Transit Equity
February 22, 2012
Making the Case for Transit Equity
Via Portland Afoot and our friend Al...
A very nice presentation deck put together by OPAL with a view on the equity impacts of the current TriMet budget proposals. A key point is the involvement of transit-dependent riders in the actual decision power structure. Only one of TriMet's board members is a regular transit rider. Sigh...
Posted by Chris Smith at 7:52 AM | Comments (25) | Permalink
June 9, 2011
Defending the Youth Pass
This Op-ed piece was passed on from OPAL (Organizing People, Activating Leaders). A version also appears on oregonlive.com.
TRIMET YOUTHPASS: CREATING OUR TRANSIT RIDERS OF THE FUTURE
Our region prides itself on sustainability, ideally a harmonious balance between economic vitality, environmental health and social equity. In order to meet our sustainability challenges for the coming decades, we need the commitment and innovation to support a permanent Youth Pass transit program for all middle and high school students throughout the tri-county region.
One of the legacies of Sisters in Action for Power, a dynamic nonprofit that empowered young women of color, was the adoption of a transit pass policy in 2000 for Portland Public School students on free- and reduced-lunch programs. By retiring its "yellow bus" fleet, PPS provided free TriMet passes to over 2,500 low-income students at a cost of approximately $800,000 per year. In 2005, the Multnomah Youth Commission advocated for the creation of YouthPass, and both Mayors Potter and Adams supported using the Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC) program to expand the program to over 13,000 PPS high-school students.
Unfortunately, the BETC is under attack in the Oregon Legislature, and the funding source for YouthPass is almost certain to disappear. OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon and the MYC are renewing community efforts to advocate for a permanent YouthPass program, and call upon the Legislature to find a stop-gap solution to ensure that the current program is preserved. From a triple-bottom line perspective, the cost of not supporting YouthPass is too great to ignore.
Economics. School districts are required to provide bus service to students living beyond 1.5 miles of their school. The Oregon Department of Education then reimburses districts for 70% of these costs from the State School Fund. It will cost PPS $6 million to provide bus service to its 7,500 high school students living more than 1.5 miles from schools, costing taxpayers $4.2 million. Under the current BETC, the public cost of providing transit passes to all 13,000 students is $3.5 million, saving taxpayers $700,000 per year. Beyond raw cost-benefit, YouthPass has positive impacts for our regional economy. It allows students to attend schools of their choosing, including community college courses, and serves as an important educational and workforce development tool. Funding YouthPass makes simple economic sense.
Environment. The Portland Metro region is facing an air toxics crisis, with many known air toxics exceeding health-based benchmarks, primarily from (on-road gasoline) transportation. It is no surprise that transportation emissions are greatest in freeway corridors where low-income families and people of color live in greater numbers, perpetuating an environmental injustice and health inequity. Transportation is also the leading cause of our state's greenhouse gas emissions. Taking yellow buses off the road and capitalizing on existing public transit will help stem the tide of air toxics. Providing youth with the necessary incentives to embrace public transit as a viable commuting and lifestyle option - creating transit riders of the future - is the type of structural shift we need to combat climate change. Funding YouthPass is critical from an environmental stewardship and health perspective.
Social Equity. YouthPass promotes equal access to opportunities for positive health outcomes for our students. Transit connects students to education, jobs, housing, healthy food options, social services and recreation. YouthPass means that, regardless of where you live, the color of your skin, or how much money your family has, you have the freedom of mobility and opportunity. According to a 2009 PPS survey, only 44% of students used TriMet to get to school prior to YouthPass, versus 80% that used TriMet frequently or everyday once the YouthPass program was established. Ridership is highest in schools serving the most low-income students of color where transit options are fewest. Funding YouthPass reinforces our commitment to social equity.
As we make difficult but necessary budget choices now and into the future, we must closely examine our values and consider the widespread benefits of YouthPass. Contact your legislators to demand that YouthPass be fully-funded. It saves the state money, it promotes environmental health and can make the difference between a student's success or failure. Contact OPAL organizer Grayce Bentley at (971) 277-9058 or grayce@opalpdx.org to get involved, and stay current on Youth Pass events via OPAL's website and Facebook: http://www.opalpdx.org // http://www.facebook.com/opalpdx.
OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon is a 501(c)(3) intercultural grassroots nonprofit empowering working class communities and people of color to promote environmental and social justice. Environmental justice is the equal protection and opportunity for meaningful involvement for all people, without regard to age, race, ethnicity or income, in communities where we live, work, play and pray.
The Multnomah Youth Commission is the official youth policy body for both Multnomah County and the City of Portland, consisting of a group of young people, ages 13-21, that strive to provide a youth voice in the County & City's planning and policy work.
Posted by Chris Smith at 8:53 AM | Comments (6) | Permalink
May 18, 2011
The plight of the auto-dependent motorist
In many public transit circles, a distinction is made between "choice" and "dependent" or ("captive") riders--the latter being those users of transit who don't have other options (particularly the automobile) at their disposal, and the former being those who do. This dichotomy is often criticized, for various reasons, including:
- Its a false dichotomy which does not accurately characterize the complexities of choices available to people. Many people find transit more suitable for some trips and driving for others (and walking for others still), and act accordingly. In addition, there is the matter of the "transit dependent by choice"--those who have the ability (financial and legal) to drive but choose not to own a car, and thus are at the mercy of the local transit authority--are they "choice riders" or not?
- It may encourage inequitable behavior by transit agencies, such as neglecting the needs of dependent riders rather than treating them like valued customers. At a minimum, there is tremendous pressure for transit agencies to focus on attracting new riders, which can lead them to take their existing ones for granted.
- It promotes "auto-normative" thinking and the "desperate or dedicated theory", framing public transit as a manifestly inferior solution--something which is only selected either as a mode of last resort, or one which represents an altruistic sacrifice of some sort on the part of the user. Of course, many public transit offerings are demonstrably inferior to driving (from the point of view of the user)--but in some areas the reverse is true.
And with the last bullet in mind, it is useful (as an intellectual exercise, if nothing else) to invert the usual assumptions---thus this article is about the "two types of motorists": auto-dependent ones, and choice drivers.
The plight of auto-dependency
A dependent driver is one for whom there are no reliable travel options other than the automobile--i.e. one who does not reasonable access to public transit and is forced to drive (or ride in) an automobile to get anywhere, particularly for longer distances for which walking is impractical. A choice driver, on the other hand, is one who has good access to transit, but drives anyway. (There are also the auto-dependent-by-choice; those who could afford to live in transit-friendly places like the Pearl, but instead choose to live in transit-hostile neighborhoods, like, say, Cooper Mountain).
Many of the transit critics who read this blog probably are scoffing right about now, and consider this whole discussion preposterous. Even some transit supporters probably are having a good chuckle right now, and wondering to themselves if there might be medications I forgot to take. And--such auto-normative thinking can be forgiven; especially in the United States. The US has spent the better part of a century promoting the automobile--culturally, economically, and politically--that driving a car is ingrained into most Americans' thinking. And for the linguistically inclined, the word "automobile" contains the Greek stem "auto", meaning self--a prefix also found in other words like "autonomous", "autodidact", and "automatic". To many, having a car means independence, not dependence--it means being able to travel at a time that suits you, rather than at a time that suits the transit agency.
Independent of what?
However, this notion of automotive independence is dependent on a whole lot of things. It's dependent on a massive network of paved roads connecting the vast majority of developed places in the land, as well as quite a few undeveloped locations as well. Without this network of pavement, many types of automobiles would be impractical, as would high-speed travel. It depends, likewise, on a massive fuel distribution infrastructure that provides cheap gas at convenient locations--pipelines and shipping terminals, military force to defend these, refineries, fuel trucks, and gas stations. Were this not there, modern gasoline-powered equipment simply would not run. (Other power sources may still be tractable). And it depends on the existence of other automotive industries--auto parts, towing services, and repair shops, most notably. During the early history of the automobile, it was commonly expected that those who could drive cars should also know how to fix them; it wasn't until a critical mass of automobiles were on the road that professional auto repair became a lucrative industry. (In some parts of the world, this is still the case).
Automobile independence also assumes that one can drive. There are many people who cannot--due to age, physical disability, or having the privilege revoked by society.
