Metro is continuing their media campaign to plead for some revenue help.  In 2010, we could be looking at cuts of 800,000-1m annual service hours, or about 75,000 riders per day out of approximately 400,000.

And the campaign’s going multimedia!

Kevin Desmond doesn’t break a ton of new ground in the interview, but it’s good to hear it straight from the top.

There’s reason to hope the PSRC allocation will at least plug the $29m hole in 2009 and prevent service cuts in September, but sales taxes aren’t supposed to recover to 2008 levels till 2013.  It’s pretty clear that the current Metro business model is unsustainable, since its solvency depends on robust growth coupled with low fuel prices.

31 Replies to “Interview with Kevin Desmond”

  1. SLC’s bus system is cutting prices because fuel costs are going down, we seem to always be in a operating cost hole.

  2. These are problems of titanic proportion for Metro and riders alike. The solution is twofold — increase revenue AND reduce expenses — until the ecconomy rebounds.
    I can’t do much about revenue, but here goes my two cents worth on expenses.

    NOTE: The talent on this blog sometimes amazes me. Let’s hear a bunch of cost saving ideas, and forward the “raw-uncut” list to Kevin.

    1. Eliminate the ride free area to maximize revenue and reduce nonpaying rider costs. Watch the on/off data carefully, and begin to prune extra trips that have been added over the years to accomodate overloaded buses traveling through the RFA.
    2. Eliminate ALL unproductive trips on routes with fewer than xx riders per hour, or yy riders per revenue mile, or some agreed upon metric that is fair for both rural and city citizens. Times are tough, and the tough choices have to me made sooner, not at the last moment to ease the budget crunch in 2010 thru 2012.
    3. Combine trips that orininate and terminate within blocks of one another, with little or no time savings between the two. Routes like the 2 and 2 Express that travel at nearly the same time provide a slightly faster trip for the express riders. Can we really afford that luxury today, or can some 2 riders on Queen Anne share some of the pain? I’m not picking on Queen Anne, but it’s a good example. there are many more.
    4. Look at the driver requirements with an eye on full time and part time divisions of work. There are lots of part time trippers that do only one run per day, with one driver, earning two and a half hours per day. Can this be reshuffled to run more trips with the same driver, or eliminate the trips, saving training and administration costs associated with a larger workforce?
    5. Maintanence costs should be reviewed closely with an eye on deffered maintenance, like paint jobs, bus washing, tire change outs, etc. Note, many maintenance items are mandated by law, and some PM items would be foolish to reduce as it’s a pay me now or pay me later situation. That said, let’s look hard at all the rest.


    1. Mike,

      Isn’t there a direct payment to Metro from the city or DSA to maintain the ride free zone? I’m not sure eliminating it would be a money-saver.

      1. Yes, the DTA does pay a small annual fee, but it doesn’t come close to the actual cost of providing all the extra service – or so I’m told. (is should really be looked at with a sharp pencil). Boarding times would be longer in the CBD, and bus queues would lenghten, but it’s all part of the decision matrix. Perhaps the DTA would like to spend their money on a free circulator around downtown. Now is the time to think outside the box.

      2. If they made paper tickets costs 2x as much as an ORCA card the boarding time issue disappears. Personally I think the free zone should be a .50 fare, but that relies on a swipe on and out the door which it sounds like ORCA will not do for some insane reason.

    2. Mike, good ideas.

      As for eliminating the ride free area I’d say OK but only if there was some form of all-day pass available 7 days a week. Perhaps ORCA will provide a partial solution for this, though with the plan to charge for the card it makes that a non-starter for people who don’t live here.

      With maintenance I’d be very careful about cutting back. I’d hate to get in a situation where Metro facilities are dirty and run down. Past a certain point you are discouraging ridership and encouraging vandalism. Clean well-maintained facilities are attractive to riders and discourage vandalism. This isn’t to say there aren’t places where money could be saved.

