I suppose because a 15.6 percent cut in Metro bus service would be totally all right:
THE campaign for King County Proposition 1 says 600,000 hours of Metro bus service would be cut if voters don’t approve the measure.
At best, that’s disingenuous. The facts matter when asking voters to increase car tabs from $20 to $60 and to raise the sales tax 0.1 percent on the April 22 ballot.
In fact, Metro has known since at least March 13 that better-than-expected tax collections would reduce the expected cut down to 550,000 hours. That’s because King County’s trampoline rebound from the Great Recession netted Metro $5.4 million more last year than had been projected. Metro is now forecast to receive $13.7 million more in 2014 and $15.9 million more in 2015.
First of all, the editors at the Seattle Times are the last people who can straight-facedly critique the math of others. But Jesus… talk about nitpicking. Are they seriously making the case that voters should reject Proposition 1 because Metro only faces a 550,000-hour 15.6 percent cut in bus service as opposed to the 600,000-hour 17 percent cut threatened? Accept their math and the region is still facing a devastating cut in bus service at a time there is demand to expand it (not to mention our region’s growing backlog of deteriorating roads—40 percent of Prop 1’s revenue goes to road repairs). If this is the strongest case the editors can make against Prop 1, it only emphasizes the need to pass it.
As to modestly rising sales tax forecasts, yeah, that’s true. But sales tax revenue is notoriously volatile. Indeed, this recent uptick in revenue comes on the heels of a 10-year $1.2 billion sales tax revenue shortfall from previous forecasts. So much for forecasting sales tax revenue. And with reserve funds now standing near nil, Metro has little margin of error before a couple bad quarters forces additional cuts.
Look, time has run out. Prop 1 isn’t perfect, but after two years of waiting for Olympia to stop dicking around with our transit funding, this is the only option we have left. Pass Prop 1 or cut 600,000 hours of Metro bus service—give or take a 100,000 hours.
What would it take to actually destroy the Times and drive them out of business, or at the least drive the Blethens out?
@1 Patience.
Re-read the piece and see that the Metro GM essentially stated a range that could be down to 450,000…
Raise some fares, cut some service, do what is necessary with driver salaries and benefits….
Sequester. It’s not just for feds. We’re not hearing what a practical long-term response to reduced funding will look like because it hasn’t happened yet. We’re still in scare-story mode.
One weird trick in that article… it talks about a reduction in the *deficit* spending. So the paper can talk shit about the extra money Metro supposedly had but not even acknowledge how large their operating losses are.
@3
Metro can’t just unilaterally cut employee salaries and benefits. The employees are covered by union contracts. The unions would have to agree to any changes in pay or benefits.
@3 Bullshit. We’ve been at this for years. Costs have been cut. Efficiencies have been made. Metro has complied with all the demands Olympia made. This has been debated for years. Time has run out.
@ 5
Well, apparently they would. And, Prop. 1 failing, they just may. What happens when 450,000+ hours of pay are threatened? Probably something the unions won’t like and may negotiate to mitigate. If it takes ‘time running out’ @ 6 to bring them to the table with the knowledge that they won’t be saved by other peoples’ money this time around, that’s what it takes.
@ 6
They’ve taken a butter knife to a labor cost level that needs a carving knife. I agree, let’s end debate and have a vote, then see what happens either way.
Buses run half empty during certain runs. Keep them operating?
@3: A practical long-term response to reduced funding is what we’ve been operating under since 1999, when I-695 pulled the rug out from under every Washington State transit agency.
Stop saying it hasn’t happened yet. We’ve been living under conditions of extreme frugality for 15 years. Metro is a shadow of its former self, administratively. The core routes are standing-room-only. There’s zero security enforcement.
Most transit nerds agree that there’s a segment of Metro’s routes that could be cut safely. It’s somewhere around 2-3%, and it’s all empty routes that exist only for political reasons, over the objections of Metro’s administration, to placate neighborhoods that county council members are trying to court. 17%, 15%, 10%, even 5%… that’s not a reasonable cut.
@ 8
Well, yeah. Duh. What else is the driver going to do to get paid?
Always keep in mind, Seattle Times editorials are written by people who have never depended on public transit to get anywhere.
@ 6 @ 9
I have a question.
KC GOP spews this (I googled and this is what came up easily):
In 2000, voters approved a .2% sales tax hike. Metro promised 575,000 added bus hours within 6 years in exchange. By 2006, Metro delivered on a mere 36% of the amount promised or approximately 207,257 hours.