That said, the US has, in the vast majority of the country, the necessary infrastructure to make driving convenient. We've got the millions of miles of paved roads, the gas stations and pipelines and refineries and fleet of tanker trucks. We've got car dealerships and repair shops in every town, and the world's biggest military. And we've got an aggressive lobby that makes sure none of this is threatened.
The economics of getting places
The economics of transit vs the economics of auto ownership also play a part. Driving a car has several barriers to entry: You have to be able to afford the up-front capital costs to buy one (or qualify for financing)--even clunkers aren't cheap--and you have to be able to license and insure yourself (or else break the law). Many of the costs associated with automobile use are fixed--if you have a car, you pay for insurance, license fees, taxes, and a good part of the depreciation regardless of whether you drive it or not. Car-sharing services can mitigate the expense somewhat, but not completely. Transit, on the other hand, has a very low barrier to entry for users--you only pay for what you use; and most systems provide volume discounts to frequent riders of some sort or another. Thus, its a lot easier to be priced out of car ownership than it is to be priced off the bus. Unless, there is no bus.
That was now. This is later
With all that said, there are very good reasons to be concerned about maintaining the automobile infrastructure into the future; and very good reasons why auto dependence is a problem for the poor today.
The Portland area has, over the years, seen a shift in poverty from inner-city neighborhoods to neighborhoods further flung out. It wasn't that long ago that inner neighborhoods like Albina had bad reputations (partially due to legitimate crime and poverty statistics, partially due to racist attitudes)--nowadays, the poor are more likely to be found in places like Rockwood, Aloha, King City, or south of Lents. Close-in real estate is generally expensive in Portland. And the denser parts of town are where the best transit service is. Rockwood and other parts of SE are reasonably well-served by transit (with MAX lines and parallel frequent service lines); but some of the poor neighborhoods in Washington and Clackamas Countys are not. And looking beyond the region--quite a bit of poverty to be found in the country is in rural areas, where transit (even of the bare-bones variety) simply does not exist. In many of these places, people are truly auto-dependent--there is no other option.
And if you're poor, owning an automobile is an expensive proposition. A 2003 study by the Surfact Transportation Policy Project found that on average, Americans spend 20% of the household budget on transportation; a figure that for the poor, balloons to over 40%. And this was nearly a decade ago, well before the days of $4/gallon gas. The study also found that a major contributor to transportation expense was sprawl--denser cities had lower transportation costs that sprawled-out ones. A report in California found that poor families who drove spent 19% of their budget on transportation, whereas poor families which used transit only spent 2% of their budgets on transportation. And a recent report based on data released by the Oil Price Information Service shows that fuel costs are approaching 9% of the average household budget.
If you live in area without transit service, this is like an additional tax, and a regressive one at that.
Obviously, active transportation (walking, biking, etc.) is another alternative. Most of us can walk, and many who can't afford automobiles can afford bicycles (which do not need fueling). But the areas in which one is most likely to find auto-dependency, are frequently areas which are inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists: rural communities with narrow roads and no sidewalks; suburbs where the distance from the home to even the most basic services is measured in miles; and places with busy and dangerous highways. In some parts of the country, there remains political and cultural resistance to active transport--bikers (other than children), in particular, are perceived as weirdos who have no business being on the roads. In many auto-dependent neighborhoods, one finds a double-whammy: no transit, and biking/walking are simply not resonable alternatives. (The transit-dependent are more likely to have good human-powered options available).
And my fear is--things are going to get worse. A big reason I'm a transit supporter is not because I'm hostile to cars (I do drive; though my household is a low-mileage one); but because I'm terrified that sooner or later, the US is going to get the stool kicked out from underneath it. Not by domestic policies demanded by the local green crowd; but by continually rising oil prices (as production gets more difficult, and emerging powers such as China and Brazil start to drive more and increase their thirst for oil), and a decaying infrastructure that we seem to have more and more trouble maintaining. And that's ignoring the environmental consequences of fossil fuels. The nation is dependent on cheap oil, and my suspicion is that this dependency will come back to bite us hard.
For those of us who live in areas with good quality transit, the transition will be painful (oil prices affect all sectors of the economy, not just personal transport), but the pain will be mitigated. But for the unfortunate auto-dependent motorists, it will be quite a shock.
And then this post won't seem so ridiculous after all.
