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.
The contention that the average commute duration has remained constant over time, and is independent of cultural differences and the built environment, underlies Marchetti’s constant. Technological changes might determine how far one can go, but the time allotted remains the same. That allotment is thought to be an hour total, or 30 minutes each way. I came across Marchetti’s constant early in my exploration of transit planning, and my analyses typically use a time budget of 30 minutes. That being said, I never made an explicit decision that I would use that time budget because it’s Marchetti’s constant. That 30 minutes seemed like a reasonable amount is probably influenced by having encountered it, though.
In spite of that choice, I simply don’t like the idea of assessing the quality of transit using a parameter justified by Marchetti’s constant. That a preferred amount of commuting time is built into human nature seems preposterous. While it’s interesting that this average value shows a persistence over circumstance and time, is there any merit to the average value itself? It feels like the sort of average that folds a diversity of individual preferences into a single, flawed description of a human stripped of agency. There are plenty of people who will tolerate longer commutes, and plenty who would balk at devoting an hour per day to it, and plenty whose tolerance varies depending on the current priorities in their lives. There are trips that people need and want to take that are not part of commutes. How long should be considered tolerable for those? Contemplating what people collectively “prefer”, “are like”, or “will do” seems to inform decision making in the transit planning field, but individuals, not populations, make the choice to board a transit vehicle.
I grew up in Massachusetts. When I go back and spend a day in “Boston”, it might actually involve being in Brookline, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, Chelsea, Everett, and Revere. That is not my relationship with Seattle and the municipalities around it. Sometimes I don’t leave its boundaries for months at a time. Much of what I need and want to do is located within the city limits. That’s not true all the time, but it’s true often enough that it heavily influences the way that I think about measuring transit access in Seattle. I presuppose that a person in Seattle mostly cares about getting around Seattle. The access analyses of the city that I produce measure the ability to do that.
Making trips within Seattle is, of course, not everyone’s priority all of the time. Looking at access at the city level is also a somewhat awkward way to analyze transit in this area. Seattle does not run or plan the transit service located within it. It provides some funding and participates in the planning process, but most transit in the city is under the purview of King County. Sound Transit, operating the Link Light Rail, exists at the level of a multi-county consortium. City-level access analysis feels like the most instructive tool for evaluating everyday transit quality, but it’s unlikely to be the most relevant tool for the agencies making the decisions. Recognizing that, I produced a thirty-minute transit and walking access analysis for King County. I feared this would be impractically slow and expensive—a fear that was neither entirely born out nor totally meritless. There are caveats to calculating and considering access for the county that are not exposed at the city level.
On September 2nd, King County Metro enacted its plan to suspend or reduce the frequency of 20 routes. Faced with a shortage of operators and mechanics, it could not reliably operate its existing service. Meanwhile, I proposed a reimagined transit network for Seattle, subject to the same service hour constraints. In contrast to Metro’s plan, it achieved greater access than Metro’s pre-reduction network. With schedules for the reduced service now available and running, it’s possible to analyze the exact access implications of the service reductions.
In the last post, I presented a restructured transit network for Seattle. Overall, the new network, versus that of an existing weekday, improves access by 19.7%, while reducing the amount of service by 13.9%. In theory, this would allow King County Metro to operate transit service at least every 15 minutes, on nearly all the current transit corridors in Seattle, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, while still accounting for its current labor shortage. To accomplish this, the restructure eliminates service that appears duplicative. Most notably, rather than having many bus lines go through a downtown already served by the Link 1-Line, routes are altered to serve Link stations that would allow the trip to continue there. It would be an adjustment for transit riders in Seattle, but one that would improve the ability to use transit to reach destinations throughout the city.
The 19.7% access increase throughout Seattle is an average, and those can hide information. It would be hard to accept a network restructure that concentrated all the improvement in one area, at the expense of many others. A positive change in average could indicate that is happening, instead of a more desirable across the board increase. The access map is useful to see that spatial distribution, but it’s hard to look at two different maps and make comparisons. I wanted to look at the restructure in a different way. In previous posts, I have constructed a variety of measurements based on access. This post applies them to the restructured transit network.
King County Metro is facing a labor shortage. Due to a lack of operators and mechanics, on September 2nd, 20 routes will be either suspended or modified to run less frequently. Routes have been chosen based on low ridership or already-high frequency, with the rationale that this will negatively impact the fewest riders. Service hours will be reduced by 3.8%.
Canceling and lowering the frequency of routes is a pragmatic way for King County Metro to decisively deal with a labor shortage. It’s also an approach that necessarily reduces the ability to access destinations via transit. I’m considering a different one. My previous examination of access across cities has convinced me that Metro’s allocation of transit service hours is subpar. By considering options beyond cancelations and frequency reductions, there could be a way to reduce the amount of service that doesn’t negatively impact overall access. This is an experiment in completely restructuring King County Metro’s transit routes in Seattle.
After I posted A Journey on the Seven Seats, a reader noted that while the post acknowledged that some multi-seat journeys would be infeasible if any transit vehicle were running slightly late, the methodology used to count these journeys did nothing to exclude them. Since I stated that a transit rider wouldn’t typically consider such a risky itinerary, I should have found a way to model what a rider would consider, incorporating information like the variability of actual arrival times. I understand the reader’s point. If I were building a trip planning tool, like the transit directions feature of Google Maps, I know that it would frustrate users if it suggested itineraries that were regularly undone by minor lateness.
Trip planning is not the purpose of these access analyses, though. My goal in conducting them is to highlight ways in which transit is, and isn’t, effective in connecting origins and destinations. This is done with the thought that the results can inform attempts to restructure public transit networks, allowing access to more destinations more often. When the matter of what some hypothetical normal rider is willing to do creeps into access measurement, I believe that its efficacy in guiding restructures is actually diminished.
Transfers have been on my mind. To me, they’re just a normal part of the transit rider’s experience—no different than taking an unprotected left turn when driving a car. I’m not going to go out of my way to make one if I don’t have to, but if it’s part of the fastest path to my destination, I’m not going to give it a second thought. I won’t deny there is some risk and inconvenience, but those do not override the desire to reach the destination as soon as possible.
When I talk to occasional transit riders, I often experience a type of culture shock about transfers. They’ll mention, at times apologetically1, driving or taking an Uber to some place because there’s no bus route or train line that could get them there. That they refer to a singular one of these is weird to me. A public transit system is a network of interconnected routes; it’s unreasonable to expect all origin destination pairs to have a single route connecting them.
