State Senator Fred Jarrett, who recently ran for King County Executive, had a very thoughtful piece in Crosscut yesterday attacking County Executive Kurt Triplett’s plan to cut all routes proportionally, as well as the current 20/40/40 service allocation policy:
King County can take one of two paths to deal with excessive costs, looming service reductions, and the outdated policy of regional equity. It can “spread the pain” and make simple broad-stroke across-the-board budget cuts and service reductions. Alternatively, it can view the situation as a strategic inflection point — that time in the life of an organization when circumstances force it to adapt to new reality — and use the crisis as an opportunity help shape the future we want. To date the Metro debate has focused on the first path. I hope that King County will step back and take a broader look at the situation.
There are a number of strategic and tactical steps Metro can take to use the crisis as an opportunity to shape the region’s future. First, the failed “20-40-40” service allocation formula must be scrapped.
He proposes, instead, primary opponent Ross Hunter’s idea to tie bus service to density and zoning:
More interesting, though, is putting buses where we want them to work. For 20 years, we’ve had a regional strategy of growing “centers” with density sufficient to be successful transit markets. Current plans identify 27 such centers in 18 cities in the county, and propose “prioritizing transit funding” to encourage investment in those centers. The state’s Growth Management Act supports this prioritizing by requiring “concurrency,” a policy prohibiting cities and counties from permitting development where necessary infrastructure investments supporting the development haven’t been funded. In principle, concurrency focuses our scarce public resources on these designated centers.
We’ve said nice things about this idea before. Regionally, we almost all agree that more density has to go in somewhere. However, local jurisdictions control the zoning process and are often captured by NIMBYs. A policy like this one would give the County both a carrot and stick to help policy reflect the wider interest. Areas that desire an urban level of transit service should accept an urban development footprint.
In the past, I’ve pushed back against the self-serving Seattle view that boardings per service hour are the only thing that should drive Metro planning decisions. Jarrett proposes three metrics more definitive than the current mush but more broad than a strict boardings perspective:
Focus should move to peak market share, cost-per-mile and cost-per-passenger.
I think there’s enough in there to make sensible decisions without cutting off half the county’s population from bus service. By including passenger miles as a metric, there’s a framework to support long-haul commutes that dramatically reduce VMT.
Dow Constantine, like all Executive candidates, also said bad things about 20/40/40 in his recent “Reforming King County” release. There’s less policy meat than in Jarrett’s piece, but he went out of his way to say nice things about the Jarrett column in yesterday’s KUOW interview.
The Hutchison campaign did not answer a request for comment.
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(King County Metro)
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Instead of following arbitrary political allocations, let’s shift to a philosophy of putting bus service where it’s already working and where we want density to go.
The King County Metro bus system is at a critical juncture. The direction county leaders choose for the regional transportation agency will have profound long-term impacts on our economy and environment.
King County can take one of two paths to deal with excessive costs, looming service reductions, and the outdated policy of regional equity. It can “spread the pain” and make simple broad-stroke across-the-board budget cuts and service reductions. Alternatively, it can view the situation as a strategic inflection point — that time in the life of an organization when circumstances force it to adapt to new reality — and use the crisis as an opportunity help shape the future we want. To date the Metro debate has focused on the first path. I hope that King County will step back and take a broader look at the situation.
There are a number of strategic and tactical steps Metro can take to use the crisis as an opportunity to shape the region’s future. First, the failed “20-40-40” service allocation formula must be scrapped.
It certainly seems like some part of this policy could be implemented by putting the best buses on the best roads to the best transit stations in the areas where you want development.
And this could be openly stated as a policy of giving those riders a better ride because fuller buses and faster runs make more money per hour. If buses work at all, running a full bus from Point A to Point B quickly has to beat running a a half-full bus slowly.
If buses are going to be the choice, there needs to be considerable pressure on improving the lanes they run in and freeing them from the traffic. Eventually, in some places, the car will have to take second place to the other modes. We know by now that car traffic is like a kind of glue that fills every available roadway, paralyzing all movement. There need to be places where life can move faster than rush-hour traffic.
This is a start, but Jarrett’s ideas are way to vague to be worth investing in at this time. Jarrett talks about balancing serving denser areas with service to areas where we hope to see ridership increase. But this is basically what the 20-40-40 policy has done historically – preserving some funding for well served Seattle but investing in underserved South and East King. One would hope that the planners, unfettered by political interference, could make the best decisions as to where those services would be best improved, with some relatively simple, politically understandable, guarantees of fairness.
20-40-40 has come up recently due the need for Metro service cuts, and this is the reality of the moment. If we cut service, do we cut it equally or on some other formula – and then, when service is restored do we apply that same formula to a baseline that is different.
There is a simple answer to this question – if one respects the fact that Seattle routes are the most effective – and often operating on a standing room only basis. Either do the cuts at 20-40-40 or use a subsidy dollar figure to figure cuts (make the $ cuts equal across the region but cut more profitable routes fewer hours proportionate to their success.)
One thing for sure, cutting routes that operate with standing room only would be **stupid**.
Funding equity for transit needs to be looked at in a broader transportation role – it may well be the case that the solution is to build additional roads in rural areas – corridors designed, hopefully, to be transit friendly, in the future.
Capital improvements to service corridors is perhaps the best way to approach Jarrett’s rather unspecific managerial vision. If we are to focus on serving centers, we must build transit right of way to service those centers – starting in the center and building outward is a very simple way to look at the question. The ultimate end of such an approach is a light rail corridor operating with bus, as in the Seattle Tunnel now – and eventual bus service in rural areas.
Jarrett’s call for improving concurrency measures under the GMA is correct, but consider the fact that Jarrett’s candidate for County executive, Dow Constantine, was praising the office of Dan Satterberg on the very day Satterberg lost an employee whistle blowing lawsuit on exactly this subject (Weyerhauser’s Redmond Ridge project, represented by the counsel of ???)
Perhaps it would better to prosecute those violators of property rights and the rapists of the intellectual for their abuses of the GMA, rather than just adding more law to be selectively enforced by a crowd that has shown it’s degeneracy and corruption at a national and international level?
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