Posted by EngineerScotty at 12:00 AM | Comments (11) | Permalink
May 17, 2011
What Brookings Has to Say About Portland's Transit Equity
A recent Brookings Institute report puts Portland at the 12th best transit city in the U.S. This has gotten a lot of local media play because it contrasts with a recent popular media publication that put us first (more than a few of us were skeptical about that, if happy to accept the accolade).
But more interesting is that Brookings measures some interesting things. For example, nationally 30% of jobs in major metros were found to be accessible by transit within 90 minutes (thanks to Portland Afoot for that pointer).
Portland's profile shows that we do better - about 40% of jobs.
But some of the other data in the profile is also very interesting. On all three measures: coverage, frequency and access, Portland does better by low-income neighborhoods than it does for high-income neighborhoods. This essentially confirms the core conclusion of our own Transit Equity analysis based on Transit Score.
Not of course that we shouldn't strive to do better on all measures.
Posted by Chris Smith at 12:33 AM | Comments (7) | Permalink
March 23, 2011
Transportation Equity Event
Sponsored by T4American and a broad range of organizations:
Transportation is crucial to ensuring opportunity for all - connecting us to jobs, schools, housing, healthcare, and grocery stores. But millions of working families and people of color live in communities where quality transportation options are unaffordable, unreliable, or nonexistent.The type of transportation system we build, where we put it, who builds it, and how we
operate it have an enormous impact on our economy, our climate and our health.To learn more about these issues and what we can do about it, we invite you to a box lunch event:
Who Gets Access?
Transportation Equity from the National to the Local
A box-lunch event and conversation with:Radhika Fox, Federal Policy Director - PolicyLink and Executive Committee Member - Transportation For America
Lillian Shirley, President-elect - National Association of City and County Health Officials and Director - Multnomah County Health Department
Alejandro Queral, Healthy Communities Program Director - Multnomah County Health
DepartmentRon Ruggiero, Executive Director - Service Employees International Union Local 49
Where:
SEIU Local 49 Hall
3536 SE 26th Ave. (at Powell Blvd.)
Portland, OR
on bus lines 9 and 10When:
Wednesday, April 6
11:30 am - 2:00 pmBe on time and eat! A limited number of box lunches will be available starting at 11:30 am.
Presentations will start promptly at 12:00 pm. Q&A with the panel will be from 1:00 pm to 1:45 pm.RSVP to chris.rall@t4america.org. Reservations are encouraged.
This event sponsored by:
1,000 Friends of Oregon
Bicycle Transportation Alliance
Coalition for a Livable Future
Community Cycling Center
Josiah Hill III Clinic
Northwest Health Foundation
OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon
Oregon Public Health Institute
Oregon Tradeswomen, Inc.
PolicyLink
Upstream Public Health
SEIU Local 49
Transportation For America
Urban League of Portland
Willamette Pedestrian Coalition
Posted by Chris Smith at 5:56 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink
January 17, 2011
Updated: Transit Equity: Where Are You?
Update:
I am mortified. In the comments, Michael has identified a methodological error in the way I analyzed proximity to a regional center (downtown is after all, also a regional center). But in the process of re-computing those numbers, I discovered a computation error in my calculations for the system center, so both new correlation coefficients were incorrect, and my conclusion about poly-centrism unsupported...
Mea culpa... corrections below.
Original Post:
As promised, I'm continuing to add data to our transit equity data set. The latest addition is distance based - how far are you from a center.
The concept behind the Region 2040 plan is that we are going to become a poly-centric region. Portland's central city will remain the center of the region, but we then also have 7 regional centers and a number of town centers. Housing, employment and services should cluster around each of these centers, reducing the need to travel long distances on a daily basis.
So today's question is how strong is the effect of these centers on transit service? To figure this out, I calculated two distances for each block group:
1) The center of the block group to the 'transit system center' (I used SW 5th and Yamhill where all four LRT lines meet as my 'system center').
2) The center of the block group to the nearest regional center (I used the transit center in each regional center as that point, pulled from a TriMet data set on the CivicApps site).
Those columns have been added to our correlation data set spreadsheet.
The correlation results (negative because service decreases as you get further from a center):
- Distance to system center:
-0.58-0.68 - Distance to nearest regional center:
-0.08-0.48
By comparison, our correlation coefficient for density is 0.53, so distance from the system center is even more predictive of service level than density (although they certainly vary together to a strong degree - the correlation coefficient between density and distance from the center is 0.53).