      I’d also support increasing fares, though again I think there needs to be a 7 day a week all day pass option. One thing I wonder about is Metro’s rather low farebox recovery rate. Are the fares too low? Does Metro need better fare enforcement? Is Metro running too many high-cost routes?

      1. A driver told me on some routes only 25% of people actually pay, many just waltz on since there is no enforcement.

        I would also favor more partial wraps.

      2. Fares, payment method, and enforcement are all ‘fare game'(pun intended). It used to be, and maybe still is mandated that Metro recover 25% of operating cost. I think the current number is about 17%, and going down.
        Higher bus fares, enforcable payment methods (like Orcas and 7 day-all day passes), and visible enforcement action are all part of the solution.

  3. You know what would fix our budget woes? An income tax. Oh wait, sorry, thats a bad word in this state.

    1. Uh, not in this economic environment. States with income taxes aren’t doing any better than we are at the moment. Its how the money is managed that’s important. The only way an income tax will be accepted is if the sales tax if fully eliminated and I mean both the state portion and the local options.

      1. > Its how the money is managed that’s important.

        Amen to that. Trying to restore the mosquito fleet is a drain on the county budget with very little payback. Extending this out to Vashon Island is truly ludicrous. Sure it’s a relatively small hole in the water now but it sends exactly the wrong message. A $3 fare when the cost is closer to $30? I noticed ferry terminals weren’t included in Rep.Nelson’s bill (D-34, West Seattle, Vashon) to mandate higher zoning around transit.

        It doesn’t really matter how the money is divvied out in the end it all comes from tax payers in King County. Like any business the County needs to start looking at it’s revenue and it’s priorities and decide what deserves money from the general fund (property taxes and sales tax). Any user fees, fares, tolls, LIDs can be applied toward the project/service in making those decisions but in the end there needs to be a narrow focus on what’s important and how to accomplish that at the minimum cost to the tax payer.

      2. The Ferry money comes out of a different pool than the bus money, but the point is taken.

        It’s funny how the state decides who can raise what taxes. If it’s about getting something Olympia doesn’t want off it’s plate (i.e. the ferries) then they’ll allow the county to raise $1bn a year in property taxes to let that happen. If it’s for buses, forget it, Olympia couldn’t care less.

        Just to clarify, Metro’s budget is not general fund money : it’s a specific tax for a specific purpose.

      3. Yes, that’s my point. The notion that were going to budget by saying this percentage of the sales tax will go to buses, this percentage will go to light rail and we’ll pull X number of dollars from the property taxs for ferries is no way to run a railroad. I don’t want to drift too far off topic with the ferry district thing but really these boats are primarily to serve bus riders. Protecting, in fact building out that portion of the system while cutting the buses it’s supposed to increase ridership on is nuts.

        Another pet peeve for me is Access. I’m riding my bike to work in the mornings and it’s a pretty nice neighborhood. In fact it would probably qualify as stinking rich. I’m seeing Access vans pulling in and out of gated estates. Why not just give out taxi script, it would have to be way cheaper.

      4. Its how the money is managed that’s important.

        It’s not really that either though, is it? Every state and probably every level of government in the country is going to feel the squeeze over the next few years. I think it’s hard to make a government function well during sharp economic downturns. It will be interesting to see what lessons we draw. I think that the lesson is a bit more complex than just “irresponsibility.” :)

  4. Metro has 4,163 employees as of the end of 2007. Cut salaries by $10,000 dollars a year across the board. Or if that’s unpleasent for too many people, cut the top salaries by a lot more. say $20,000-30,000 a year and the bottom by a lot less.

    Subtracting 915 part time drivers gives us 3,250 full time employees. Voila, you’ve just saved $32,500,000 dollars.

    Yes, I know half of their employees are covered by union contracts and it can’t be done by fiat. I’m just throwing it out there as a example of where it could start.

