Traffic is why we vote for transit. If it weren’t for traffic we would cut pollution by focusing on mileage standards, we would offer free Car2Go passes for people who can’t afford a car, we would offer accessible van services for people that can’t drive. A lot fewer buses and no trains would be needed if it weren’t for traffic.
If the main goal for transit boils down to coaxing people out of their cars during rush hour, what’s the cost / benefit ratio for each transportation alternative? To figure it out, I calculated how much taxpayers subsidize each individual to not drive alone to work, broken down by transportation alternative. Results are based on spending of tax dollars in Seattle and usage by people in Seattle:
| Transportation Alternative Mode | 2015 Seattle tax dollars dedicated to this mode in millions | People commuting primarily via this mode (2013) | Tax subsidy per commute round trip in dollars |
| Carpool / Vanpool | 0.5 (vanpools) | 8.5% | $0.06 |
| Walking | 15 (ped master plan) | 9.9% | $1.64 |
| Bicycling | 19.5 (bike master plan) | 4.1% | $5.14 |
| Bus | 201 (metro) | 18.9% | $11.49 |
| Rail | 159 (sound transit) | 0.8% | $214.73 |
Click the figures in the chart for backing documents. For things like Metro and Sound Transit where the taxing authority doesn’t match to Seattle’s population, I multiplied the total tax subsidy of the agency by the percent of people in Seattle. Part of the reason rail looks so bad is that most of the money is going into construction, but that’s also true for other modes like non-motorized transportation where there’s no operations cost at all, so the comparison seems fair to me.
The numbers clearly aren’t perfect. For instance, walking and biking reflect shorter trips, so if the focus was on car miles reduced instead of commute trips reduced then walking and biking subsidies would be closer to bus subsidies. On the flip side, walking and biking arguably lead to an increase in quality of life and health that bus use does not, plus those options are needed to get to buses and trains, plus once built there’s no operating cost.
What stands out to me in the numbers is that rail is over funded and carpools are underfunded. Trains are really just super expensive buses that require a separate type of infrastructure to run on. There’s nothing magical about rail. It’s a lot cheaper to provide bus rapid transit that avoids gridlock than it is to run new rail lines everywhere, plus buses are a lot more flexible. Put bi-articulated buses like these in that downtown tunnel transit advocates hate? Voila, it’s a mass transit tunnel!
Carpooling, on the other hand, is under funded. If everyone that could carpool or vanpool did so then we’d have no traffic in Seattle and no need to pay billions for more bus and rail infrastructure. Unlike with transit, with a carpool you don’t need tax dollars to buy the vehicle, pay to fuel it up, pay to insure it, pay somebody to drive it around, pay to maintain it. While rail and transit have the inconvenience of transfers and indirect routes, pretty much everyone can find a carpool.
What could be done if we handed every carpool passenger $11 a day, like we do for bus users? Offering rebated Car2Go options if two drivers double up on their commute, offer freedom from tolls, give cut rates for parking downtown, build or convert more general traffic lanes into HOT lanes, help employers incentivize their employees to carpool. Unfortunately, there’s zero political will around carpooling in Seattle.
I think the problem is that people don’t want to imagine themselves in a carpool as it’s a straight sacrifice. Also, people like to think of eliminating cars, and carpooling seems like a wishy washy compromise to them, or something that was tried in the 1980’s and that didn’t work out. See all those clogged carpool lanes? It didn’t work! How about: It worked too well, we need more carpool capacity, and our future likely consists of shared, self driving cars going everywhere.
I’m having a lot of fun with this polling stuff, so here we go, another poll…
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Had we actually gotten the elevated monorail system we voted for and passed THREE times, our transit woes would have been reduced significantly. Doesn’t give you a lot of confidence in our political system when you vote for something and have that decision subverted by those in charge who feel they know better.
This is certainly a worthwhile thought exercise and I applaud you for taking on the question of “where to invest”. There are a few nuances that should be noted:
A one-year snapshot of spending doesn’t really capture the cost to SWITCH people from SOV to these other modes which is what we really want to know. i.e. Spending a million more on carpooling may in fact just incentivize people to carpool who used to take transit.
Carpooling might look effective by your calculation, but your numbers are mis-matched. The budget number is for “vanpooling” which by ordinance all riders are required to pay the full direct cost of while the ridership number is for “carpooling” which is a much larger category and is much more driven by both personal situations that cannot be affected by city investment and HOV priorities. That said, I am extremely surprised that we do not have slug-lines / casual carpool here like DC and SF. I-5 is ripe for them and the public cost is essentially zil.
The “Seattle Taxes” do not encompass the full cost to the Seattle Tax-payer of each mode (hint: driving is the most expensive to tax-payers). Each of these modes, and each budget category (maintenance vs operating vs capital) have different Federal funding pots associated with them and different local/federal matches based on different things. And Federal Cost does not equal “Free”.