The more significant finding is that the correlation for distance to a regional center is weak, our transit system is NOT very poly-centric yet. That shouldn't surprise anyone, but it's interesting to put a number on it. Unsupported by the revised data... In fact, the correlation with distance to a regional center rivals density as a reasonably strong correlation.
Posted by Chris Smith at 10:22 PM | Comments (6) | Permalink
January 4, 2011
Transit Equity: Scale and Correlation
Yesterday I noted that the ACS 5-year/Census block group demographic correlations were significantly lower than the 2000 Census tract correlations.
So let's look at the differences:
- Different (newer) data
- Different areas - we included all Census tracts that touched any part of the service district, while we only used block groups that were substantially inside the service district
- Finer-grained data (about 3 block groups for every tract)
So to start peeling it back, let's isolate some of those differences. First let's recall the 2000 Census tract correlations.
- Transit Score/Density: 0.67 (1.00 would be perfect correlation)
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.40
- Transit Score/Median 1999 Household Income: -0.52
So for apples/apples, let's take ACS 2009 data for the same census tracts and correlate (spreadsheet here):
- Transit Score/Density: 0.67
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.28
- Transit Score/Median Household Income: -0.50
That's a lot closer! What I think we see is that over the last decade, we've become more racially diverse and the population groups of color have dispersed through more of the region.
So next let's deal with the fringes of the region. If we drop the tracts largely outside the service district here's what we get (spreadsheet):
- Transit Score/Density: 0.62
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.28
- Transit Score/Median Household Income: -0.50
So the density correlation drops, because we just dropped out some tracts with low density and effectively no transit service.
But the big jump comes when we move to block groups (spreadsheet):
- Transit Score/Density: 0.53
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.23
- Transit Score/Median Household Income: -0.39
So the big learning for me is that scale matters - looking at a census tract level averages things out too much, and we're likely to have more insights analyzing block groups.
[As always, better statisticians are welcome to correct me.]
What's next - we'll accumulate some more metrics for possible correlation, then we'll start to look at outliers (things that don't have service levels the correlations would predict) and hopefully we'll recruit a real statistician who can help us do some multivariate correlations.
Posted by Chris Smith at 12:15 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 3, 2011
Transit Equity: Starting to Look at ACS Data
You'll recall that back in October we did our first correlation between Transit Score and several demographic factors, based on the 2000 Census. We came up with the following correlation coefficients:
- Transit Score/Density: 0.67 (1.00 would be perfect correlation)
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.40
- Transit Score/Median 1999 Household Income: -0.52
Based on that, we set two key goals for our next steps:
- Get newer data!
- Look at finer-grained information, specifically at the Census "block group" level rather than the Census tracts we had used for our first analysis
We went on to compute Transit Scores at the block group level in November.
On December 14th, while we were busy getting ready for the holidays (and playing with Transit Appliances) the Census released the first set of American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data.
ACS is important because it is updated continuously (not just every 10 years) and because it contains much more demographic information than collected in the Census. But it is a sampling process, not a census, so the data is an estimate.
The 5-year data represents an average of ACS data collected between 2005 and 2009, and is the first data set that gives results down to the block group level. So over the break between Christmas and New Years I grabbed the data and matched it up with our Transit Scores. You can find the correlated spreadsheet here (MS Excel). And here are the correlation coefficients:
- Transit Score/Density: 0.53
- Transit Score/Percent non-white: 0.23
- Transit Score/Median Household Income: -0.39
Obviously the first take is that the correlations are weaker than they were for the prior data set. But the reasons need a little bit of looking into. Tomorrow we'll explore some of the possible factors...
Posted by Chris Smith at 12:56 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink
December 5, 2010
Rethinking transit: Funding and equity
After a whole lot of conversation on the particulars of TriMet and the agency's present situation, time to take a few steps back, and give some thought to how things might be different. We'll start with two issues which are frequently conflated (and some say, rightly so)--funding and equity. By "funding", for purposes of this post, I speak mainly of operational subsidies coming from general taxes--capital projects are a different ball of wax. I do assume that some subsidy is required--there are few first-world cities out there who have complete transit systems which are operationally profitable. I also assume that this is OK--transit is a public good, and on that basis ought to be entitled to some level of public subsidy. I know that some readers object to this, but that debate is not the topic of this thread.
