The BusGraphs Project

Decisions in public transit are often framed as tradeoffs. Should transit service cover a broader area, or should fewer routes run more frequently? What times of day, or days of the week, should see the greatest allocation of service? Rarely will one outcome be superior to another in all ways, for all people. This is the unfortunate reality when limited funding is a hard constraint.

An access measurement comparison, in its most condensed form, doesn’t present an obvious tradeoff. The consequences of any decision are rendered in the form of a single score. Good decisions increase the score, bad decisions decrease it. Of course, this is an oversimplification. The overall access measurement is the composition of many scores. An agency may achieve its greatest overall access by concentrating all of its routes into a section of its service area, but those who must leave that section will be justifiably upset.

The restructured transit network for Seattle that I produced—with uniform frequency meeting or exceeding King County Metro’s definition of frequent service on all routes, all day, every day—increased overall access while using no more in-service hours than the existing network. I nevertheless sought to be cognizant of how this would affect access throughout the city. While some parts of Seattle would see a decrease in access, the losses would be neither severe nor widespread. That still doesn’t cover every way that a restructure could disparately impact riders.

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

Measuring a route’s access-based productivity involves creating a hypothetical transit network in which the route doesn’t exist. For the two routes in this installment of the series, elimination is anything but hypothetical. In preparation for the Lynnwood Link extension, King County Metro will be revising its transit service in North Seattle and Shoreline. Routes 20 and 73 are technically being replaced by new routes 61 and 77, not deleted. In reality, significant portions of their paths through Seattle are losing transit service entirely.

In my 12 years in Seattle, I’ve observed that Metro is reluctant to entirely remove transit service from corridors. The route serving a corridor may change, based on a desire to connect neighborhoods to different resources (typically new Link stations), but total elimination is a rare proposition. When initial plans have included route deletion, they are often walked back, at least in part. The cuts to routes 20 and 73 have survived the full public comment and county council approval processes.

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

When I last looked at access-based route productivity, I found that a sample of Metro’s conventional bus routes nearly-categorically outperformed a selection of trolleybus routes. The type of vehicle wasn’t the only difference between the two groups, though; they each had a geographic bias. The trolleybus routes all serve Queen Anne Hill; the conventional buses connect downtown Seattle and neighborhoods to its north by way of the Aurora Bridge.

I previously warned about the negative consequences of using mode to judge the effectiveness of transit routes. But the trolleybus routes considered to this point are less valuable than the conventional routes. The reasons for that are, plausibly, due to the infrastructure that underpins them. It would not be wise, though, to rely on an incomplete and skewed result like this to make sweeping conclusions about trolleybuses as a mode. An assortment of King County Metro’s routes run under trolley wire, and there’s nothing about that that condemns them all to ineffectiveness. To demonstrate this, I calculated the same set of access-based route productivity metrics for all of the remaining trolleybus routes.

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

The routes in this update of the access-based route productivity series all cross the Lake Washington Ship Canal using the Aurora Bridge. Routes 5, 28, and the E Line share a common path out of downtown Seattle, cross the bridge, and then diverge. They are much more straightforward than the routes in the last installment; they largely lack the intra-route variation, twists and turns, and overlaps of the previous batch. There is a longer version of route 28 that runs during peak commute times. Aside from that, these routes basically correspond to one sequence of stops, in contrast to the aforementioned route 3, and its mess of variants.

Another thing that differentiates these routes is that they are run with conventional buses, rather than the trolleybuses used on the routes¹ that have been analyzed thus far. Overall, I think that vehicle type—referred to as “mode”—gets overblown in public transit planning. Planners associate different rider behaviors with mode, rather than characteristics like frequency or dedicated right of way. In some cases, the mode does influence that nature. There is a stark difference in the access-based route productivity measurements between this batch of routes and the previous ones, and perhaps something about the infrastructure that underpins them does play a role.

When trying to solve a complicated problem, I find it useful to ignore obvious constraints at first. It’s obvious that a transit vehicle cannot hold an infinite number of people. Yet when I proposed a redesign of King County Metro’s transit network in Seattle with frequent, 24 hour, seven day per week service, that is exactly what I did. I find that being confronted with a large number of constraints early on encourages an overly conservative end goal.

Beyond the objective of uniformly frequent service, only one constraint governed my redesign. I did not want the new network to increase the number of person-hours required to operate the system’s transit vehicles. This is the predominant expense of transit agencies. Keeping this net-neutral separates a pragmatic proposal from a fantasy. All other constraints could be sorted out later. Thinking in this way produced a network that doesn’t resemble typical transit service, though a rider could easily see the benefits.

