All posts by Jason Shindler

Improving Transit Accessibility for Visitors

Posted on by Jason Shindler

A recent trip took me to Atlanta for a family get together. We were staying in the suburbs, and wanted to go to downtown. After hearing some grumbling about dealing with Atlanta’s traffic and finding parking, we decided to drive to a park and ride and take the MARTA train into the city. We were a group of 14 adults and kids, and we need to get tickets. This should be easy, right?
I never realized what a pain point transit can be for tourists.Here are some things we noticed:
  • 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.
 The good news is that we cleared all of the hurdles and had a great time. The troubling news is that MARTA was a bit challenging for a newcomers, which probably acts as a deterrent to this type of use — how many people would say this is just too complicated, and drive off?  I know there are some signage challenges, but what’s Seattle’s transit experience like for tourists? Are there any model cities that handle this challenge well?

How to expand transit service, one neighborhood at a time

Posted on by Jason Shindler

Blue Moon

A few weeks ago, a neighbor of mine in the Issaquah Highlands noted that the 1,000-parking-space Park and Ride near our neighborhood was filled to capacity on a recent weekday. I got to thinking, if people wanted to use public transit in our relatively dense neighborhood, that park and ride is all we have. The majority of our neighborhood’s homes aren’t within 1/4 of a mile of the bus routes, and there’s a decent sized hill between many homes and the park and ride.

I decided to seek a rush hour shuttle service that would take people from where they live and get them to the park and ride, where there are several rush hour bus routes to Bellevue, Issaquah and Seattle. At a time of service cuts at Metro, there is no chance of a service expansion — in fact Metro recently cut service on several of our city’s routes.

However, Metro does have a program to allow cities to buy service. I contacted Metro and spoke with Michelle Allison, a self described “transit geek” working on the Community Mobility Contracts project, which allows cities to purchase Metro service. Community Mobility Contracts are a “full cost recovery” program, meaning that cities pay 100% of net costs to Metro. So if the route would cost $200,000 a year, that’s what it costs your city.  Also, even if your route happens to recover an above-average amount at the fare box, they charge you the system average. For example, if you collect $100 in fares on your route that costs $200, Metro only gives you credit for collecting $60.  For a low-performing line, this could be a benefit.  For a high-performing line, it would be a drawback.  My quick math (based on this article) is that a shuttle service like this might actually net higher than average cost recovery, so this makes Metro’s service look less desirable than it might otherwise look.

Next, I approached Hopelink, a social service provider on the Eastside. Many people don’t know that Hopelink provides all of the buses for Metro’s DART Bus service. They quickly returned messages, and came back with an estimate of $75/hr (almost 1/2 of what Metro’s average cost is). Even without any farebox recovery, that brings the cost to approximately $113,000 per year.

Finally, I spoke with the neighborhood association to see if there was interest in paying for this service.  Initial comments included concern about the cost and whether the City of Issaquah and service users would be paying for part of the costs. I’m working on scheduling a meeting with the President of my association to assess next steps.

I’m excited about my nascent effort to expand transit options in my neighborhood, and curious if my efforts will bear any fruit. I’m hopeful that this service upgrade could mean fewer car trips and perhaps allow some people to downgrade from 2 cars to 1.  The Issaquah Highlands is never going to be downtown Seattle, but perhaps some additional transit options can improve people’s lives. I hope to share my findings soon.

Repurpose This Building

Posted on by Jason Shindler

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 uselessly taking up space. Here’s why I think it should be repurposed, and I’d love to see some ideas on how that could happen. 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 Sound Transit 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.  A bike shop apparently was in the building several years ago, but it failed. 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.

Continue reading “Repurpose This Building”

Repurpose This Building

Posted on by Jason Shindler

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?