Equity, in this context, refers to the levels of service provided to different parts of the metro area. Chris has been spending a great deal of time mapping service levels, and analyzing the results; here we consider the question of what should be, rather than what is.
There's a reason these two topics are lumped together in this thread. One common "formula" for equity is that transit service ought to, in some fashion, be proportional to taxes paid. This is a common refrain heard often from taxpayers in suburban areas with high payrolls and minimal transit service; recently we received news that some business leaders in Boring want to withdraw from TriMet. We'll get to that debate in a moment.
What sort of taxes?
If one makes the assumption that transit is to be partially funded by general taxation (an assumption that is being made for purposes of this discussion)--the first question becomes: What sort of taxes? Ad valorem property taxes? Income taxes? Payroll taxes? Sales tax? Other forms of consumption tax? Fees on unrelated activity (i.e. development charges)?
TriMet, of course, uses the payroll tax as its primary funding source--according to PortlandAfoot, the payroll tax provides around 55% of TriMet's operating revenue. Payroll taxes have some advantages--they're easy to collect (businesses who pay them have to process payroll taxes for other purposes such as Social Security and Medicare; and employees need not do a thing); they have less effect on minimum-wage employees (as the taxes collected don't count towards the wage paid); and they are relatively stable. On the down side, they are less stable than property taxes.
Other common forms of taxation would be difficult to apply in Oregon.
- Levying a local income tax would be a big headache for taxpayers, who would have to prepare (potentially) a third set of tax returns in addition to the state and federal forms they have to fill out now. (Four years ago, the City of Portland considered a city income tax to help fund schools--an idea which was quickly rejected).
- Property taxes have the advantage of stability, and many transit authorities use these for funding. A major limitation on use of property taxes in Oregon is 1990's Ballot Measure 5, which limits property taxes to 1.5% of value (0.5% for schools, 1.0% for other services), excluding bonded indebtedness. This is a total limit; not a per-agency limit.
- Use of sales taxes to fund transit is also common. Sales taxes have a tendency to be regressive, unstable, are far less deductible from federal income tax. And Oregon's anti-sales-tax tradition almost assures that TriMet will not be collecting revenue from the region's cash registers any time soon.
The payroll tax has one other interesting attribute--which is both a strength and a weakness. It relates directly to employment--being paid by employers on payrolls--and many consider that equitable because a primary class of transit users are commuters paying to get to and from work; thus employers are "paying" to have transit provided to their employees. On the other hand, employers are not similarly charged for roads and highways (which are funded via other means). And, as the Boring situation shows (as does the withdrawal of Wilsonville from TriMet two decades ago), this gives employers--especially those located in areas with high concentrations of jobs a lot of leverage. In both cases, high-employment communities are asserting an unfair allocation of service hours--claiming that because their community provides a high proportion of payroll tax revenue (relative to population), it is entitled to a higher "share" of transit service.
The funding mechanisms for roads, on the other hand, aren't employer based--payroll taxes do not fund road construction. Instead, the funding mechanisms for these come primarily from general fund sources (city/county property taxes), fees (construction assessments, license/registration fees), and fuel taxes--a kindasorta user fee; none of which has anything to do with where one works. Other than providing free parking at the job, employers generally don't subsidize employees who drive to work. While roads are subsidized (how much is an interesting debate), the sources of the subsidy are generally unrelated to the workplace.
How to assign service hours, anyway?
That brings us to the whole concept of equity: TriMet has a limited budget, and thus a limited number of service hours. Let's take a look at the map which Chris worked so hard to create:
The first thing you notice is: Most of it's blue or cyan, and the cooler colors on the map mean "lousy transit". The only red or orange ("excellent transit") is downtown and along the Banfield corridor. Green ("decent transit") is found in much of the City of Portland, in East County, along the Westside MAX line, and to a lesser extent along the Barbur and McLoughlin corridors to the south. But much of the area in the Portland metro area is ill-served by transit.
