Metro Bus News from Leschi CC

A King County Metro representative attended the October Leschi Community Council meeting last Wednesday. Some enlightening news.

On the subject of increasing bus route coverage.

1. Metro has a shortage of operators. Apparently, they're only hiring part-time drivers from what I can tell, maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

2. According to King County, they are in the middle of the largest expansion in history, announcing a purchase of 500 new buses over five years. However, it only appears that 22 of these buses are coming in 2008 and 100 2009. And the representative said a new bus basically requires a three-year lead time. Yikes.

3. The Metro rep said they are planning on increasing service to the 8 and 14 in the next five years because they're ridership has about 3,000, but they are not increasing service to the 27, which is how I get to work, because ridership is only 1,500.

To me, this last point is the fundamental problem.

If we want bus ridership to increase to reduce global warming or congestion or whatever, bus supply needs to increase ahead of demand.

The 14 Route has eleven buses between 6:30 AM and 9:30 AM to downtown from Jackson. The 27 only has seven. Is the reason that there is less ridership on the 27 because there are fewer interested commuters or because there are fewer buses and it is less convenient?

For those people that can choose to ride the bus or drive, I argue that frequency is the primary variable. So if you're waiting for ridership to increase before increasing bus frequency, it's never going to happen.

4. Metro is under a 20/40/40 plan, which means that 20% of all new bus service is for Seattle, 40% for the Eastside and 40% for South King County. Don't really know what this means, but I'm all for more more more.

[where: 98122]