In 2006, voters approved a .1% sales tax increase. Metro promised to provide 700,000 bus hours within 10 years. As of last year, Metro only managed to add 300,000 hours. Metro must deliver more hours in the next 2 years than they have in the last 8 years in order to deliver on voter promises.
Let’s say those claimed numbers are only 20% off of factual accuracy. Metro still was way short in its, er, calculations of what would happen if it was given more money.
Given that historic inaccuracy on Metro’s part, why do you find credible their numbers when they claim that up to 550,000+/- hours might be cut if their subsidy goes down?
@7 Labor costs follow the cost of living (which is rising much faster than general inflation). Metro is already having difficulty filling empty part-time positions.
Metro operates in King County, not Skagit county. They have to pay what it takes to attract and retain employees here.
@12:
People keep bringing this up, but it’s pretty simple.
The projections for how many dollars the tax increase would raise were wrong. Sales taxes became a very unstable source of revenue in the 00’s, and Metro only received about 1/3 of the projected extra funding.
Metro wasn’t short in it’s calculations. The department of revenue was short in actual collections vs. projected collections.
@ 13
So, wouldn’t that problem be a little less onerous if route hours were cut? That is, assuming I accept your premise that PT positions aren’t being filled very readily. I read (coupla blog comments) about PT drivers claiming they show up hoping for more hours even if they aren’t scheduled. If there are all of those unfilled hours, wouldn’t they be taken by the hungry PT drivers?
@7 It’s a running theme of Travis Bickle. Any means to cut a workers wages. He won’t be happy until bus workers are paid minimum wage and then he’d argue the minimum wage should be lowered, like he has in other discussions.
Only the rich having discretionary income is not enough to keep the economy going.
@8 Of course you keep it running. Metro could switch to a smaller bus for that particular run, but they’ve found that it doesn’t actually save a significant amount of money vs. running the larger bus with some empty seats. And a half-full bus is still 57 cars off of the road.
“Fullness” of a bus is a very bad metric to use. Metro prefers a weighted combination of boardings per mile, and passengers per mile. How often people are getting on and off is pretty important.
Also, most runs, over the course of the route, go from barely full, to half full, to full. Metro has all kinds of route-by-route performance statistics on the county website, check them out sometime.
Or you space out those buses during non-peak times!
At what point of emptiness does one say kill the route? 60% 70% 80%? Hmmm…?
@ 16
Show me one instance in which I argued for decreasing the minimum wage.
We’re in a 2% inflation environment, and that isn’t likely to change in the intermediate future. Not long ago Metro drivers were offered a contract with zero increase year one (but this would be paid if new revenues showed up), 2% year two, 2% year three. They overwhelmingly rejected it.
Salaries and benefits are unsustainable. Taking a haircut to them, when driver salaries are currently three times minimum wage, doesn’t put them anywhere near minimum wage level. And yet it could go a long way to solving a problem and keeping everyone employed.
So you’re false, and intentionally false, most likely, in each of your allegations against me. What will you do when the measure fails, and the cuts are not draconian but measured and offset by union givebacks and fare/sales tax revenue increases?
@15
Well, of course it is easier to fill fewer positions. But that would reduce the quality and quantity of service. I like my government services to be of high quality, and I like my buses frequent, fast, and reliable.
There are lots of PT drivers hungry for hours, because the shifts are very short, and they all happen at the same time. The bulk of Metro’s schedule is based around the rush hours, when ridership suddenly rockets through the roof. A whole shitload of part-time drivers all show up at once, drive peak-time routes for a few hours, and then all go home.
Most of those part-time drivers would love to double the length of their shifts, but that would mean having as many buses on the road at 8 PM as there are at 5 PM, and Metro simply can’t accommodate that without busting the budget.
@ 20
Appreciate your @ 14, 20 comments.
If cuts in routes occur, where do you see them happening first?
Also, if people in the outlying areas of the county pay disproportionately relative to the service they receive from Metro now, as I have read, will this worsen?
@19
Again, cost of living has been increasing faster than general inflation. Indexing wages to general inflation is a de facto annual pay cut. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts cost of living increases at 3.2% annually.
Also, full-time operators for Metro already make a below-average wage for King County.
@ 22
Also, full-time operators for Metro already make a below-average wage for King County.
Why is this relevant? Is their education level above average? Were their job losses during and following the great recession above average?
@18 The anecdotal “empty buses!” meme is stupid. Every bus starts empty. Every bus ends empty. So of course you’re going to see empty and near empty buses on the road at all hours of the day and night.