For many, though, that's the way it ought to be. Providing decent bus service to low-density sprawl is difficult and expensive, and such places are designed around the automobile--the vast majority of transit users in these places are those who cannot drive. Providing good service to high density areas is easy--there's lots of potential passengers, and owning an auto in these places is often more expensive or inconvenient, so a higher percentage of residents are likely to take transit. If one views the payroll tax as being paid by employees instead of by employers (an argument could be made that if the payroll tax didn't exist, wages would rise somewhat), this is equitable from a funding point of view as well--high density areas contribute more dollars, and thus "deserve" more service hours allotted to them.
Some urbanists go further, and propose that dense areas receive levels of service that scale greater than linearily with population density.
However, the payroll tax isn't paid by the workers, it's paid by the boss--and levied at the place of employment. People who live outside of the TriMet service district, but work inside it, have payroll tax paid on their behalf; people who do the opposite (live in town but work elsewhere, i.e. in Washington) do not. Thus, attempts by areas with a large concentration of industry to withdraw from the service district are a credible threat.
And, there are quite a few TriMet lines with extremely low ridership--whose only purpose, it seems, is to maintain a minimal level of service to a given geographical area in order to justify collecting taxes from that area. One of those lines, the 84, is the subject of the next section.
The Boring situation
At the present time, the idea of Boring withdrawing from TriMet is still an idea--but it might have some legs. The city of Damascus to the west has long been outside the TriMet boundary (despite being surrounded by it). Some of the complaints lodged by the Boring business owners are entirely legitimate--the service to Boring is very limited, and is designed for Boring residents to get to jobs in the urban parts of the Metro area, not the reverse. (One line, the 84, provides weekday-only service to the are, and only three runs per day). It's nearly impossible, given current scheduling, for a Gresham resident to take the bus to a job in Bornig. And given Boring's extremely low density--it's a small town surrounded by rural lands; more of an exurb of Portland than part of the continuous metropolitan area, providing good service would be difficult.
From a point of view of number of users, Boring isn't entitled to very much service at all; but from a point of view of who pays the bills, Boring has a decent gripe. The annual payroll tax contribution from the community is $2 million; but operating the 84 only costs a fraction of that. Were Boring to withdraw, it would likely mean service cuts elsewhere in the metro area. (An unanswered question, though one which may be mooted by the current service patterns as indicated above: How many employees who work in Boring live there, vs. how many travel there from other parts of the metro area, vs. how many live outside the current TriMet service boundaries?)
Several other exurbs, more distant from Portland than Boring is--have withdrawn from the district over the years. Canby, Sandy, and Molalla all now operate their own transit agencies, which focus on their respective communities. Given Boring's present exurban nature, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their situation. Were Boring to withdraw from TriMet and form their own transit district (perhaps providing service to Damascus as well), that might produce a net benefit for transit users in the region, even if it produces a small negative for TriMet. (If such a district could reach a transfer agreement with TriMet, so interchanging between the systems doesn't cost riders extra money, so much the better).
On the other hand, it might well be the case that the business owners in question simply want to take the money and run--we'll see.
What about Wilsonville?
A more controversial departure from TriMet occurred in the city of Wilsonville in 1988, when the city elected to withdraw from the TriMet service district, and form its own city-run transit authority, nowadays called SMART, or South Metro Area Rapid Transit. SMART operates six bus lines (providing six-day service; no busses run on Sunday)--three of which provide half-hourly service within the city, and three of which provide connecting service to neighboring transit agencies (TriMet, Canby Area Transit, and Cherriots in Salem). Like the current situation with Boring, Wilsonville businesses complained that payroll tax dollars collected in the city of Wilsonville were being unfairly diverted to subsidize transit service in Portland--and indeed, TriMet did not, at the time, provide significant levels of service to the city. (At the time, Wilsonville had not experienced a major residential boom, and had the unusual distinction of more jobs than residents within City limits). So the city withdrew and started WART, later renamed to SMART. Intra-city service is free (the lines to Tigard, Canby, and Salem are not)--and the city's employers got a tax cut in the bargain as well
The relationship between the two agencies has been somewhat fractious over the years. Early this year, when TriMet discussed reducing service frequencies on WES to deal with its budget crisis, Wilsonville leaders blew a gasket. WES, despite its many faults, is a useful way for TriMet commuters seeking to reach Wilsonville, as one can get to the Wilsonville transit center on a single TriMet ticket, and then transfer to SMART's free intra-city lines. (Use of the SMART 2X line, between Barbur TC and Wilsonville, requires paying an extra fare to SMART--the two agencies do not honor transfers from each other).
