Phillips-sponsored Transit Performance Audit helps Council find efficiencies to avert cuts to Metro bus service

November 16, 2009

Summary

Transit budget avoids bus service cuts of 9 percent proposed by Executive and keeps the faith on RapidRide bus rapid transit service along 15th Avenue NW

Story

By implementing solutions provided by the Transit Performance Audit sponsored by Councilmember Larry Phillips, the Metropolitan King County Council is poised to adopt a budget for Metro Transit that avoids cuts to bus service threatened in the next biennium. Phillips is also calling for a regional transit summit next year to focus on stabilizing and growing transit service beyond 2011.

“At the beginning of the year, the transit picture was so bleak we were talking about catastrophic 20 percent cuts in service,” said Phillips. “The 2010 Executive Proposed Budget called for 9 percent cuts to service, but thanks to cost savings and efficiencies identified by our auditors, the Council has been able to develop a transit budget that avoids service cuts and keeps buses on the streets.”

Metro’s revenue, supported primarily by the sales tax, began declining steeply last year as the global recession reached King County. Phillips, the Council’s 2009 Budget Chair, led efforts to close the transit budget gap and called for a Transit Performance Audit to find long-term efficiencies for addressing what became a projected $213 million revenue shortfall in Metro’s budget for 2010-2011.

The Transit Performance Audit yielded results that will help the council to close Metro’s budget gap in the 2010-2011 biennium and narrow the projected budget gap in the 2012-2013 biennium. The cost-saving efficiencies identified in the audit which will be implemented by Metro include:

• More efficient scheduling of buses and operators, in part by reducing the amount of time buses lay over at the end of each trip.

• Scheduling bus routes based on the system as a whole, rather than the current practice of scheduling routes within one of Metro’s seven regional transit bases, which will help reduce the “deadheading” that occurs when buses return empty to their home bus base at the end of each operator’s shift.

• Increased training and use of Metro’s scheduling software to identify more opportunities where one bus and operator could more efficiently handle routes.

• Use of $40 million over the next two years from Metro’s Fleet Replacement Fund, which the Council audit revealed holds excess reserves of $105 million.

The transit budget set for Council adoption next week adheres to Phillips’ priorities of avoiding the threatened cut of 310,000 hours of bus service over the next two years and keeping the commitment to implement the Rapid-Ride bus rapid transit service promised under the voter-approved “Transit Now” initiative – especially the D Line service from Ballard to Uptown and downtown Seattle along 15th Avenue NW set to debut in 2012.

To address the projected Metro budget gap in the 2012-2013 biennium and beyond, Councilmember Phillips wants to convene regional stakeholders to discuss the future of Metro Transit. The conversation would include developing a comprehensive vision for what the regional transit system should look like in the future as well as revisiting methodologies for distributing service cuts and growing service.

“Bus service is a lifeline for getting people to work and home to see their families, which is why I fought so hard for a no-service-cuts transit budget for next year,” said Phillips. “To avoid bus cuts in the future, we must come together as a region for a conversation about the future of our transit system. I believe the region will agree we should be growing our bus system rather than shrinking it.”