King County Metro is getting ready to raise bus fares. So what better time for the Seattle Times to call for, um, lowering bus fares? Here’s my summary oftheir argument:
Lowering fares will make it easier for more people to ride the bus. The more people ride the bus, the less congested the roads will be for everybody. (Note that they only think this applies to buses, not light rail.) Hence, lowering fares (and expanding the Ride Free Zone) will make the roads work better.
The first problem with the Times’ plan is that most people choose to ride or not ride the bus based on convenience, not cost. (A quarter here or there doesn’t deter anybody, ridership studies show.) The second is that by starving Metro of revenues, a fare-lowering plan would actually render Metro unable to buy the buses it needs to serve new passengers. So the crowded, unpleasant experience of riding Metro now would be an even more crowded, more unpleasant experience tomorrow.
I’m guessing the Seattle Times editorial board knows this. People who support adding vast numbers of riders to the bus system while cutting the revenues that would make the bus system able to serve those riders are people, like the members of the Times editorial board, who don’t ride the bus. For them, crowding more of us onto buses is a win-win; they can say they support transit, while heavier transit use by other people makes it easier for them to drive to work alone. Those of us who actually do ride the bus on a daily basis know that Metro needs more revenues, not less, if they’re going to make the system better.
Last week, I sat down with Metro general manager Kevin Desmond in his office overlooking Occidental Park. He’d called me in response to a column I wrote two weeks ago calling for the creation of a transit riders’ union to lobby elected officials on behalf of Metro riders. While he acknowledged many of the conditions I complained about—crowding, passengers with hygiene issues, security problems, unreliable buses—are real, he contended that Metro is making progress.
“We’re coming off a period of very little investment,” Desmond said. “We had four years of doing nothing [thanks to depressed revenues during the recession] just as ridership was booming.” Indeed, ridership has gone up 14 percent in 2007 alone. Job growth, worsening traffic, and increased concern about pollution and global warming have pushed more and more people onto public transit. As a result, the number of buses that are overcrowded—essentially, buses where people can’t find a seat—has more than doubled since 2002. Metro anticipates some relief early next year, when 22 new buses will come online. Right now, though, the improvements are minor. “People are going to have to be patient. The buses are going to be crowded for a little longer,” Desmond said. “Once we get new buses we’ll be able to really strike at the peak (rush) hours.”
Although you wouldn’t know it to read the Times’ editorial, Metro hasn’t raised fares since 2001. Peak fares remain $1.50; off-peak fares, $1.25. Those numbers will go up in March, to $1.75 and $1.50, respectively. Desmond says Metro needs the extra revenue to pay for higher operating and fuel costs (which have tripled in the last six years), and to operate and maintain all the new buses funded by Transit Now. “It’s like building an extension onto your house,” Desmond says. “You build the extension but then you have additional costs, like heating and maintenance. Transit now was the expansion. The fare increase makes the program whole.”
In addition to adding more buses, Desmond says that Metro hopes to speed up service by adopting a new all-purpose fare card, called Orca, that will apply to Sound Transit, the ferry system, and all bus systems in the region; by allowing riders to buy tickets from vending machines at transit hubs like Northgate; and potentially by allowing people to board and scan their fare cards at all three doors, so riders don’t have to queue up at the front end of the bus.
Metro also plans to beef up security on and around buses, adding 25 more transit cops to the 47 already in place. That won’t make much of a dent in the overall system—with 1,100 buses in the system, it’ll be hard for 72 cops to keep track of all of them—but it’s a start. Metro’s also adding between 140 and 160 bus cameras to the 110 already in place by the middle of next year. Cameras, Desmond says, gives Metro “a better ability to deter things. The fact that cameras are on the buses says, if you mess up, Big Brother’s watching.”
All of that seems like good news to me. Complaining about the bus system, as I frequently do, is pointless if we aren’t willing to help improve it. The challenge will be holding King County’s feet to the fire to make sure they approve the funding Metro needs to make those and other improvements—instead of catering to folks like the Seattle Times editorial board, who wouldn’t know the inside of a bus if it walked up and peed on them.