The following letter has been distributed to community organizations throughout Seattle:

METRO TRANSIT SERVICE – FACING A CRISIS

As you know, Mayor Greg Nickels is committed to ensuring that our residents have great transportation choices – whether it’s light rail, buses, bike lanes, or sidewalks. You may also know that King County Metro, who provides the bus service for our city, is facing some very tough financial times.

In fact, Metro’s budget deficit is so serious that we will likely be facing severe transit service cuts across the county and most of those cuts will come out of Seattle’s bus service. This will have devastating effects not only on the riders who use the system, but on the transit system’s overall health.

As a leader in your community, we feel it is critical to make you aware of this situation. But we are not simply sounding an alarm bell; we are working with community members, stakeholders, and other governmental entities to find solutions to this problem.

We would very much like to work with you on this important issue. There are lots of ways to get involved and make your voice heard. Our goal is to build a coalition to successfully advocate a positive, solution-oriented position to the County Executive and County Council, who will make the final decision.

THE BACKGROUND

King County Metro Transit is in crisis and facing severe budget shortfalls and service reductions that could cripple the system.
Seattle represents almost 67 percent of ridership and 65 percent of farebox revenue in Metro’s system.

Yet – if transit service has to be cut – Metro’s current policies call for 62 percent of any service reductions to come from Seattle. This would have devastating effects, limiting transit-dependent riders’ mobility and putting others back into their cars (thus exacerbating our climate change problems).

Additionally, this strategy will only worsen Metro’s financial problems because these high ridership transit routes have high farebox recovery – meaning they actually make money to put towards the overall system.

We are committed to identifying and implementing short term and long term strategies to fix our transit system. First, Metro should treat these impending service reductions as “suspensions,” not “cuts.” It may seem like semantics, but if the reductions are suspensions they will be restored to current levels as soon as funding is available.

If they are cuts, it could take three times as long – decades – to restore service back to the levels they are today because of the formula Metro uses to allocate transit service.

As unfortunate as these scenarios may be, they also present an opportunity to align transit service with the goals of our region. Once new funding is available and service has been restored, transit service should be allocated based on these four criteria:

• Maximize Ridership – keep the most riders in the system

• Serve transit-dependent communities – get buses to those who use transit the most and depend on transit to get them where they need to go
• Meet Growth Management goals – serve urban centers that encourage compact communities

• Address climate change – provide cleaner alternatives to the car and make reductions in vehicle miles traveled

GET INVOLVED

We need your help! If you would like to join in working with this issue, please contact: Rachel Smith, City of Seattle, rachel.smith@seattle.gov, 206.233.7014.