Parents know how tempting it is to “rescue” a child that’s about to run smack into something unpleasant—to stuff the left-behind homework into a backpack or intervene in tough situations. But this shields them from consequences and sets them up for a painful reckoning when they realize the real world doesn’t work that way.
That’s why King County Executive Dow Constantine’s decision to veto the county council ordinance passed yesterday on a 5-4 vote to delay approving painful King County Metro bus cuts was the grown up thing to do.
Update: Seattle City Council members Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant have proposed replacing the sales tax funding in Mayor Murray’s plan to reverse bus cuts with an employee head tax and expansion of the city’s commercial parking tax. Also, transit advocates who filed an initiative to buy back bus service with a property tax increase officially suspended that campaign this week, citing the city’s action and the “more progressive” alternative to Murray’s plan that is now on the table.
We know this is what Seattle wants. Two-thirds of Seattle voters in the last election said a very clear and loud yes to transit service. Sixty-six percent of Seattle voters approved that plan.
One difference is that Prop 1 would have raised money for a combination of roads and transit, while Murray’s initiative would spend 100 percent of the money on preserving bus service. It would go before voters in November, presuming the majority of council members who joined Murray in announcing it approve that decision.
Now that King County voters (but not Seattle’s) have rejected Metro’s Plan B to fill a funding shortfall and preserve bus service, the transit agency has proposed a plan to cut 550,000 service hours beginning this fall.
And since it appears the Seattle voters who supported Prop 1 will have the opportunity to vote on Plan C—raising property taxes to reverse cuts to routes that primarily benefit Seattle residents—it’s a good time to consider what we’re in for, what we’d be buying back, and what kind of transit system we really want.
Some proposed cuts may increase Metro’s operating efficiency by targeting poorly performing routes—the ones with high operating costs or low ridership or that duplicate nearby transit service. Some will be painful and leave people stranded. Some might do both at the same time.
So far, Metro and its supporters haven’t done a great job of distinguishing—at least in the public debate—between cuts to low-performing routes that arguably ought to be sacrificed or restructured for the greater good and cuts to well-functioning routes with high ridership that will be gutted or cut back solely for lack of money.
In that analysis, 11 of the Seattle routes that are now proposed to be eliminated were “high” priorities for major reductions, based on relatively low performance and the fact that acceptable levels of service already exist in the same transit corridor. Another 5 were “medium” priorities. But 10 routes on the chopping block are healthy ones that were “low” priorities for cuts.
Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our Free Use Policy.
To be clear, if Metro had an unlimited pot of money, it’s possible that none or very few of those routes would be on the chopping block. In fact the same 2013 Service Guidelines Analysis found that Metro should actually grow its service by roughly 15 percent to reach ideal levels of service.
That number is a little hard to visualize. Seattle Transit Blog has done it with this map revealing how much of the region’s frequent service network would disappear. King County has crunched numbers to show how route cuts will impact highways and job centers. But for those of us who aren’t transit nerds or intimately familiar with traffic patterns, here’s another way of thinking about what a 17 percent cut really feels like:
What 17% KC Metro Cuts Mean, by GoodMeasures.biz, for Sightline Institute. (Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our Free Use Policy.)
A good part of that bump came from Sound Transit. But King County Metro’s bus ridership also grew by 3 percent last year, and it has nearly reached the record levels the agency hit in 2008 before the latest recession drove ridership numbers down.
Yet several Cascadian neighbors, namely Portland and Tacoma, haven’t had that same experience. Portland’s bus ridership remains about 10 percent lower than its pre-recession peak, and Pierce Transit’s ridership has dropped by more than 30 percent.
What’s the difference? Bus cuts.
King County voters will decide on April 22 whether to approve Proposition 1, which would make needed investments to fix local roads and prevent an up to 17 percent cut in bus service. We can see from other places that significantly cutting transit service is one of the quickest ways to turn a region with healthy growth in transit ridership—which takes cars off our roads and allows the region to grow without adding to our pollution and traffic and health burdens—into a region where significant numbers of riders simply give up on transit and get back in their cars.
But first, let’s look at what King County’s experience has been over the last five years.
Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our Free Use Policy
In a few months, King County voters will be asked to invest in the future of our local roads and bus system. In particular, Metro needs additional revenue to avoid crippling cuts to its transit system. Just a few years ago, Seattle voters had another opportunity to support local roads and buses. Instead of investing … Read more
King County officials are planning to ask voters this April to approve a $60 annual car-tab fee and a tenth-of-a-penny sales tax increase for the next decade to prevent catastrophic cuts to Metro bus service and keep local roads whole.
Metro is also planning to raise bus fares by another 25 cents in 2015—the fifth fare hike since 2008—but will soften the economic blow by creating a cheaper fare for low-income riders.
What does losing 17 percent of a vital service actually feel like? It’s not just tinkering around the edges. In public schools around the state, for example, students would be out of school for six additional weeks. Libraries that are currently open every day would close for two months straight. A full-time employee who cut his or her hours by 17 percent would get nine extra weeks of vacation.
Political observers have all but written the obituary for a transportation package in Olympia this year. Deadlocked negotiators could go back to the table in early 2014, or even start afresh in the next legislative session.
Yet the impasse could be a blessing in disguise, since it could give legislators a chance to fix the package’s fatal flaw: that it goes wildly against what Washington residents say they want from a transportation package. Neither of the proposals currently on the table—which focus singlemindedly on expanding highways and skimp on nearly everything else—reflect the balanced set of priorities that the public favors.
King County is laying the groundwork to solve its own transit funding problems in the event that the legislature fails to come up with a “balanced” transportation package anytime soon. Under its Plan B option (which we argued here should really be Plan A), the county could avoid cataclysmic cuts in King County Metro bus service by creating a Transportation Benefit District and raising its own revenue.
Last week, we argued that the rest of Washington State should simply walk away from a $12.3 billion transportation package being floated by the Senate Majority Coalition Caucus. This chart explains why: Its priorities are exactly the reverse of what people say they want.
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