By mid-2014 — when two temporary funding sources expire — King County Metro will be facing a shortfall of $75 million per year. Metro chief Kevin Desmond said this morning that, without replacement funding, this could mean the termination of up to 30 percent of Metro routes. Continue reading 30% of King County Metro Routes May Disappear in “Bus Rapture”
What Gregoire, Sims, and Nickels could do was present everyone with a fait accompli: a construction megaproject in midstream, and the promise of gridlock if more funds aren’t made available. Specifically, says Metro chief Kevin Desmond “about 125 daily bus trips and 7,500 daily transit seats will be lost — while tunnel construction and viaduct demolition continues into 2016.” Continue reading Who Made King County Transit the Tunnel Fall Guy?
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). Continue reading Op-Ed: Coaxing Metro into Putting Passengers First
The most absurd claim, though, is that Metro is “continually asking for more money,” as if the problem is not that Metro is continually getting less in the first place. “Voters have already given Metro two recent tax increases,” writes Ennis, “in 2000 and 2006.”
As Desmond points out, King County Metro’s financial struggles stem from 1999’s I-695, which left transit dependent solely on sales tax revenues. The 2000 “increase” supplied Metro with less money than it had lost. After the 2006 “increase,” and the recession, “Metro’s revenues dropped twice as much as Transit Now was supposed to raise.” Continue reading For Just a Nickel a Day, You Can Feed King County Metro
Some 50,000 Seattle transit riders use the popular OneBusAway bus-tracking program per week says creator Brian Ferris, a graduate student who’ll finish up his work at the University of Washington shortly, and head off to work at Google Transit.
That last news has created consternation in about 50,000 hearts, as it’s not clear what will become of OneBusAway once Ferris departs. On his blog, Ferris tries to allay concerns. Continue reading OneBusAway Faces “Number of Options”
Last week I sat down to talk with King County Metro chief Kevin Desmond about how technology was affecting Metro’s … Continue reading Inside the Mind of Metro: ORCA, Twitter & Transit Unions