    1. Everyone has to tighten their belts, but lowering everyone’s salary isn’t an ideal or smart solution. Families are struggling right now.

      You opine that this is a starting point. Metro says that the starting point is a ridiculous cut in service. Someone else might say we should re-purpose those property taxes. Perhaps some loose combination of the three, with salary decreases affecting mostly management with incentive plans to keep them around. But if we want qualified people running our system and quality drivers manning the buses, let’s not give them an excuse to flee to the private sector.

      1. It’s not ideal, but these are not ideal or even normal times that we live in. In the interview, he states “we want to minimize the impact to the user” as much as possible. Than cut the salaries and save yourself $20-30 million a year before you do the cuts in service.

        Look, the people who work for Metro work for a “public” agency to “serve” the public. To the average man or woman on the street, it makes absolutely no sense to want to raise taxes when the top management makes over $100,000 a year and are taking no cutbacks in their own pay, especially while stating they have a deficit.

        It has been said these pay levels are to attract and keep the best from going to the private sector. I say let them leave. If they have such a passion to serve the public than the money(to a point)shouldn’t matter to them and they should be willing to take a hit for now in the interest of saving the agency from financial ruin. I highly doubt its going to cause someone to be impoverished if their wages are cut from $150,000 down to $100,000 or even $90,000.

        If the management salaries are cut in a substantial way, the public will have more sympathy for the hole that Metro is in. If the top people do not share in the pain while asking taxpayers to pay more money, it will encourage more anti-tax sentiment in the long run and might i add be a bit morally reprehensible as well.

        Sorry if this post seems a bit of a rant..;)

    2. A couple of points. Firing all part-time drivers and giving the work to full timers doesn’t save money. The work will be paid at time and a half at wages higher than part timers. Or do you think the full timers will work extra for free?
      Also, the part time ranks are the place Metro hires full timers from. Kind of like a farm system in baseball. Eventually your pool of talent is diluted.
      And they make no where close to your $36,000 / yr number.

      1. Actually, that’s why I took out the part time number of 915 drivers from the number of total employees and only figured the amount of savings based on the number of full time employees. I wasn’t advocating firing the part timers. Sorry for the confusion there.

        And I realized this can’t really be done due to union contracts/labor unrest from cutting wages,etc. I was just throwing out some numbers to illustrate that their is potential savings in cutting some salaries and IMO this should be part of the equation before asking for tax increases.

  5. even if sales tax got back to the same level in 2013, that doesn’t mean service would get back there. As Metro’s costs continue to rise (they’ve been rising an average of 5% a year), service won’t get back to the 2008 level until 2021.

  6. I really like the way things work in San Francisco where the Muni authorities run both transit and parking in the city. Parking fines seem to be pretty recession-proof, and coordination between parking and transit authorities would seem to help speed up service (saving money) while also generating additional revenue. At this point, it seems *anything* would help in terms of suggestions, and at least from what I’ve read, the Muni arrangement has worked quite, quite well for San Francisco.

    Since we’re Seattle/Puget Sound, obviously such a large and sweeping change would never be possible without an acrimonious, inconclusive multi-decade, multi-public-initiative process.

    But, instead of hearing why it *can’t* work, I’d really like to hear from Metro and others how we *could* make something like this work. Seriously.

  7. Why not start using our natural resources?

    Legalize marijuana, and tax the hell out of it. We’d have enough money left over to build a Ron Sims statue out of pure gold at each bus stop. I mean, California’s considering this, and they don’t have the growing potential that we do.

    1. We brought up to King County council member Larry Phillips. He said he’d look into the policies, but that he also wouldn’t let it happen that way because it’s dumb. (Not a quote.)

  8. BTW, some news from this video is that cuts are seemingly being planned mostly for the least efficient routes — i.e. not cutting across subareas just for “fairness”. That makes sense, but hopefully we wouldn’t have to deal with deep cuts — because they a 20% reduction would affect nearly every one.

Comments are closed.