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).

Part 2 of 2

(Editor’s Note: The first part appeared on page one of the May 2004 issue.)

The city of Bellingham and Whatcom County are growing at a very fast pace. Some of the growth is occurring where it can be reasonably managed such as downtown, the Fairhaven commercial district and a few other nodes of incorporated areas where persons can easily walk or bicycle for some of their trips and where public transit can be designed to serve some trips.

But a fair amount of growth is also occurring in low-density areas of cities or the county, which are difficult to serve well with transit and where walking or bicycling is challenging at best. Western Washington University (WWU) is also growing and realizing that it cannot afford to expand attractive facilities such as athletic fields unless it is able to curtail pressures to expand parking.

Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA), our area’s public transit agency is not growing its ridership quite as rapidly as the region’s population and, except for a couple of recent route additions serving specific WWU needs, its general ridership is not growing.

Part of the reason for slow or no growth in transit ridership is beyond any one agency’s control; it’s caused by a variety of factors: the American car culture, which is willing to drive to Iraq for its next tankful rather than walk or cycle a half-mile to the local grocery or video store, plenty of free or cheap parking inviting motorists to drive anywhere-everywhere, and popular media dominated by automobile advertising and boosting.

But part of the reason for the lack of growth in transit ridership rests with the agencies themselves. In the United States, most transit agencies have reacted to the onslaught of the car culture by lowering their sights—picking certain parts of the population they believe they can capture, such as those who are “transit dependent,” or commuters to worksites where parking is expensive or limited. They retreat from trying to make their systems attractive to a wide range of riders and a wide range of community and environmental needs.

They might forget that their competition is the space-consuming and polluting automobile. They might neglect their environmental responsibilities, not paying attention, for instance, to unnecessarily idling buses. And since they orient themselves to “captive riders” they become captive themselves to outmoded approaches and timid about innovation.

There are some things that transit agencies can do to boost their ridership and improve performance. As discussed in the previous issue of Whatcom Watch, WTA can take a hard look at revamping its current collection of 40-odd routes. Several parallel, adjacent and overlapping routes could be consolidated into fewer but more frequent routes whose hours of operation could extend well into the evening and all weekend.

The low-productivity segments (“tails” or loops) of several routes could be spliced off and replaced by a different sort of service at strategically located transfer sub-centers; a multidirectional minibus almost constantly in motion, picking up and dropping off within a relatively small low-density zone, assisted by advanced telecommunications and scheduling software.

In order to improve the efficiency of its current very costly “on-demand” dial-a-ride and van services for persons with disabilities, WTA should explore combining some of these new “zonal” services with on-demand and van services. A new type of smaller transit vehicle, a “minibus,” less polluting, quieter and more friendly to neighborhood streets should be used for these zones.

Regular riders would be picked up at stops near their houses but convenient for the bus. Persons with disabilities would still be picked up at their doors and then brought to the neighborhood transfer center where they would be able to access an improved regional system. In the evening persons with security concerns could be dropped at their doorsteps. This is not a transit fantasy—variants of this type of service already exist in several locales in North America and Europe.

Some of the most effective strategies, which WTA could adopt to grow its ridership after some route restructuring and innovation, involve establishing more transit pass programs and marketing transit services and pass programs to certain key residential and employment segments. WTA is already making some good efforts in these directions, but its board and the community should encourage it to expand this aspect of its work.

After Boulder significantly improved its services, it found that it was able to aggressively market transit passes to a range of employers and neighborhoods. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the intricacies of transit pass programs, but it should be noted that when successful, transit pass programs increase the revenue of transit agencies, and solve mobility and parking problems for transit pass sponsors.

Pass programs can be wildly successful, often raising ridership by double or triple digit factors within a couple years.1 Transit passes also create efficiencies for the agency; by bypassing the fare box, a significant source of contention between rider and driver is eliminated as well as some money processing time—and a potential source of fraud. The pass automatically creates data useful to transit planning without extra expense or distraction to the driver.

An area that is especially ripe for transit rethinking is Bellingham’s downtown. On some of downtown’s main streets there are surprisingly few places where the bus stops outside of the downtown transit center. In some instances this is because the one-way street system that the city of Bellingham so lovingly created in the 1960s to speed cars through downtown, regardless of whether it worked for those whose destination was downtown, works against optimum transit coverage. In other cases, one can only wonder why the bus stops every few blocks in an outlying neighborhood but goes for many blocks without stopping downtown.

Another area ripe for improvement is the coordination of bus schedules with the schedules of the institutions that transit serves. In most instances WTA needs to work backwards from the schedules at WWU, Bellingham Technical College, Whatcom Community College and other major institutions to their downtown center rather than the other way around. Services to these institutions need to be more than once an hour in the evening in order to serve students and faculty effectively.

The campus transportation program at WWU has made great strides in recent years in the direction of promoting alternatives to driving, but there are a few more things that WWU could consider in regards to improving their transit situation.

By many criteria, WWU’s voluntary pass program has been successful as virtually half the students purchase one and most pass holders appear to be regular users. But careful research has shown that mandatory pass programs work much better. Mandatory pass programs have the effect of lowering costs per student as well as encouraging more nonusers to become bus riders.