One reason ST looks high in your calculation is because it includes capital costs for lines that haven’t opened yet (and thus cannot attract riders), and includes capital costs for entire ROW whereas buses use existing roads…which have insane subsidies in and of themselves (much larger than transit, walking, and biking combined):
http://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for%20Roads%20vUS.pdf
I’ll also just note that the Feds require a lot of reporting on transit money, so there is a wealth of information out there by system and mode: http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/data.htm
Eric, Are you counting the construction of the roads and highways the buses and carpools drive on? Highway 99 tunnel and the 520 Bridge are of considerable expense. You count the construction of rails and surely the concrete that peds walk on. It certainly seems to me this subsidy comparison is an apples and oranges case when one mode is 3579 times more than another.
Seems that a more useful metric might be to consider the per commuter avoided cost. That is, compare each option to the incremental cost per commuter for single occupancy vehicles and estimate the avoided cost of not having to widen highways, the economic impact of increased commute times and/or the potential quality of life rewards of a less stressful commute. Utility conservation programs work similarly: our utility providers can afford to subsidize insulation, window upgrades, furnace replacements, solar panels, etc. because the cost of building a new power plant is terribly high.
The advantage of “rise above it all” is that commute time is then independent of traffic plus every time a commuter stuck in traffic witnesses the train or bus whiz by is free advertising and incentive to get the SOV commuter out of their car.
I am not a fan of converting two-person carpool lanes to three-person, or allowing SOV users to buy their way into the carpool lanes. The biggest incremental benefit for car travel is that first step from one to two people which eliminates one car for every new carpool patron. It is relatively easy to find one other person to commute with. Wait until carpool lanes are at capacity before making it more difficult to create a carpool.
Numbers were chosen to focus on what sort of investments we are making to coax people out of cars. A few notes based on the comments…
– I left the cost of driving alone out of the list because it’s a boring, toxic discussion and it’s so hard to come up with a good number that includes the externalities, plus I wanted to keep the focus on which transportation alternative to invest in (not whether or how much overall).
– I left out road maintenance costs since rail really doesn’t have any yet (it’s all new) and road maintenance is shared across all the other modes (pedestrians, bikes, buses, carpools, solo drivers, freight). The idea was to focus on what new investments we are adding on top of our existing system.
– I left out WSDOT as it’s mostly user fees (gas tax, licenses / fees) for maintenance of highways that aren’t going anywhere. I also factored out bus and train fares- the idea was to focus just on the tax subsidies we all pay. If you want to wonk out, see here:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/220BF076-CBFE-4CFA-BFBC-0FC295C2A328/0/WTPIIIAFundingandFinancing111406.pdf
– I focused on tax dollar subsidies per agency instead of looking at specific levies in order to capture all support, including federal, state, and local tax supports.
I totally get that the numbers are less than perfect, but I think you’ll be hard pressed to find data that rationally changes the sort order in the list. For instance, here’s an analysis showing that buses would need to be on a schedule of being more rapid than once every 2 minutes in order to have per-user operating costs that are less than rail, and that just doesn’t happen:
http://publictransport.about.com/od/Transit_Vehicles/a/What-Are-The-True-Operating-Cost-Differences-Between-Bus-And-Light-Rail.htm
If anyone wants to take a crack at better numbers, email me and I’ll send you the spreadsheet!
I disagree that there “is nothing magical about rail”. People all over the world who will not ride the bus, will ride rail. It defies logic, but it’s true. I think it has something to do with magic.
It’s not a simple choice of investing money in transportation. If people insist on low density, rail would not work well. To have high density transportation worth it, you need high density living areas and high density working areas first. Low density is what encourages car usage.
Saying rail isn’t any better then buses is clickbait. and I fell for it. Rail, when coupled with things like grade separation, are completely worth the investment to improve people moving. Buses will fall prey to intersections and on-street congestion. Most rail has grade separation, exclusive alignments, and much more reliable time tables. The new tunnels that will connect the downtown with the UW are probably one of the best mass transit connections made, since they will no longer have to wait for the university, montlake, fremont, or ballard bridge.
Also, I’m not buying your $/roundtrip. is this for opening year? is this for a life of facility versus number of riders in that duration?
I used to love light rail, until I had to wait for it. I have been waiting for decades. It’s a lot of inflexible structure for a route that cannot be changed and is riding at grade at the ends, which means it can get stuck in traffic. It’s subject to the whims of government and the sensitive University they are digging under. The bus, on the other hand, can go around accidents, can get rerouted (that might be a debit), you can add them in (well, this is theoretical) when necessary. This is not describing how METRO service works, or is capable of thinking, but you get the idea. I just want more. If buses come sooner, that’s what I want. People ride buses when they come more frequently. And so far, that’s all we have around here. And until…..2020? that’s all we are going to have.
