Whatcom Transit Needs a Fix

Preston L. Schiller has been working on issues involving transportation and the environment for 17 years at state, regional, and federal levels, and has written reports for several nonprofit and environmental organizations, including “Taking the High Road, Protecting Open Space Along America’s Highways,” Trust for Public Land (2002).

Public transit, when done well, can be an important component of reducing over-dependence on automobiles and lowering the environmental impacts of transportation.1 It can also serve a variety of social and civic objectives; from providing mobility for those with special needs, to helping lower-income citizens reduce expenses. It’s an integral part of any sustainability agenda because an effective transit system can improve the accessibility of commercial centers as well as large institutions and employment centers without increasing demands for costly and space-consuming parking.2 Even given the heavy subsidization of driving and roads,3 and under-funding of transit, there are ways to improve transit and increase ridership.

Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA) is currently immersed in a strategic planning exploration, which may determine whether or not WTA introduces much needed changes.

WTA has many strengths; a competent and helpful staff, from administration to drivers, a robust and reliable source of funding, fiscal management that has allowed it to develop large reserves (which allow it to expand), and most importantly a rich transit market in an environmentally progressive community with a sizeable student population. Its cost per rider for regular (fixed route) service is fairly good compared to its peer agencies, and the cost could be even lower were it to expand ridership. Its costs for para-transit (special vans/Dial-a-ride), however, seem rather high when compared to peer agencies and offer many opportunities for efficiency improvements.

Until rather recently, WTA defined its mission in terms of serving those with special mobility or economic needs (the transit dependent) rather than marketing to “choice” 4 riders. It also guided its service planning along the lines of providing maximum “coverage” for the citizens living within its area.

Coverage usually translates into a large bus, with few riders, toodling around a low-density neighborhood once an hour during the day, with some measure of Saturday service. This approach has de-emphasized the alternative of maximizing service to dense corridors where transit ridership would grow were the buses to come more frequently during the day and be present for evenings, Saturdays and Sundays.

It is not necessarily an either/or situation. New planning techniques, accompanied by software and telecommunications advances make it possible for transit agencies to develop a bouquet of services, s,ome oriented to maximizing ridership in population and activity dense corridors, and others oriented to efficiently serving the needs of special populations and low-density areas. With a little effort these services can be integrated with each other.

Let’s see now, I can walk four blocks in my Fairhaven neighborhood and catch the 27 to Western Washington University’s (WWU) campus...but no, I just missed it and the next one is in an hour. If I rush I could grab the 97 since WWU is in session this week. Or I could walk an extra few blocks and catch the slow meandering 5 route. Or even walk a few more blocks and catch the 23 to the other side of campus. Four different schedules to consult. Four different maps. A fifth for evenings and a sixth on Sunday. It’s only a little less complicated or slower trying to get to downtown from my neighborhood—and walking two miles is quicker in the evening.

This is but one example of the dilemma facing many Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA) users as well as many “wannabe” riders. The system is too complicated, there are too many routes (many with confusing loops), maps and schedules are not easy to decipher, and the services are simply not frequent enough to make bus trips an attractive alternative to driving.

Transit experts have found that persons considering the bus don’t want to consult complicated maps and timetables. They want to be able to walk to a street where the bus comes fairly frequently with constant intervals throughout the day. They want evening and weekend service. They want the transit system and its services to be “user friendly” and transparent—easy to grasp and use.

Approximately 40 percent or more of all persons boarding or leaving WTA buses do so at Western Washington University (WWU). The routes that directly connect WWU with downtown Bellingham or Fairhaven carry about half of all WTA riders. The extensions of these routes into other parts of Bellingham carry another 20 percent of WTA’s riders, making the total ridership for these routes equal to 70 percent of all WTA ridership.

WWU students and staff are also likely to use their passes for destinations not on a WWU route. Eighty to 90 percent of all WTA rides are within the city limits of Bellingham. Ridership declines dramatically and costs escalate steeply outside Bellingham. This is not to say that WTA should not serve destinations outside Bellingham, but it does put the system and its costs into perspective.

WWU is becoming more interested in using transit to better manage campus traffic and parking demands. Some of WTA’s highest ridership and most cost-effective routes have been those that have been designed in recent years with students in mind—and with substantial subsidy from WWU. A couple offer limited evening service. WWU’s transit pass program has grown considerably in recent years; now almost half of WWU’s students have passes.

But WTA’s and WWU’s ridership, and transit’s potential to help city traffic, may not grow much more without a redesign of many of WTA’s core services. This is because students, like many other citizens, need transit for more than the trip to work or campus. To have an impact on car use, transit must become a comprehensive easy-to-use system—it must conveniently connect key centers, it must have several key routes with frequent service and it must offer more evening and weekend service.

Students in a recent WWU-Huxley planning course found a large potential market for transit among students who drive to and from campus:5 almost 25 per cent of WWU students live on campus, another 25 per cent live within a mile of campus, and most of the remainder live within two to four miles of campus.

Beginning in the mid 1980s, the city of Boulder began to approach transportation planning in an integrated manner. A new transportation management department, “GO Boulder,” would aim to reduce automobile traffic by promoting walking, bicycling and transit use. Bicycle and pedestrian trails connecting the university, downtown, neighborhoods and activity centers, were built. Pearl Street was successfully converted to pedestrian-only in downtown.