Discussion
Given all of that--how should TriMet (or transit agencies in general) be funded, and how should it (they) allocate service? Is the payroll tax fair, or should something else be used? Is the current service too Portland-focused? Or, is too much money being wasted on unproductive routes to suburban areas (particularly wealthier neighborhoods without much in the way of transit-dependent populations)? Should political subdivisions receive "level of service" guarantees from the agency?
A few specific ideas to consider:
- Should cities (or smaller-scale entities such as neighborhoods) have the ability to "purchase" more frequent service than their population or density might otherwise merit, through some sort of local assessment? (We see this already with some types of capital improvements--Portland Streetcar, for instance, was largely funded with a Local Improvement District).
- Could the Dial-a-ride program be expanded to other classes of transit-dependent riders (beyond the elderly or disabled) to permit the elimination of unprofitable bus lines?
- Are more smaller transit agencies a good thing? Or is it better to have a single region-wide agency? (Or what of the Seattle model, where numerous local agencies--KC Metro, Community Transit, Pierce Transit--provide local service, and a separate agency--Sound Transit--focuses on regional trips?)
- Is "local control" a value worth defending (in the transit context)--or does it lead to inequitable results, particularly when wealthy areas try to separate themselves from poorer areas in order to avoid subidizing them?
Keep in mind: The assumption of this site is that public transit is a useful thing--so this thread is not an invitation to discuss proposals to privatize or defund it altogether (i.e. fares should pay 100%).
Posted by EngineerScotty at 11:50 PM | Comments (4) | Permalink
November 15, 2010
Streetcar Equity
I've been banging the transit equity drum quite a bit lately, so I probably owe it to folks to open a discussion about some of the equity issues we need to sort out as we prepare to open the Streetcar Loop in a couple of years. These are issues that are beginning to be discussed at the Streetcar Board and CAC and will have quite a bit of public discussion, probably for much of 2011.
The first and most obvious issue will NOT be the subject of this post - that's fare policy. A goal of Streetcar has been to seamlessly integrate with TriMet's fare system. But doing so would keep most of the west side of the Loop free, while charging $2.05 on the east side. Definitely NOT equitable - but a topic for another day.
Today's topic is service configuration. First, some definitions. For purposes of discussion, we're designating the Loop as "Line A" since it was the original proposal for a central city circulator by then-Commissioner Earl Blumenauer. Our current NW to SoWa line is designated "Line B".
We currently run Line B at 12 minute frequencies by deploying 7 vehicles during most of the day. The current thinking is to open Line A running from OMSI to Market St. (avoiding the need for a transfer in the Pearl District). OMSI to Market St. would have a 90-minute cycle time, so if we match the 12 minute headways, we'll need 7 trains for each line, like so:
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Now, there are a couple of challenges to that. We may not have enough vehicles at opening to support 14-vehicle operation (we'll have staggered delivery of the vehicles and we need to have several spares at any given time). More significantly, the operating budget commitments made by TriMet and the City with the Federal application only support a 12-vehicle operation in the first year.
So what can we do with 12 vehicles? We could run seven on the west side and five on the east with a transfer in the Pearl - maintaining 12 minute frequencies.
Or we could run Line A to Market St. by running 15 minute frequencies on both lines:
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While we shouldn't give up on attracting some additional operating funding before opening, let's look at the equity considerations for a 6 and 6 configuration. Here are the winners and losers:
- East side: winner - new service all the way to Market St., frequencies the same as west side.
- Pearl to Market - big winners, trains every 7-8 minutes! (double frequency here was always part of the plan for the full Loop, it's the most heavily traveled part of the system)
- NW and SoWa - losers, service reduced from 12 minute to 15 minute frequencies
So, is it fair to reduce frequency in NW and SoWa for the benefit of the system? Would requiring transfers be more equitable (everyone who has to transfer is a loser)?
What do you think? Do you have a better idea for how to configure service.
As food for thought, here are the configurations for full completion of the Loop at either 12- or 15-minute frequencies:
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Posted by Chris Smith at 12:01 AM | Comments (34) | Permalink
