Community Comment: ‘Pampered Commuter’ For GEORGE
I am a member of the “Pampered Commuters Club” — one of several citizens that each morning stands on the roadside in the cold, heat, rain and snow waiting for the GEORGE while many of you drive by comfortably in your cars sipping your coffee and driving one mile to Metro for the privilege of paying $4.75 a day to park.
There are others on Broad Street and Washington Street that wait for a regular Metrobus while the city pays on average $2.1 million a year so that they can also be “pampered” by that “boutique” system. The formula for what we pay WMATA each year is complicated and the amount does vary; however, we do pay for the non-GEORGE bus system as well, and that seems to have been ignored through all these discussions. Quite frankly, from what I am learning, I don’t trust any numbers the public has been given to date.
While everyone agrees, even GEORGE riders, that the system is too expensive, there are several alternatives to keeping a community-based mass transportation capability. I personally do not support a tax increase for the bus system, but I DO support increasing the fare to $1 or $1.25 AND lowering the operating costs, which have been ignored over the last several years since we spent all the original grant funding. We should be able to have a meaningful bus system for our citizens that also supports our business community.
The environmental benefits affect all citizens. Here is what the Environmental Services Council has submitted to City Council:
“These benefits include car trips replaced by bus trips, resulting in reduced gasoline usage by these cars, and therefore less carbon released into the air. For example, if we assume the average ride length for a GEORGE user to be approximately 1.5 miles, and that cars in Falls Church average 20 mpg in city driving, then use of GEORGE saved approximately 5,250 gallons of gasoline in 2008 alone (approximately 70,000 rides X 1.5 miles/ride)/ 20 mpg). Since each gallon of gasoline adds about 19.6 lbs of CO2, use of GEORGE has prevented approximately 102,900 pounds, or 51.45 tons, of CO2 from going into the air.
In addition, we assume that most of the 70,000 riders of the George are traveling to and from the East and West Falls Church metro stations, so the George service results in less congestion on City roads, especially during rush hour, and increased availability for others to park in the metro lots adjacent to these stations. Both scenarios — less congestion and increased parking availability — would also contribute to reduced amounts of CO2 going into the air.”
There are alternatives to elimination. Let the City Council know you support GEORGE.
Send an email to the City Clerk at cityclerk@fallschurchva.gov with the subject “SAVE GEORGE.”
BARRY BUSCHOW
By (see byline)
March 31, 2009
Barry, there are several moving parts to the GEORGE analysis and while I would not go as far as to say I do not believe any of the numbers we have seen, it is the case that we do not have answers to all of the questions you and I and others have raised. I do believe that in order to save the GEORGE service, taxes would have to be raised from the level recommended by the City Manager, which is why I have floated a proposal to provide funding of approximately $175,000 for about six “platform hours” per day of service vs. the 20+ hours provided now. Of course if we also raise the fares it is unlikely that we will increase ridership, but if we assume the fare collected were $1 and 50,000 rides, there is still a significant funding gap unless we find a revenue source. I will have more to say when we receive answers from City staff on all of the questions that have been raised, but I do want to comment on the Carbon emission issue.
According to NVTC staff (the report has been made public and should be posted on the City’s website; if anybody wants it I will be happy to email it), GEORGE emits approximately 1,590 pounds of CO2 per day, which is not mentioned in the quoted text. If we compare the 450 pounds per day which would be emitted by 300 car trips of 1.5 miles, GEORGE causes an increase of 1,140 pounds or 200%+. The NVTC report used an average of 20 miles per car trip based on APTA data to conclude that GEORGE saves 1,410 pounds per day, which I objected to based on a more nuanced assumption of alternative behavior (25% each would take Metro Bus, Walk, Drive to the Metro, and Drive 20 miles to work) that indicates GEORGE increases emissions by only about 100%. In fairness, NVTC Executive Director Rick Taube responded to my objection as follows:
“You are correct that the calculation of C02 output depends on what one assumes about the reaction of current GEORGE riders. Given the survey results about the relatively high proportion of auto availability for GEORGE customers, the shortage of parking at the rail stations, and the price of parking and taxi rides, it seems to me that it is not unreasonable to assume that most GEORGE customers would divert to their autos for their entire commute. Consequently, I chose to use the factors published by APTA to highlight the fact that transit has favorable impacts on Greenhouse Gas emissions on average compared to driving. And transit has other benefits such as NOx and VOC reductions as well as traffic congestion relief that also depend on assumptions about what current GEORGE customers would do if the service is eliminated.”
Obviously these are important points, but my conclusion on the carbon emission issue that the data are not convincing, nor has anybody provided a guess as to the value of eliminating a pound of CO2 or the cost of using alternative methods like planting trees.
