but it may be useful to think about what is the purpose for this sign. In 2015, the only folks who really need this sign are folks that don’t have smartphones — locating the Greyhound Bus Terminal in the wrong location could be quite catastrophic for someone trying to find it to catch a bus. Likewise, telling a visitor to town that you can ride buses for free downtown could cause them an expensive ticket (if they got on the RapidRide buses, as an example).

Who does this sign belong to? I’m guessing some department of the city of Seattle? What are the goals of signs like these in 2015, and are they meeting them? And how can they be kept up to date in a fast developing city like Seattle?

There are many ways to improve service and provide the best bang for our transit dollars. You can improve or even remove low performing routes – that was essentially the focus on Metro’s September 2014 reductions. But, you can also tweak high performing routes and get either deliver increased service at the same cost or reduce service without reducing frequency. I’d like to take a stab at improving one of the most popular routes: the SoundTransit 550.

The 550 is responsible for 16% of SoundTransit’s boardings, with close to 10,000 rides a day. In rush hour, it runs as frequently as 11 times an hour. It is so popular, it is essentially being replaced with a light rail line in 2023. That’s still 8 years away, and there’s room to improve this busy route right now.

I propose replacing some of 550’s rush hour runs with a new 551 – a super express to Seattle. The 550 begins at the Bellevue Transit Center, makes a few downtown Bellevue stops and then goes down Bellevue Way to serve the S. Bellevue Park and onto Mercer Island, Rainier Freeway and Seattle. The great majority of people on this route are just going between Bellevue and Seattle and the intermediate stops just waste those people’s time and our transit dollars.

The 551 would start at Bellevue Transit Center, stop at one or two (though likely different than the 550) downtown stops and proceed directly to Seattle. That would allow the bus to get on the freeway at SE 8th St, using a queue jump and dedicated HOV exit lane to go directly from I405 to I90. Without traffic and stops this saves 4 minutes according to Google Maps), I suspect the actual savings are much larger. Skip the Mercer Island stop and the Ranier Freeway station and head directly to the tunnel and make the regular tunnel stops. Do the same on the return.

I’m not sure how many of the 550 runs could be converted to 551. You wouldn’t want to convert too many, as there are enough users of the South Bellevue Park & Ride and the western Bellevue stops near Bellevue Way who would miss out. But even if you convert just 1 trip per hour during rush hour, you improve the rides of hundreds of people and you might be able to squeeze out an extra run you couldn’t do otherwise.

Downsides? There are some. First, the confusion at least at first — it would be annoying if you got on a 551 bus looking for South Bellevue Park and ride and you end up in Seattle instead — though good outreach, driver announcements and signage could help. Also, you would get people used to the super express with no stops when the matching light rail service that opens in 8 years can’t match it. But light rail can also bypass the traffic the 550 gets stuck behind in Bellevue, so the effect might be a wash. And the traffic is just heating up — there a number of new towers going up in Downtown and the light rail construction will yield some serious traffic issues.

SoundTransit (and STB commenters), what do you say?

A few months ago, I was thinking of ways to improve transit service up in the Issaquah Highlands. I thought a peak hours shuttle bringing people from the Issaquah Highlands to the nearby Park and Ride would increase ridership, increase the capacity for the Park & Ride, and help some folks cut down from 2 cars to 1.

I made some initial inquiries into the issue with Hopelink, Metro and my neighborhood’s association. I got some price estimates, but really didn’t get much farther. My neighborhood association didn’t see a path to paying for it, and I couldn’t imagine Metro increasing service after cutting service in September 2014. The association did mention that they would survey folks to see if there was interest and try and advocate to Metro and/or the city to help pay for some service.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that the new 628 (which started this week) route provides almost exactly the bus service I was calling for, albeit in not quite the way I expected.

As covered here, it provides service from North Bend and Snoqualmie to the Issaquah Highlands Park & Ride. But it also has 5 optional stops (like other DART buses, you must contact Hopelink at least 24 hours in advance to get them to go to the stop) in the Highlands which would help many people folks not within walking distance of the Park & Ride to easily get there without driving.

I guess the next step is to try and get people to take it. I’m hopeful that the bus is overcome with Highlands folks that Meto sees the need to provide the shuttle I originally suggested. Our association has done some publicity to get the word out — now, how would you get people to take the bus?

• MARTA requires a separate Breeze card for each paying customer. Each Breeze card is $1. There are no paper tickets. Granted, that’s better than $5 ORCA cards, but still is annoying for a one time user. Could they be free and have some sort of “recycling bin” for collecting used cards?
• You must pay for each ticket separately.  Some of the kids were under MARTA’s 46 inch height limit for riding free, but most needed tickets. That meant an adult had to navigate the machine 8 times.  The upshot is that we got good at using the vending machine by the 8th time, but why is there no way to buy multiple tickets at once?
• Conveniently, there was a staffed office at the park and ride, but they have no ability to sell transit tickets. They can only help with parking fees. Parking was free for 24 hours, and fairly easily to understand for newcomers.
• MARTA has a day pass for $10, or each ride is $2.50 + $1 fee for the Breeze card. But if you take a connecting train, is that a ride? There was nothing indicating “round trip” — just a question of how many rides we wanted?
• Many of our riders were Canadian. They inserted their credit card, and it asked them for a 5 digit zip code, which didn’t accept letters (Canadian Postal Codes have letters too!). It also had no prompts of what to do if you didn’t have a numeric code, and couldn’t easily go back to the previous screen. So they were unable to pay with a card —  luckily they had cash.
• All of our riders spoke English, but I don’t recall the machines having a way of switching to other languages. MARTA’s site only offers a machine translated copy of the site. This would not be helpful to most users, as machine translations are extremely unreliable.
• The machine dispensed change as $1 coins, something despite years of the US Mint’s efforts, most consumers are unfamiliar with.

Space at a transit center in the heart of a growing downtown should be at a premium. Strangely, The Bellevue Transit Center has a 2,100 square foot building taking up useless space. Here’s why I think it should be repurposed, and I’d love to see some ideas on what could happen instead.

First, a bit about what is there: the Bellevue Transit Center has 12 bays, 23 bus lines, and thousands of passengers every day. It also has the Bellevue Rider Services Building which SoundTransit described in 2008 as

…adjacent to the Bellevue Transit Center. Several rider amenities are available including transit schedules and other rider information, public phones, community information, bike racks and public restrooms. The building also houses a station for the Bellevue City Police.

The majority of the stations users are workers in the core of Bellevue. They are extremely likely to have access to transit schedules via computer or smartphone. They are also unlikely to need a public phone (wait, there are still public phones?), or access to paper community information. There are no bike racks in the building (though there are *many* in the nearby area), and the police station closed 3 years ago.  In addition, just a  few feet away is a small building attached to the transit center that housed a ticket office at one point. Now, it is a very expensive and big map holder so you can find your bus in the 12 bays of the transit center.

Before going forward, you have to wonder what SoundTransit and the city of Bellevue were thinking here. In 2006, payphones had all but gone the way of the dodo bird, and the city of Bellevue’s headquarters is two blocks away — why would they need a station so close by? The public restrooms are a nice item to have, but I’m frankly surprised they have lasted – Seattle’s experiment with public restrooms didn’t go as well. Overall, it seems like the building you would want in 1985, not in 2006 and certainly not in 2014.

Moving forward, that leaves a $3.5 million dollar 2,100 square foot  built in 2006 sitting mostly empty. What would you do with this building and the accompanying former ticket office?