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

I’m continuing to explore access-based route productivity measurements by examining four routes that, like route 1, serve Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. Routes 2, 3, 4, and 13 make their way up its eponymous hill. These are some of the quirkiest routes in King County Metro’s system. The former three are putatively long routes connecting downtown Seattle with mostly-residential neighborhoods on either end, but run a variety of shortened trips. Meanwhile, route 13 is linked with some, but not all, abbreviated route 2 trips. It might be more pragmatic to think of these as six shorter routes with a common trunk downtown, but that’s not how Metro treats them. It evaluates the productivity of each route in its totality, so I will do the same. How do these routes compare when it comes to access-based route productivity measurements?

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

I received a package from Amazon the other day, and I noticed something hidden under the shipping label. My first full-time job was writing software for its warehouse operations, and I had a passionate love-hate relationship with it. I had to take a closer look.

PackTypes! I remember those! Without delving too much into the minutiae of Amazon’s warehouse operations, they’re broad categories of packaging. Back then, I saw their use in enforcing appropriate packaging as clunky and inflexible. In my view, the solution was to relegate the PackType concept to the dustbin of history, in favor of granular packaging instructions that would impose restrictions on a shipment by shipment basis. I wrote design documents for this. I navigated the web of systems that referenced PackType and proposed migration plans for each one. I advocated for it as an organizational priority whenever I had the ear of management.

I listen to the Effectively Wild baseball podcast religiously. Generally, though, I despise sports commentary. I associate it with red-faced former athletes ranting about heart, hustle, and generalities concerning who’s a winner and who’s a loser. They recycle a tiresome collection of arguments, invariably returning to the trope that anyone who didn’t play the sport professionally can offer no insight. Effectively Wild is different.

Due to a computational error, the data and conclusions in this post may not be accurate.

I initially wrote this op-ed for the The Stranger. That publication passed on it, citing the busy election endorsement season. I then submitted it to The Urbanist, where it was rejected as a “too extreme of a version of the argument.” While the publisher’s feedback did highlight the risk of overcrowding under the restructure, I felt that it largely disregarded the benefits of transit service that makes journeys throughout the city uniformly convenient, amidst concerns of low ridership and farebox recovery on certain trips. I thought that transit service like this would be compelling to Seattle’s progressive and urbanist press. I plan on reflecting on that in a subsequent post, but, for now, I want to make this piece publicly available. I still think that it is an idea worthy of study.

In the 12 years that I have lived in Seattle, I can’t remember a time when it has felt more bleak to be a transit rider. I find the car-free life to generally be a happy one. In exchange for a little patience, planning, and pliability, I pay a fraction of the typical American’s largest expense after housing. I haven’t worried about parking spaces, oil changes, or gas prices in seven years. The downside is that this leaves me, and those for whom this lifestyle is not a choice, at the mercy of decision makers who can lose sight of what’s important for running useful transit service. That is happening now for Seattle’s transit riders. I find this uniquely frustrating. In my estimation, there is a way for King County Metro, with its present resources, to run frequent service at nearly every current transit stop in Seattle, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, but its leadership seems disinterested in going down this path.

I recently received feedback critical of the Seattle transit network restructure that I previously proposed. It raised concerns about overcrowding during peak travel times—those associated with the commutes for a traditional 9 to 5 office job. My restructure provides uniform frequency on each route throughout the day. Presently, King County Metro and Sound Transit run extra trips beyond the normal frequencies on some routes during these times. In theory, riders distribute themselves among the additional trips, increasing the capacity of the system at the heaviest-traveled times.

I understand this point, but still think it should be questioned. Even with additional trips, a lot of people could still want to travel at the same time, resulting in a crowded bus, followed by a nearly-empty one. Even in that scenario, though, it’s nice that people who can’t or choose not to board the packed bus don’t have to wait as long until the next one comes. I also feel that Seattle’s local transit agencies don’t approach the crowding problem with mechanisms beyond frequency. Different vehicle layouts and passenger arrangement staff can better utilize limited space. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that there is a physical limit to how many people can fit in a single vehicle. In my proposal, I tried to account for this by giving the Link 1-Line 8-minute frequency and select other routes, including Rapid Rides, 10-minute frequency, on account of their popularity.