In the post below commenting on the loss of the proposition to fund Metro transit service in King County, I noted the following: “Metro in Seattle’s King County has been cutting service already, as has TransLink (“service optimization” it’s called) …”
Not so fast, says Tamim Raad, Director of Strategic Planning and Policy for TransLink, who deserves some space for clarification:
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Saw your post on Seattle. Not encouraging, for sure.
I did want to correct you on one thing, though. And I’m not being defensive or ‘spinning’ here. But service optimization is not a cut to service.
Seattle is reducing its overall service hours to reduce its budget because of funding shortfalls.
Service optimization is really different. Our total number of service hours for the system are not going down. We are simply taking the lowest productivity hours out of low performing routes (this can be a certain place, or time of day) and we are REALLOCATING those hours to times and places where there is crowding and/or higher ridership potential. We are moving more people with the same hours.
TransLink saves no money (or not much). But it does get higher ridership and higher revenue. There is a negative impact on some passengers though, for sure – the buses might not have been totally empty, just not very well used. We just have to decide what a reasonable minimum level is for providing service at certain times and areas and how best to service customers overall. Overall, more people benefit than don’t. And the higher revenue means we can support more service over the long run.
By optimizing the allocation of service hours towards more productive and higher potential routes while maintaining the same total number of service hours in the region, we strive to ensure that the region is getting the best value out of the investment in bus transit service.
We can understand that the number of Service hour is a metric closelt followed by the Transit operatora union….
and for one:
total number of service hours for the system are not going down
…But unless you value the Transit service by how much time you spend on the bus, this metric is irrelevant to measure the service delivered to customer (which eventually expect to be moved from A to B)- so that is the reason why another metric, capacity.km is often used since it is a much more relevant measure of the Transit offer:
and the Translink offer is growing (and this at a a rate superior to the population growth.): see last graph of this post.
The Seattle Transit Blog also reads:
One effect of the cuts will to be consolidate desirable service into a few trunk lines. .., cities must ignore complaints from other stakeholders and remove parking or general-purpose lanes to ensure these buses are not stuck in traffic. Moreover, future city transportation levies must invest in priority treatments for buses. The returns from these projects are often astronomical, and if anything the case for them has improved.
What is layered out there is what has happened in Zurich after the failure of a Transit referendum (in 1973): A plan B aiming at getting the most of capacity.km for a given budget (service hour) and this very plan B is the reason why Zurich is now celebrated for his transit…soon or later, A plan B will be an inescapable necessity for Vancouver too…
I understand the point that Tamim is making, but when rising costs face fixed funding and the inevitable cuts start to be made, do you really think the government is going to call it “service cuts” rather than “service optimization”?