Tomorrow morning, the city council’s transportation committee will get an update on the Transit Master Plan—along with the bike and pedestrian master plans, the framework for alternative-transportation planning in the city. The plan hasn’t been updated in more than five years.
There’s some fascinating stuff in the briefing, which looks at the results of an online survey and an analysis of where people are currently taking transit in Seattle and how reliable it is. Most surprising, perhaps—given that conventional wisdom says people don’t take buses because they seem unsafe and icky—is the fact that safety and cleanliness ranked near the very bottom of the improvements people said would make them use transit more. (Making the bus less expensive ranked last).
At the top of the list: More frequent service, faster service, and more direct service.
Overwhelmingly, survey respondents said they wanted the transit master plan to include new light rail “between major destinations,” and to make Metro’s bus system faster and more reliable. The lowest-ranked priority, with just 775 out of nearly 10,000 votes, was making it easier to get around downtown.
The update also includes data on where in the city people are traveling to and from. Not surprisingly, a huge number of non-commute trips occur in the corridor between Pioneer Square and Belltown; somewhat surprisingly, the heaviest work travel was between Capitol Hill and downtown, followed closely by the Greenwood-downtown commute.
Other findings:
- Queen Anne and Capitol Hill residents were the most likely in the city to use transit, with between 4,000 and 5,000 transit trips between those neighborhoods and downtown every day.
- Transit tended to be least reliable downtown (where buses are subject to frequent traffic jams) and in far-flung neighborhoods like White Center, South Park, and Bitter Lake (where service tends to be less frequent).
- The report also notes that Seattle’s transit system is oriented toward moving people to and from downtown at rush hour—”a fraction” of all trips in Seattle. Reorienting the system to serve more people outside downtown might be more efficient, the report suggests.
- I don’t have a lot to say about this map, which shows where in the city people are more (urban villages) and less (outskirts where few buses go) likely to use transit, but it is pretty, isn’t it?
Figuring out all the problems with the transit system, of course, is the easy part. Next, the council will have to figure out which corridors to focus on, decide whether rail or bus service makes more sense—and, of course, figure out how to pay for it all. Mayor Mike McGinn came into office promising to put a light-rail measure on the ballot within two years; with a families and education levy, a library levy, the seawall, and a potential vehicle-license fee on the ballot in November, that’s looking increasingly unlikely.
