Fulfilling transit’s need for speed in King County
Improving bus travel times and overall reliability can not only lower the cost of providing service and potentially attract new riders, but every dollar saved is a dollar that can be spent on more transit service elsewhere. Attracting new riders and stretching every dollar as far as possible are critical for regions striving to meet the demand for housing, jobs and retail near effective transit. T4A member King County has a novel approach to improving transit speed and reliability.
Transit agencies traditionally improve transit speed and reliability by investing in big light rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) projects that give transit vehicles dedicated right-of-way unimpeded by traffic. But how can transit agencies improve reliability and speed of their existing transit service when dedicated right-of-way isn’t possible or affordable?
King County Metro, the transit agency for a county that contains 39 cities including Seattle and Bellevue — while still investing in many RapidRide BRT corridors — has a department that develops lean, flexible solutions that can be applied more broadly over its bus network to make service more convenient and reliable.
True to its name, King County Metro’s Transit Speed and Reliability (S&R) group works to sustain and improve the speed and reliability of the system, which carries 120 million riders per year. To accomplish this, S&R employs a toolbox of engineering solutions that range from large corridor-wide projects to smaller spot improvements that can improve speed and reliability anywhere on the network, regardless of whether the line is a designated BRT corridor or just a typical bus line.
These spot improvements are small- to medium-scale solutions to maintain or improve bus performance, like bus lanes, on-street parking management, intersection channelization, traffic signal retiming, traffic signs, roadway channelization and transit signal queue jumps to eliminate delay and improve travel times and reliability.
Two recent examples of spot improvements help illustrate how cost effective this approach can be, and just how critical partnerships and collaboration are to the process, because streets are often owned by cities.
In the northern neighborhoods of Seattle, four separate bus routes carrying 1,950 total riders per day were experiencing significant delay at Wallingford Avenue N and 80th Street due to a traffic signal prioritizing east-west traffic in the evening hours when the dominant bus traffic pattern is actually north-south. Speed and Reliability worked with the Seattle Department of Transportation (another T4A member) to change the signal timing from 9 p.m.- 12 p.m. creating a 12 second reduction in bus delay. That may not sound like much but multiplied over the 27 buses that pass through the intersection over those 3 hours, it’s over 5 minutes of paid bus driver time and even more passenger time every day — all from a very simple fix.
In Bellevue, Route 249 carrying 1,210 passengers per day was getting hung up at a left turn due to a short green signal. S&R worked with the Bellevue DOT to extend the green phase allowing buses to complete the left turn, reducing delay by 77 seconds. Again, very big time savings with a small, inexpensive fix.
The work of the four-member S&R group helps Puget Sound’s transit system collectively operate more efficiently with faster, more reliable service for riders — which is overall one of the most important qualities in transit service for most riders, according to TransitCenter’s new national survey out just a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many funding streams dedicated to improving system performance with strong but incremental returns on investment. For example, the major source of federal capital funds that agencies can receive, New Starts/Small Starts/Core Capacity, is used to build new lines entirely or make comprehensive improvements to entire corridors. The other capital funds that agencies receive are entirely for new equipment, so you can get money to buy a new bus, but it’s hard to get any money intended specifically to operate that bus more efficiently,
Although Metro has had success in securing federal capital funds for speed & reliability projects on RapidRide and other large corridor projects, the agency relies on locally-generated revenues as well as cooperation and support from local traffic agencies for spot improvements . Operations and maintenance of S&R treatments are even tougher to fund, which can result in degradation of the effectiveness of S&R treatments over time.
We’re glad to have King County on board as a new T4A member. As the T4A network grows, we can continue addressing the policy and funding gaps that inhibit these types of innovative, and cost-effective strategies exemplified by King County Metro’s Transit Speed and Reliability group.