Honestly the numbers should favor cars, because the city is built for cars. The argument about rail being inflexible and not that great falls into the same trap: the city is not designed for rails, so of course it’d be easier to find shortcomings of rails. If you do a study of Dallas or Los Angeles, the result would be all transportation options other than cars are horrible, and does that mean they must abandon other options?
Here’s a fun number regarding build out costs: Building out the entire bike master plan for all of Seattle costs the same as building a single mile of light rail.
The basis- the 53 miles of planned and funded link light rail comes to about 30 billion dollars in taxpayer expense according to Sound Transit’s financial estimates up to 2040. Implementing the entire bike master plan, all I-5 crossings and catalyst projects and everything, will cost $390 and $524 million according to SDOT.
I rode the bus to work downtown from Fremont from 1985 until I retired in ’98. My bus commute time doubled during that period from traffic congestion. Now I’m too old to ride a bike like more & more of the retiring “baby boomers”, Walking or busing for groceries, Dr. appointments, etc., is no longer feasible so I’m now car bound for all my transport needs yet the potholes are the worst I’ve seem in 3 decades. We’ve got an overhead year long extremely loud banging noise from a 2 year old defective N. expansion joint on the Aurora Bridge that WSDOT has yet to fix along with the Bertha TBM fiasco. Our country’s infrastructure and Seattle’s main transit systems including the aging ferries are going to Hell in a hand basket while the politicians fiddle — I say fire ’em all!
There’s a lot of problems with interpreting the data this way. A couple examples:
1. In our specific case, it uses budget numbers from 2015 (the height of U-Link construction) while taking ridership from 2013 (when we were coming out of the recession). Link ridership has been going steadily up[1], and will sky rocket when U-Link opens early next year and replaces a bunch of U-District-downtown trips.
2. It only looks at /primary/ transportation mode, ignoring the fact that everyone is a pedestrian at some point, and many of us transfer from rail to bus, taking our bike with us too. You bring this up briefly, but it is important to realize that a well-designed, integrated system will have a very frequent, very fast, rail network, with bike, bus, and pedestrian feeders. That’s not just incidental; it’s part of a good design.
3. You dismiss the difference between rail and bus, but at scale there’s nothing that can beat rail. You need a separate bus and operator for every 80 or so people, but a 4-car Link train (which we will see soon with U-Link) can carry something like 800 with one operator. With one vehicle, you also don’t need the safety spacing between vehicles that you need with buses.
[1] http://www.soundtransit.org/Rider-Community/Rider-news/Quarterly-Ridership-Report
First, it should be said that any anti-transit types would happily tout this study to further their roads building agenda. Of course they’ll ignore the fact that it didn’t take into account construction and maintenance cost of roads and highways for single-occupancy users. They take that for granted; that it just “happens.” Whereas expenditures for any other form of transportation is just a massively wasteful subsidy in their view. We need to think of transit efficiency not as how many vehicles move per hour/mile, but how many PEOPLE.
That said, I feel like the city whether consciously or unconsciously, has adopted a hostile approach to car drivers. It seems like the city is trying not just to encourage people to give up their cars, but to force them out of them. Like they’re trying to make it as difficult as possible to get around by car, instead of trying to simply support and encourage other options.
Take, for example, the Rapid Ride bus only lane they converted from a car lane heading south on Aurora into downtown. How often do you see a bus travelling that lane? Maybe one every 15 minutes? Meanwhile, what was once a tolerable rush hour commute now has Aurora drivers stewing in anger as they look to their right at that empty lane. And more than a few will take their chances with the law and hop onto it.
Same with the lanes they keep taking from cars and converting into bike lanes. And now they’re doing that on 5th Ave? This is madness. I used to commute by bike to work. And, I know, it’s hard to believe, but I didn’t need any bike lanes to do it! We didn’t even have them years ago! And yet most of us with two brain cells to rub together were able to figure out how to get from point A to Point B reasonably quickly and safely. We didn’t need any big green stripe or “sharrows” to tell us where to be. You ride where it makes sense for the situation.
Transit should be about providing more choices, not about take them away from some to give to others.
Until 0 people are injured and killed on by drivers on the streets of Seattle, I will be voting for transit, bike & walking improvements for reasons entirely unrelated to traffic.
I often shake my head when reading Wallyhood comments. Mainly because commenters too often descend to name calling and self-righteous indignation on either side of an issue.
Not this time!!! This exchange is informative, data-driven, insightful, and varied in perspective — These 16 comments are a true credit to the Wallyhood community of readers.
I leave this thread with new ideas, new data, new perspectives and a lot to think about. Thank you.
