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Metro Sub-area Disequity
In a recent STB post, John asked why we don't just raise fares in Seattle, since that's where the money is. I'd argue that Seattle is already subsidizing the rest of King County's bus service to a large extent.
A few notes from 2007 ridership data:
West area revenue: $55.6M
East area revenue: $10M
South area revenue: $19.8M
West area fare/expense: 25.7%
East area fare/expense: 14.4%
South area fare/expense: 19.6%
Ordering routes by fare recovery looks almost like the original bus route list back when streetcars were removed, with four Seattle routes actually making over 50% farebox recovery. The average farebox recovery for the West side off peak is 24% - that's almost as high as the system-wide peak recovery (25%).
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The rest of King County subsidizes the bus service for Seattle. Bus service is funded mostly by sales tax receipts.
http://seattletransitblog.com/2008/11/18/in-fact-king-county-subsidizes-...
The slog linked to your post.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2008/11/18/while_metro_s_raisi...
Interesting. I'd never considered the farebox side of subregion equity. It certainly mitigates the tax side.
Factoring in the farebox reduces the subsidy of the Seattle subarea from something like $50 million to closer to $10 million. This also suggests that Seattle will be a net exporter of transit dollars in the future, as more service is added to the other subareas. Maybe this is the opening to getting subarea equity repealed.
It does look, calculating from rough sales tax numbers, like John is right about sales tax. But the farebox recovery point remains. When some riders are paying over 50% of farebox recovery while others are paying 1% (route 922 from Carnation - on peak) does it make sense to raise their fare further? It seems like asking the north area to tax themselves more would be a smarter move.
Good point. Someone in my post made the point that there are two differing, but valid, views on transit. One is provide service where demand is highest, and the other is "build it and they will come." That poster ends up concluding that 40-40-20 is wrong as well.
After these fare increase we'll still be very, very lucky if we don't see any service cuts. RapidRide is in serious doubt. If we start cutting service, exurb service investments should be the first to go -- I absolutely agree with you. And it has to go both ways, because that night owl 49 is pretty cool but also less cost-effective as the 253 during peak...
-john
I agree with your general point, but the 49 has a 22% fare recovery at night. Going by just fare recovery numbers, we'd have to get rid of around 80% of the east side routes before we touched that.
I was speaking off-hand about night-owl service, which are very light night buses. To be fair, these are usually just trolleybuses heading back to base so it makes sense to put people on them. But, yeah, my general point is that if service cuts do come, it won't shock anyone if some Seattle routes see their mid-week 10pm service curtailed. As Multimodal made clear on the STB, it's also pretty complicated to figure out efficiency. Say you cut a poor performer in Seattle whose bus is typically used for the good performing 49. Now you have to materialize an extra bus for the 49, and if that means a new bus and operator from base than you're better off keeping that poor performing route in place. (This is a gross simplification, as all my other examples have been.)
Before this conversation gets too deep, it's worth pointing out that farebox recovery is only one of many, many factors that have to be taken into account when evaluating a route. the demographics of the people who live along the line, the access to employment centers, the relative transit options, etc., etc...
This is definitely true. But farebox recovery is a moderately good indicator of how efficient a route is. You have costs to operate that line on one hand (in theory, they may have used derived numbers), and a proxy for number of riders on the other. In my mind, two of the best metrics for a successful route is its operation cost and ridership.