Some students appear to be driving to campus because they carry a fair amount of gear; books and a laptop for classes and study and a change of clothes for extramural athletics or evening activities. While the new recreation center and Carver Gym have surplus locker space, it doesn’t seem to be replacing the car parked several blocks away for storage.

A program that markets locker space more aggressively, perhaps installing a fair number of lockers in the halls of Carver (rather than in the locker rooms) in order to ease access to lockers, might provide an alternative to the car-locker.

Since about half of the traffic around the university appears to be pick-up and drop-off trips, more effort should be put into curtailing such trips, especially since they are often disruptive of pedestrian and bicycle travel. As part of their effort to promote transit and reduce traffic, the city of Boulder and Colorado University entered into an agreement that, for each new student, CU added a new bed on campus. While this might not be easy for WWU, it might be able to accommodate more student housing near campus, perhaps in partnership with private developers. Downtown, a stone’s throw from campus, could be a wonderful place to encourage more mature students to live, especially if there is frequent comprehensive transit service linking it to campus.

In tandem with an aggressive transit pass program, WWU could also begin the painful process of desubsidizing parking for students, staff and faculty. One approach is to offer financial incentives to faculty and staff who trade in their parking permits for a bus pass. WWU’s current option of a limited parking permit (maximum use of 10 times per quarter) is also a useful way to reduce daily car trips to campus.

There are many things that the city of Bellingham could do to promote transit both on its own and in concert with WTA and WWU. The primary areas where significant city improvements could be made are in the area of parking management, better allocation of transportation capital expenditures (especially in regards to pedestrian facilities), reconsideration of certain problematic street designs (re-evaluating the counter-productive downtown one-way grid), and playing a more innovative role in regards to promoting transit-oriented housing.

Several years ago the city encouraged apartment development in the Happy Valley neighborhood immediately to the south of WWU. Funds were collected from developers for sidewalks. But while the traffic generated by such development has grown and endangers many pedestrians and bicyclists, most streets in Happy Valley remain without sidewalks.

The heavily used intersection of 25th and McDonald Parkway is ripe for a signal and better crosswalks so that pedestrians and bicyclists can take advantage of that wonderful walking and bicycling route between Fairhaven College and the Sehome Arboretum. Would it not make more sense to scale back the five lanes proposed for Sunset2 to three and spend the remainder on the badly needed sidewalks and a few improved intersections for Happy Valley? This is but one example of several where city transportation priorities need rethinking.

Improving transit (along with walking and bicycling conditions) is a cost-effective way for a city to reduce pressures for costly road and parking expansions. The graphic on page 9 compares the amount of street space consumed by 100 cars with the space taken by two buses. The buses also eliminate the costly and subsidized parking for those 100 cars.

Better management of parking is an area where WTA, WWU and the city of Bellingham could cooperate. Rather than building costly new parking, these entities could investigate making better use of existing parking. One of the worst uses of street parking is for long-term storage of vehicles.

Dormitory students primarily use the row of street parking several blocks long opposite the WWU Ridgeway Dormitory complex, known as “the wall,” as free long-term vehicle parking. It would make sense for the city of Bellingham to give over control of “the wall” to WWU, which could manage it as part of its parking system. Commuter parking by day, library and special events parking at night.

The three could also explore leasing space for Park and Ride lots from underused weekday parking at churches and commercial facilities along bus routes. Where street parking is being consumed by long-term vehicle storage, the city could initiate a weekly street sweeping program thus forcing some of those recreational vehicles and semi-abandoned vehicles into the garage. Help the salmon and create better parking turnover with one clean sweep.

Here are a few things that citizens should be promoting in the coming weeks and months as WTA considers changes:

•WTA is in a good position to introduce innovations. Its financial reserves and revenue streams are robust and there’s no reason to fear shrinkage in the foreseeable future. It is treating its strategic planning exercise as a zero-sum game; add a new service here—take an older one away somewhere else. WTA has substantial reserves; it can well afford to dedicate a small part of its reserves (perhaps up to 10 percent) to innovations. This could be done to simultaneously soften the transition away from a few current “coverage” routes to “frequency” or “productivity” routes while allowing a “shakedown” period for the new services to eventually replace some of the older ones.

•The interest of WWU in promoting transit should be capitalized upon by both WTA and the city. Citizens should urge better representation of the city and WWU in WTA decision-making.

•Citizens should also review the city of Bellingham’s forthcoming draft of a Six Year Transportation Plan (See vote 89 on page 16) to see whether it continues the current practice of over funding road expansions and under funding pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The plan should also begin to address the need to implement transit priority features, which help buses get through traffic more quickly.

•At press time it appears that WTA is responding to requests to develop a planning scenario that stresses the building of ridership. Under consideration are two or three frequent core routes. This is a step in the right direction, which should be encouraged even if it is necessary to spend extra funds to help establish this change.

But WTA should not stop with these changes and coast for the next five or 10 years. It needs to incorporate the energy it has received from recent WWU and citizen involvement in its planning process into an ongoing effort to evaluate itself, continually educate its board, and plan for a future where transit is at the center of growth management and sustainable development. As the “Bellingham-Boulder” connection3 has taught us, it’s ultimately not about routes or lines on a map, it’s about the quality of community life and whether transportation will serve sustainability or work against it. §