Seattle Could Have 24/7 Frequent Service; King County's Priorities Seem to Lie Elsewhere

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.

In addition to riding transit, I write software to analyze it and have published peer-reviewed research in the field. After King County Metro announced service cuts in response to a shortage of operators and mechanics, I wanted to quantify how effective Metro was at running service. Was there a way to acknowledge the adversity that Metro was facing, but find more effective ways of using the resources that it did have?

I assess the quality of transit in a fundamentally simple way, under the broad category of access measurement. I divide a city into an 80 meter by 80 meter grid of sectors. For each of these, I compute, at every minute of the day, how many other sectors can be reached within 30 minutes by walking and using transit. I total these amounts to create a count of journeys—combinations of origin sector, destination sector, and starting time—that are possible. I measure in this way because I believe that transit should be the mode of choice for most all trips within the city. No survey or rider data analysis is going to flawlessly capture where people are going to be, what they want to do, and when they want to do it. Any attempt to do so will be biased by the existing transportation infrastructure. I instead assume that people are going to start from arbitrary places and go to unpredictable destinations, at all times of day. No location or trip is objectively more valuable than another. Just plan transit service that doesn’t implicitly pass judgement on what people want to do, and watch them use it to meet their many needs.

When I assessed Seattle against six other cities, I found that it had the greatest transit service hour investment per unit of land area. It was the worst, though, on a transit service hour basis, at expanding the number of possible 30-minute journeys beyond those that can be undertaken by walking alone. This could just be an artifact of the city’s geography, but it could also signal inefficiencies in the allocation of transit resources.

Assuming some truth to the latter premise, I built a an entirely new network of transit routes in Seattle. Metro defines frequent service as running every 15 minutes. As a guiding principle, I wanted every transit stop to have service at least that frequent, 24 hours per day, seven days per week. That is not the case with Metro’s network today: some areas only have service during traditional commute times, others have infrequent service all day, and very few have any service overnight. I also needed to adhere to a budget of transit service hours that conformed to Metro’s reduced staffing. To address these conflicting priorities, I identified areas where there appeared to be duplication of service. These could be routes on nearby parallel streets, or areas, like downtown, where a large number of routes follow a common path. Some routes were eliminated, others truncated, some recombined with parts of other routes to encourage transfers that made new connections possible. I produced a network where all transit routes have at least 15 minute frequencies—with Rapid Ride routes and the First Hill Streetcar running every ten, and the Link 1-Line running every eight—while actually reducing the amount of service hours to a few less than Metro’s current commitments.

From an access measurement standpoint, this network improved the average by 20% over existing weekday service. Imagine having 20% more of the city available in 30 minutes. That’s what a wholesale, service hour-neutral restructure of transit service can provide. The benefit is not perfectly evenly distributed, but it is not unreasonably concentrated in one geographic area. There are a relatively small number of places that see decreases; most already have exceptional transit, and lose little of it. The access analysis confirms that this restructure would be broadly advantageous for riders.

There are benefits beyond that. This is an easier transportation system to understand and use, and more people can use it. A person at any bus stop, at any time, knows that they’ll wait at most 15 minutes under normal operations. There’s no need to remember which routes don’t run on the weekend, or when a route stops running. When I worked as a software developer, I lived with a bartender who worked near my office. Despite working and living in essentially the same places, I could rely on transit to get to and from work; he owned a car because the bus ran at hourly frequency when the bar closed. Where’s the equity in transit service that conveniently ferries around highly-compensated office workers, but inconveniences people in the service industry to the point where they need to spend money on a vehicle? Uniform frequency corrects that wrong.

I acknowledge that a full restructure of transit service in Seattle would be a difficult undertaking. Planning the routes, and checking that they are aligned with the number of in-service hours, is just the first step. There are operating costs (but also potential cost savings) that don’t map directly to in-service hours. There are matters of vehicle capacity that need to be analyzed and addressed. That shouldn’t preclude taking action when there is a lot to be gained by rethinking transit in Seattle. King County Metro doesn’t have a way to submit unsolicited proposals, like some transit agencies do, so I’ve shared my full plans using Twitter and its haveasay@kingcounty.gov email address. This is where I’ve hit a wall; my proposal has elicited no response.

This could be an innocent oversight, but I see issues with the direction of Metro, and the political officials who oversee it, that make the lack of attention an unsurprising extension of a troubling trend. Metro’s plans for the Lynnwood Link extension involve making some currently-frequent routes infrequent. Metro continues to invest in Via’s microtransit service instead of running frequent, east-west service in the Rainier Valley to connect to Link stations. County Executive Dow Constantine has promoted a Link station at the site of a former King County administration building that is too far from existing stations to create good transfers, but too close to serve new destinations. Metro’s greatest ambition appears to be a risky push for an all-electric bus fleet. None of these advance the fundamental goal of public transit: to help people get to all the places that they want to go.

Advocacy is not a natural activity for me. I want to believe that an idea, researched and presented well, will generate enthusiastic follow-up on merit alone, but I’m not naive enough to think that that’s guaranteed. I grudgingly accept that what moves organizations to act is often a proposal with widespread, vocal popularity. It doesn’t take special expertise in transit to find the merit in an idea that makes more of the city available to riders more of the time, in a cost-neutral way. Implementing this restructure would be a complicated project, but with some pressure from a broader community, I think King County could do it. I hope that the transit riders of Seattle can see what I’ve seen, and also refuse to accept their transit network in its current form.