Is it fair to say that King County Metro puts its fleet first? Before passengers, I mean? Let me put this question into context.
By some estimates, King Country Metro’s public transit system is the eighth-largest in the nation. King County reports that: “From 2002 to 2008, the percentage of commuters taking public transportation increased from nine percent to 11 percent.” Depending on how you look at that, it’s a success story. Metro always compares ridership to past performance; “near record numbers” took transit in 2011, the agency says…almost a three-percent increase over 2010.
But let’s say you are John Lennon, and you like to imagine things. First, are you thrilled by a two percent increase over six years? (Secondly, and I don’t know how Lennonesque this is, when you consider Metro’s $549 million 2011 operating budget, do you wonder how well this system scales?)
Sometimes the question is phrased as, What would it take to get people out of their cars? I like to ask, What’s keeping people off the bus? That means taking up a passenger-first perspective (which doesn’t supplant Metro’s systems management, but does rejigger some of its guiding parameters).
What’s interesting isn’t that no one has ever asked these questions–they have–it’s that they are generally considered to generate a “soft” data, as opposed to the hard metrics of on-time performance, farebox intake, and so forth. They are squishy and often derided and since people have the choice, they make it, leaving transit, culturally, as a last option or as a moral statement of solidarity.
Given all the other difficulties and challenges of running a super-sized transit agency, it’s easy to understand how conveniences and “discomforts” get treated. In 2009 I had the chance, at long last, to sit down with Metro chief Kevin Desmond and talk with him about a wide range of transit matters, from One Bus Away to ORCA cards, Twitter, and transit unions.
Desmond turned out to be an affable, if intensely focused, man who had already considered literally everything I could possibly ask him about transit. I had thought that attending a Seattle Transit Blog happy hour had helped to prepare me for such wonky heights, but I admit to walking away chastened. It turned out that Metro was not staffed by crazy people who are crazy–one of my previous hypotheses when confronted with the near impossibility of discovering, on the street, where a Metro bus goes without getting on it and finding out.
In almost every case–it may have been, in fact, every case–when I asked Desmond about ease-of-use issues and barriers to entry, it came down to money, to need-to-haves and want-to-haves. He was terribly enthusiastic about improving signage at stops, but with Metro being strapped for gas money at the time, it just was not high on the list.
Having misspent my youth working at nonprofits, I’m all too familiar with budgetary triage. But it is also true that being chronically underfunded is a relative term–if you have had terrible bus stop signage for twenty years, for example, it may suggest an inability to adapt to reality.
That leads me to Salon’s Will Doig, via NPR’s “Get Onboard: It’s Time To Stop Hating The Bus” story:
People don’t like to talk about the aesthetics of the bus because, you know, transit agencies are strapped for cash. Who wants to make the argument that buses should just be prettier? But actually, if you think about it, the average bus costs about half a million dollars. They’re very expensive. … I talked to one design expert who’s worked in bus design; he says for just $5,000 more, you could really make the bus a nicer bus itself. And if that gets more people to the fare box, then maybe the expense is worth it.
As Metro considers its new fleet of trolley buses, there has been a good deal of “hard data” discussion: the distance that the buses can run under their own power, for instance, down to the foot. Headway times. When I brought up the question of amenities, the perspicacious Mike Lindblom replied (via Twitter): “I’d disagree with loading lots of amenities on short range trolleybuses. Floor space, EZ loading!”
Admittedly, I was just throwing a grab-bag of notions out there–my point was that as Metro was preparing to buy the new buses, they couldn’t seem to articulate what the insides of them might be like, or discuss the ways they could be improved at all. Floor space is an amenity (as are seats). Personal space is. Safety and security is–how fun is to be sitting in the rear of an articulated bus as it tries to overtake the driver on a rain-slick Seattle hill?
Any retail store with the square footage of Metro would likely employ Paco Underhill to ensure maximum passenger satisfaction. It’s likely Underhill would be interested in the “case study” that emerged in 2007, when passenger complaints about limited visibility made Metro abandon (temporarily) its lucrative bus-wrap advertising. In the recent discussion of amenities, Seattle Transit Blog chimed in with a request for “larger windows.” In these climes, people are light-starved nine months of the year. They also really, really hate standing in the rain waiting for a bus that isn’t coming.
If it’s a little strange that the home of Nordstrom has made the individual bus rider a sort of second-class passenger for so long (behind Metro’s own needs), it doesn’t need to remain that way. In part, we need keep talking about how riders really experience Metro.
