Transportation planning, transit fares, and the DC region

Today's Post has a piece, "Transportation Policies Have Miles to Go and Not Much Time," by Roger Lewis, writer of the "Shaping the City" column in the real estate section. From the title you can see it's on transportation, featuring discussion of a conference last month.

His column is on big picture issues.

We can link the big picture to the local picture. Despite the DC's region pretty good transit system, we have many issues.

In the previous blog entry, I quoted from an article in Crosscut about transportation planning in Seattle, "The coming Metro Transit cuts are a rare opportunity."

But I didn't quote the parts of the article that I think are most relevant to the issues in DC. First, he discusses how the City of Bellevue is piloting a new transportation demand management model that links transportation supply and demand at peak periods. From the article:

In short, the model asks, “How much peak capacity will the planned development require?” and, “How much peak capacity will the transportation system provide?” The answers to these questions can be time-phased, and commitments can be required of local and regional agencies to provide the planned capacity.

The last question includes all modes of transportation: vehicles, transit, bikes, pedestrians, etc. Consequently, regional plans can be connected to local plans by defining these capacities, and regional agencies can be held accountable for providing committed services. The predictability of permitting under these models will provide certainly to investors, making centers more attractive investments. In all, the focus of concurrency policy on a centers strategy creates a virtuous circle for transit: Plan to implement service connecting centers, thereby making centers more attractive investment opportunities, and then investment occurs in centers, thus making them better transit markets and ridership grows.

This is the basis of transportation demand management as well as leveraging the economic power and value of transportation. (And I am definitely going to have to learn about what they are doing in Bellevue.)

That leads in the second area in which the article makes important points about decisions about "service cuts."

I mentioned recently that just about every transit system in the U.S. faces severe budget difficulties because of how the economic downturn has impacted virtually all of the funding streams that typically fund local transit. See this blog entry for discussion of this in the context of the DC region, "Transit heights and lows."

The WMATA Board's mandate that service cuts should be the primary mode for dealing with budget shortfalls is short-sighted and flies in the face of the reality that transit works in the DC region, it works well, and for many communities within the region, especially within the City of Washington proper, it is the foundation of the city's economic competitive advantage and the primary reason for comparative advantages within the region (irrespective of being the headquarters city for the federal government) because mobility within the city--at least on transit--is relatively efficient.

Fred Jarrett, the author of the piece in the Crosscut, is a Washington State Senator and a former Boeing official, and he is knowledgeable! He writes this about how the Metro King County Transit system should look at transit planning generally and service cuts within the context of overall success. From the article:

The philosophy being urged here is for immediate budget cuts to be made surgically and strategically. They should be informed by the twin goals of putting buses where they work and where we want them to work. Design decisions must be tied to performance standards. Standards for those markets where buses work should focus on gaining peak market shares. Accordingly, our transit planners and managers should be held accountable for setting and achieving higher targets in these key markets.

Meanwhile, standards for those markets where we want transit to work in should be tied to specific commitments by cities and other public agencies to measurable concurrency decisions.

All service cuts should be based on these standards: Service should not be taken from markets where transit has a competitive advantage or from urban centers where committed development plans give transit a competitive advantage. The economic downturn should be used to make the tough decisions to rethink transit’s route structure, for both Metro and Sound Transit, saving and re-designing strategic routes, while also excising those not meeting or not yet meeting standards.

King County must also reform the management and accountability systems for transit. Focus should move to peak market share, cost-per-mile and cost-per-passenger. Overhead must become a specific focus for cost reduction, but improving the efficiency across all operations based on the quality, timeliness, and cost of the results of each transit team is the only way to systemically begin the continuous improvement in transit services. Finally, the results must be transparent, with targets and performance published routinely, so customers and taxpayers can see improvement.

Note this point, which deserves emphasis:

Service should not be taken from markets where transit has a competitive advantage or from urban centers where committed development plans give transit a competitive advantage.

If transit has a competitive advantage, then service cuts should be considered only as a last resort.

Nobody wants fare increases, but I would rather see fare increases than service cuts. Besides, WMATA's fare structure (except for the distance based charging for rail) is relatively cheap compared to most other major transit systems in the U.S. By mandating service cuts without serious consideration of what transit means overall to the city and the region, the WMATA Board is failing the region. This is a leadership failure of unparalleled proportions

This point also deserves re-emphasis:

King County must also reform the management and accountability systems for transit. Focus should move to peak market share, cost-per-mile and cost-per-passenger.

The same philosophy of management and measurement of the effectiveness of transit and what to fund (especially for local transit funding decisions by local authorities such as the DC City Council with regard to the DC Circulator) needs to be adopted locally by WMATA and by DC (I don't know about how the other local transportation entities are doing their planning, I hope they are doing it with this method).

To cut service in areas where transit is used in order to continue to fund transit that is flashy but isn't used would be a travesty.