The University of Colorado (CU) was persuaded, after the financial debacle of building two expensive parking structures, to make a relatively inexpensive and only slightly subsidized transit pass mandatory for all students. Student ridership of transit tripled within the next year, which led to a decline in parking demand by about 750 spaces.

The city of Boulder (population 98,000) concluded that it needed to organize several new routes in addition to its regular RTD (Regional Transit District of Denver) routes. In the 1990s GO Boulder invited hundreds of townspeople, merchants, employers, students and faculty to join it in designing six new “Community Routes,” a couple of which reach out to nearby towns. Each route connected key centers with CU with frequent fast service, including evenings and weekends. Students even dipped into their activity fees to fund a late night weekend “beer bus” between campus and downtown.

Parallel to route planning, new and easy to obtain community and “Eco” pass programs were introduced, and are now carried by two of every three Boulderites. The result of route and pass innovation has been an astonishing growth of transit ridership among town and uiversity. The six community routes alone have grown to an annual ridership of well over five million—almost double that of all of WTA’s 40-odd routes. This also led to a healthy ridership increase on other RTD routes in Boulder.

If Boulder is too bold for Bellingham, one can find numerous examples of campus communities across the U.S. where town, university and transit agency have worked together to dramatically grow bus ridership. These will be reported on in a future Whatcom Watch article.

For now it’s important for concerned citizens and interested institutions to be prepared to engage in a constructive discussion with WTA when it releases its preliminary strategic planning recommendations in early May.6 Early indications are that three scenarios may be offered; one would include a few good ideas, the alternative scenarios would change very little. Following are a few ideas that could broaden the discussion.

After almost 25 years WTA needs to examine and re-think its route and service structure as a system.

Route 23 between downtown and Knox Street along Garden, 14th and 16th Streets is a good example of a transit fossil. Why doesn’t Route 23 go three blocks further to a useful connection at the center of Fairhaven? Well, the old “Normal” streetcar line used to run from downtown to Garden Street/WWU (then the “Normal or Teachers” College) and then to 16th and Knox where it turned around because a steep embankment kept it from linking with the Harris Avenue streetcar line. When Bellingham’s seven streetcar lines were disbanded, a bus replaced the streetcar. But no one thought to extend it to Fairhaven and make it more useful.

WTA’s current “Senior Center Route” (45) makes a very tight circle encompassing the downtown transit center, the senior center and the downtown library, carrying a sparse six passengers per hour. It could be folded into a more meaningful route.

A WTA route redesign could result in fewer, more direct, more frequent fixed routes, which connect centers with residentially dense and transit-friendly neighborhoods along major streets. At the ends of these frequent routes, now perhaps only 3-4 Northerly/Southerly and 3-4 Easterly/Westerly, there could be transfer centers where riders would access a different level of service; a smaller bus almost perpetually in motion picking up and dropping-off riders at a variety of area destinations beyond the reach of the frequent route.

Directed by advanced telecommunications and scheduling software these minibuses could provide a better level of service to regular and special needs riders in that area. Whatcom Community College, Bellingham Technical College, Sunset Village, Sehome Village, Fairhaven Commercial District, St. Joseph’s Hospital (possibly the highest job concentration in Bellingham), in the vicinity of Electric Avenue between Lakeway and Alabama all suggest themselves as sites for such transfer centers where mini-buses would then fan out to serve a wider area. Under this scenario many riders could schedule their transfer rides by connecting with a WTA trip planning program online or by calling WTA a little in advance of a trip.

In the center of Bellingham new frequent routes could create a transit grid, each route separated from the others by a few blocks, rather than the current practice of routing most buses down the same few streets in and out of the downtown transit center, “Bellingham Station.” This would create greater transit coverage in the center of town.

Some of the routes would still stop at Bellingham Station, but layover time there would be eliminated because service frequency would overcome the necessity of waiting to “pulse” with other routes. If you missed your transfer, no big deal; another bus will be along in just a few minutes—not an hour later. At present, WTA’s downtown transit center transfer pulsing involves a delay of several minutes for each route and it’s the major driver of route schedules and, arguably, an obstacle to more efficient services.

County services could be improved as well. The best use of WTA services in the county might be in connecting the smaller towns with Bellingham’s outlying transfer centers (proposed above) rather than trying to provide costly and inefficient regular routes in those towns or designing long traffic-bogged routes to the center of Bellingham. The lack of relation between fare and distance should be redressed: WTA charges 50 cents for each transfer in Bellingham while the same 50 cents transports some riders to the far corners of the county.

Certain route anomalies in the county should be examined as well. It is good that WTA serves Gooseberry Point and Marietta. It would be even better if there were service between Bellingham, Gooseberry Point and Ferndale, where many persons from the Lummi Nation and Lummi Island go to school or shop. The many persons hitchhiking from Bellingham towards Gooseberry Point or Marietta on evenings and weekends indicates a great need for more services at those times. And it would help if Whatcom County would coordinate their Lummi Island ferry schedule with WTA.

Changes in the types and pattern of transit services should not be feared by WTA or the officials on its board. In fact, change could lead to a more efficient, better-utilized WTA, which could result in more ridership, more revenues (from fares or passes), lower costs and more funds available for the expansion of services. §

Next Month — Part Two