Also, without the more lightly used off-peak service, fewer people could use Metro during peak service, as there wouldn’t be a bus available for a return trip. For example, consider the person who takes the bus to work on a Friday morning, and then hangs out downtown afterwards expecting a bus available for an 11pm ride home? Metro doesn’t fit his schedule if there’s no 11pm bus.
Finally, poor people work necessary jobs during nighttime and weekend shifts. How does the hotel worker get from Kent to Seattle on a Sunday morning if we cut back lightly used weekend service?
@21
Cuts will happen as a monolithic block, at one of the regular schedule “shakeups”. Busy urban routes will see frequency cuts, which will result in further crowding and worse reliability on routes with good ridership.
In the suburban fringes, expensive-to-provide peak-time express routes will get the bulk of the cuts. For many suburban residential neighborhoods, this is the only bus service they get without walking/driving to a central Transit Center. All-day inter-suburb and suburb-to-city routes will go relatively unmolested, but many half-hourly routes will drop to hourly.
The rural fringes, however, are complicated. Rural county service is some of the most expensive to operate service that Metro provides, the least productive service that Metro provides, and also the most politically dangerous to cut. As a county agency, rather than an independent RTA (like PT and CT), they’re mandated to serve all of King County. So they can’t completely cut off Enumclaw and North Bend, no matter how much it would improve their finances. Service will remain, but frequencies will drop to just a few token buses every day.
The (now retired) 40/40/20 new-service rule softened the old imbalance between city service and rural county service quite a bit. Seattle still receives more transit money than they pay in (something like 58%/42%), however Seattle has WAY more than 58% of the riders, and more than makes up for the financial imbalance in many other unrelated taxes and services that distribute money across city limits in the other direction.
However, now that rules mandate cuts to happen based on route performance, rather by the old even distribution formula, it’s likely that the imbalance will swing back the other way, at least in some small measure. Seattle is where all the ridership is, and if you cut unproductive routes exclusively, it hurts the suburbs almost exclusively.
@22
It is relevant. It’s a skilled position, physically demanding (ask any long-term driver about their back problems), dangerous (a Metro driver is assaulted on-the-job every 48 hours), and mentally demanding (try not to hit any of these objects darting in front of you while a passenger screams in your ear “WHERE DO I TRANSFER TO THE 48? HAVE WE PASSED IT YET?”).
They’re expected to be a heavy equipment operator, a tour guide, a customer service rep, a fare enforcer, a security guard, and a trip planner. They have to have a completely clean personal driving record – not even a 5mph speeding ticket. And they have to compete for housing and other local resources with the county population at large, who mostly make more money than they do.
@ 25 Thanks
@ 26 Nice response.
re 19: “Salaries and benefits are unsustainable.”
Prove it.
@ 28
Well, anything is sustainable if one chooses to subsidize it without asking for anything in return. So I should revise that blanket statement, you are correct.
If, what one observes when the drivers want more and there’s nothing to give is a substantial concession by drivers and mechanics, that might be your proof. I’m willing to wait for that. Perhaps Seattle voters will choose to sustain.
Goldy@24,
How is it ridiculous. Puddy uses Metro and Sound Transit service when working in Seattle after arriving at office on the Sounder. Traffic sucks and the city still hasn’t figgered out how to synchronize lights like NYC does.
Now onto bus rides. Puddy rode on many buses during off-peak hours where the whole bus was Puddy the driver and some city person or two. Maybe a person gets on rides a few blocks or stops and gets off. So the starting and ending empty bus argument is specious. Why? They flip the bus sign to Out of Service or Terminal. Of course it will be empty. Nice discussion train wreck there buddy!
BTW some of the buses that run one way are the same driver Puddy catches on the return trip. Puddy always greets the driver and sometimes it’s “hello again”.
The bus barns are supposedly stocked for the peak times. That’s what the planners and program managers do. They use the articulated buses on the peak routes not during the slow times. And Puddy remembers this story from last year… So what happened?
@puddy
Well, Metro has 9 different standards for this. Because if you held everything to the same standard, you’d have to kill all the suburban service and double-up all the urban service, or kill all the night routes and double-up all the rush hour routes.
For a Seattle route at rush hour, they say fewer than 44 boardings per hour.
For an Eastside route at rush hour, fewer than 16 boardings per hour.
For a Seattle route at night, fewer than 24 boardings per hour.
For an Eastside route at night, fewer than 9 boardings per hour.
All the south-end and mid-day standards are somewhere in the middle.
The county council mandates that Metro keep different standards for different areas, in order to keep the Eastside from overly subsidizing Seattle service.
Lack Thereof.
Thanks. When I meant kill the route, I am referring to a run or two during low hours. But thanks for the update.