Metro’s route 17 offers weekday service every half hour
from
Loyal Heights in Ballard, down 32nd Avenue Northwest, and through
Fremont into downtown Seattle. But not for much longer.
On Thursday, January 31, a hundred or so folks jammed into the
Ballard Senior Center to air their concerns with Metro staffers about a
proposal to reduce service on route 17 along 32nd Avenue—a
tradeoff for adding service along Seaview Avenue NW along Ballard’s
western edge. Although the two sides were divided along predictable
neighborhood lines, they all agreed on one thing: Metro shouldn’t be
“pitting neighborhood against neighborhood” and forcing two parts
of Ballard to fight for crumbs.
“You’re lucky that we’re all liberals,” retired Metro driver Mark
Dublin told the Metro representatives. “I can guarantee you that in
some other parts of your system, like Bellevue and Medina, if you asked
someone to walk an extra mile in terrible weather, you wouldn’t get the
same friendly response you’re getting here.”
In 2006, voters approved a $50 million annual tax increase to expand
transit throughout the county, called Transit Now, making this a
particularly strange time for Metro to be proposing cutbacks. Metro
service-development manager Victor Obeso, however, says all the money
in Transit Now is already spoken for. Most of it will pay for five new
“Rapid Ride” bus rapid-transit routes, including three in Seattle. The
rest of the new funding is focused primarily on expanding a few
existing lines and increasing bus service to suburbs like Sammamish,
Issaquah, and Maple Valley. That money can’t be shifted, Obeso says,
“without a decision by the King County Council to not provide other
services.”
The county council is also responsible for the tortured logic behind
the little-known “40-40-20” funding rule, which dictates that, of every
dollar spent on new bus service, 40 cents must go to south King County
and 40 cents to east King County—leaving Seattle with just 20
percent. That rule alone means that Seattle, which has most of the
region’s transit users, will always be underfunded compared to its
far-flung suburbs. The idea behind 40-40-20, Obeso says, is to provide
transit service to growing areas of the county that aren’t well served
by transit. “When you look at transit-ridership growth as a percentage,
the rate is higher in suburban areas than in Seattle,” Obeso says.
However, most new transit riders still come from Seattle—29,000
new riders in the last three years, compared to 26,000 new riders in
the rest of King County.
There’s one further reason Seattle bus riders are being asked to
quibble over crumbs: the South Lake Union Trolley, which costs about
$1.7 million a year to operate. That may not sound like much, but it
accounts for about 20 percent of new Metro service dollars. 