@hayduke: Modes of transportation change as society changes. The city is not forcing people out of their cars. They’re adapting to the slow, thankful death of suburban sprawl with modes that encourage urban density.
As for 5th Avenue, look at this 1896 transit map of Seattle. Rail was on that road a decade before a car made its first appearance on our streets. A hundred years ago, cars stole 5th Avenue from alternative modes of transportation. We’re taking it back. This is progress.
This is the most myopic, uninformed post on transit I’ve read since moving to Seattle from the east coast, and that’s saying a lot. It saddens me to see that my neighborhood blog broadcasts this kind of anti-transit, implicitly racist, classist, “war on cars” drivel. Statements such as “no trains would be needed if it weren’t for traffic” and “trains are really just super-expensive buses” suggest (1) that the author has never traveled outside of the west coast and/or has no international or historical perspective on the issues he is writing about, and (2) that the author views every citizen of his city as having the same white, middle-class privileges and priorities that he has. Other commenters have corrected the author’s technical/data errors above, so I’ll merely add that a *lot* of people in this world (and increasingly in Seattle!) don’t drive, have never driven, and couldn’t care less about traffic. Also: trains came before buses.
Sorry #17.
@hayduke,
I really have no idea what you’re talking about with the Aurora bus lanes. At peak times, there are no fewer than six routes (5, 5X, 16, 26X, 28X, E) that use the Aurora bus lanes. The E alone runes every 5 minutes at peak times. The 5+5X runs every 7.5 minutes. The 26X and 28X are each half-hourly routes. Added, up this is 24 buses an hour, or one every 2.5 minutes.
At peak times each of these routes runs an articulated bus, which can carry something like 80 people (sitting + standing), or almost 2000 people per hour. The Seattle Times (few transit lovers there) even reported that closing the bus lanes for construction would inconvenience 25,000 daily transit riders[1]. Aurora at that point “only’ cares 74,000 daily vehicles[2]. The bus lanes reduce general vehicle capacity by 1/3 (two lanes out of six), but accommodate 1/3 of the users of the highway. This seems pretty fair to me.
The reason the bus lanes look empty is simply because personal vehicles (particularly single-occupant vehicles) are so incredibly inefficient at their use of road capacity.
[1] http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2015/02/spring-lane-closures-will-afflict-aurora-bus-riders/
[2] http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/tfdmaps.htm
Seattle was “studying” commuter rail when I moved here in 1982. Seattle Process dragged on until we missed the boat on a lot of federal matching funds and it cost 30 billion for 53 miles. It perplexes me how little we appear to get for our transportation dollars. How did Portland manage to build out such an impressive rail network while Seattle, supposedly with more tax dollars, has but one line, crumbling streets, and a mish-mash of disorganized bike lanes, missing pedestrian amenities, and skyrocketing bus fares.
Glasgow has a very simple underground – two loops circle the city, one running clockwise, one running counter-clockwise, serving the same stations. Depending on where you wish to go, you catch the train going the direction that has your destination closest on the circle. Seems such an arrangement might work well in Seattle to connect U-District, Wallingford, Fremont, Ballard before circling downtown along Elliot, through the ID, to Rainier, Central District, Capitol Hill, and back to UW… full circle.
@gregf,
Portland MAX is actually not a great goal for us. They have almost no grade separation, so their light rail is really more of a high-capacity streetcar system that gets stuck in traffic just like SLUS, and how the soon-to-open First Hill Streetcar will operate. Even if it takes longer and costs a bit more, we should be pushing for more grade separation, whether that’s subway, elevated, or at-grade with dedicated lanes and signal priority (Link along MLK).
A loop gets kind of tricky because of our terrain. This is why we have a First Hill Streetcar to begin with – Sound Transit couldn’t find a way of building a station without having it be really deep (expensive and risky) or have a grade too steep to secure federal funds. It also isn’t going to be as fast a pure grid based system. In the worst case, you have to travel half the circumference, or pi*radius, rather than just the straight-line diameter, 2*radius, plus you might still have to transfer to get inside or outside the circle.
I’m with Jeff and Jeff. The premises in the first paragraph are simply incorrect. I ride a bus by choice, because I can’t imagine why I’d want to drive everywhere. So many of the conflicts demonstrated on this blog are the result of the need of people to store their cars when they haven’t paid for a space to do so. Tonight, I met my wife at 34th and Fremont (she took a bus from home, I from downtown). We walked to a restaurant in upper Fremont. We then took a 44 across to the U District for coffee and back to Wallingford, where we had a five minute walk home. At no time did we need to spend time hunting for a parking space. All the buses we were on were packed. You can’t build enough roads to get yourself out of congestion (read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker to see what happens when you try). But you can build a reasonable transit solution that actually makes it so people can ignore all those folks in cars.