My focus on GEORGE is to figure out the direct dollars and cents and how to go about making a decision based on the best balance of cost vs. benefit to the City. Obviously the users are getting a great deal, but can somebody show that the incremental benefit to the City in dollars and cents is greater than the cost? For instance, are houses near the GEORGE line are worth some amount more? What about the cost (~$15,000 each) of building more parking spaces at Metro Stations? That cost would not be paid by the City and would be charged to the user at $4 per day or whatever, but I am looking for things like this to support what is really just an intuition that GEORGE is a good thing.
I never knew a public bus system could have so many complex issues, but it certainly does. I generally support the City having some sort of public transportation system and I basically support the idea of keeping GEORGE around until we can replace it with a better solution (based on the thinking that completely defunding GEORGE will make it almost impossible to get a new system started later).
That said, the current GEORGE situation isn’t good. The cost isn’t justified by the usage (even if the cost to the City is lower due to subsidies – it still costs too much). I’m not convinced there’s even a positive environmental impact (depending on how you make that call). The relatively recent survey indicated that about 50% of GEORGE riders don’t have access to a car. If GEORGE goes away I assume those 50% will find another way to work and my guess is Metrobus. But who knows.
I also don’t think raising fares is going to help much. The recent Falls Church Times piece claims that when riders transfer between Metro and GEORGE the GEORGE part is free. The 2004 survey indicated that something like 95% of riders do transfer. If that’s the case it seems like raising the fare won’t do much. Either way, we only collect about 50% of the fare now and it’s not clear if that ratio would stay at 50% if the fare were higher or if it would go down. I’d rather make the bus free.
Incidentally, I do think just the idea of GEORGE probably has a positive impact on housing prices (not sure you could ever measure it). I know that when we were looking at houses in the City we made a mental note of the GEORGE stops, thinking it would be handy.
Anyway, I’d love to figure out a way for the City to have bus service that doesn’t duplicate Metro service, doesn’t cost as much, gets used more, and helps bring people into the City – not just take commuters to the Metro.
I think the “pampered commuter” phrase originated in an editorial in the News-Press. Funny thing is, I’ve never seen the News-Press editor walk any further than from the door of his house to the door of his Mustang convertible. Just saying.
Dan, I support whatever you do….this thing is getting “too thick”. Most people including me have cars, where this 50% thing comes from I do not know. The ISSUE is How do we stop using CARS. We all live within 1 mile of a metro yet the only way we get there is with CARS. Bus Help!
Just using the data that the city supplies and for what its worth:
GEORGE runs from 6am to 9:30am on 2 routes, east and west. That = 7 hours. Also from 4pm to 8pm = 7.5 hours since W starts at 4:30pm. Then 26A runs from 10am till 4pm = 6 hours. So 7+7.5+6 = 20.5 + .5 for going to and returning to the garage = 21 hours a day. During the 21 hours the bus makes a total of 40 trips (back and forth on its designed route). So on the expense side; 21 hours x $100 an hour = $2,100 a day x 260 days a year that it runs = $546,000 cost a year. On the revenue side; 40 trips a day with an average of 10 riders a trip at $0.50 = $200 revenue a day x 260 days = $52,000 revenue a year. The subsidy is then $546,000 – $52,000 = $494,000/by 104,000 rides a year = $4.75 subsidy per ride.
Now if the bus was full on every trip that = 40 trips x 24 riders = 960 riders a day at $0.50 = $480 revenue a day x 260 days = $124,800 revenue per year. So at capacity the subsidy per rider would be $546,000 – 124,800 = $421,200/by 249,600 rides a year = $1.69 subsidy per ride.
It is reported that there where 70,911 rides in 2008/260 days = 273 rides a day/40 trips a day = 7 riders per trip.
So if we eliminate the trips that have very few riders, the subsidy will be decreased accordingly.
However 70,911 rides a year at $0.50 a ride = $35,456 and not the $18,000 revenue a year that city presentations report. Where does the other money go?
Where does the other money go? Great question! The only answer (and it’s only a partial answer) that I’ve heard is that riders who use a SmarTrip card and transfer to/from Metrobus or Metrorail get the cost of the GEORGE ride reimbursed to their card (i.e. it is free). I don’t know if that’s true – but that’s what I read on one of these blogs somewhere.
However, I’ve also read that something like 95% of the riders are transferring to Metro, which suggests a large number of those folks aren’t using SmarTrip or else the City’s revenue would be closer to $0.00. It also means that if all of this info is correct and the policies stay the same then we can expect bus revenue to drop if/when more people switch to the SmarTrip card.
Related to this – if the GEORGE fare is increased will that actually increase the revenue to the City or just encourage more riders to get a SmarTrip card?
All of this leads me to what seems to be the most pressing question: who actually has any idea what the answers to these questions are?
I’ve been a supporter of keeping some form of GEORGE in place as a stop-gap so we can buy some time to come up with a very different (and hopefully better) solution. However, I’m now realizing that unless the City staffs someone to spend at least some portion of their day/week “managing” GEORGE we don’t really have any hope of having a successful service.
I hope someone (Mr Shields and the City Council) gets real numbers of both ridership and costs before George is killed or remains alive. It is most frustrating to try to make an informed decision without facts.