Process

Respecting other people’s preferences

~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

Scott Morris has put out a report [PDF] about “high occupancy houses” near the University.   The report managed to get my goat on twitter, mostly because I don’t believe it respects the preferences of the renters under question.  In the report, kitchens and living rooms aren’t common areas where roommates hang out together and share food and company the way a family might, they “are leveraged across multiple tenants to the economic advantage of the owner.”  Students don’t choose to move to try out new places and live with different friend groups, they are the victims of “unregulated business practices such as pre-leasing.” Leasing by the bed (rather than apartment), is not something that renters appreciate to protect themselves against liability for flaky roommates’ rent, but rather “a burden for the tenants, and a windfall for the landlord.”

As somebody who throughout my 20s moved often, actively sought out large houses filled with unrelated people so that I could share common areas like living rooms and kitchens with a surrogate family of friends, and would’ve loved to have a lease by the bed, the report doesn’t just disagree with me on policy preferences, it actively denies that people like me exist or else argues that we were duped or coerced by landlords.  This is, to put it politely, uncomfortable to read.

I’m picking on Scott here, but it’s not something that’s limited to him.  During the debate on the “Taco PUD” development on South Lamar, opponents such as Save Town Lake frequently characterized the debate as happening only between neighbors who wanted to save views of the Lake and “developers” (or alternatively “California developers”) who want to ruin it with condos.  The honest preferences of many of us who find the building beautiful and useful (it will be home to many people!) were ignored as if we didn’t exist.  Again, this is uncomfortable to read.

But ignoring or disrespecting other’s preferences is not something limited to those on the anti-density axis of city politics.  Believing that developers should have the right to build the Taco PUD doesn’t mean that you have to like the design of the building, and through the conversation, those who don’t like large buildings were frequently mocked interchangeably with those who opposed it being built.  There’s no quicker way to get people to disagree with your policy preferences than to tell them their aesthetic preferences are invalid.

This isn’t the only time.  Some people prefer to live in stable single-family neighborhoods.  As somebody who grew up in one, I can say there are pretty good reasons for wanting  that.  It’s pretty hard to create a neighborhood like that without some sort of zoning.  For those of us who believe in allowing density, our task should not merely be to win the argument; we would both be more effective and more useful if we came up with ideas that respect the fact that other people’s preferences differ–and even try to satisfy those preferences where we can–even if we disagree on policy.

I would have much rathered Scott had started from the point of simply announcing his preference for living in a neighborhood with low turnover, rather than concocting a fictional world where young adults want turnover as low as settled families do.  I think the policies Scott has decided on (greater restrictions on unrelated people living together, regulating when leases are signed and leasing by the bed) reflect his preferences, but not those of the people he claims to be protecting.  Yet, Scott’s preferences for a low-turnover neighborhood are not invalid or idiosyncratic.  For those of us, like myself, who find Scott’s policy proposals aimed at achieving that goal abhorrent, we would do well to think of alternative policies that might accommodate these real and valid preferences.

My first attempt will come in a blog post in the near-future.

Transparency Means Show Your Work (fare change proposal, part 2)

~ dankeshet ~ 4 Comments

In a previous post, I asked questions about the proposed changes to the fare.  The Capital Metro communications and public involvement team at Capital Metro forwarded them to the people doing the original analysis, and I got some responses:

 1. What, if any, are the projected changes in costs associated with each of the proposals?

There are always costs associated with a fare increase, in particular with reprogramming fareboxes and ticket vending machines to reflect changes to the fares and adding new passes.  In addition, there are production costs for printing new fare media, and costs for distributing the new fare media to the retail outlets.  There are also costs for new overlays to the Operator Control Units (OCU) and informational labels on the fareboxes and the labor associated with placing them on the equipment, including the ticket vending machines.  Could be as much as approximately $10,000.

2. If there are no projected changes in cost, by what analysis do you consider it worthwhile to eliminate 117,000 MetroAccess rides to gain a negligible  $9,000?  If there are projected changes in cost, how do you expect the public to judge this proposal without providing the data?

$2.6 million per year savings in reduced operating costs due to reduced demand. Revenue is the not the main goal of this proposal, it is equity and demand control.

3. Is the additional revenue and lost ridership for changing premium service to $1.50 measured against the current baseline or the baseline of a change to $1.25?

Measured against current $1.00

4. What would the revenue and ridership numbers be different if you had adjusted the MetroBus fares to $1.10 or $1.50?  Presenting only the selected numbers gives us little room to judge the proposal by.

The numbers would be different if we had raised the fares more or less.

5. How will day passes work when transferring between premium and base service?

Currently, whether your swiping a Local Day, 7-Day or 31-Day on an express bus, the farebox will prompt you for an upcharge (per ride) of $1.35 (full fare) or $0.65 (reduced fare).  Being that a Premium fare has yet to be determined, the upcharge has yet to be determined, as well.

However, the logistics would be…customer with a local pass boarding a premium bus, the upcharge would be less than the upcharge for boarding an express bus with the local pass.   And if a customer with a premium pass boarding an express bus, the upcharge would also be less than boarding with a local pass.  On the other hand, if boarding a local bus with a premium pass, there would be no upcharge.

As always, a Regional pass is valid on all bus and rail services.

6. Will different fares between MetroBus and MetroRapid cause difficulty in advanced payment facilities, such as the promised smartphone app to prepay MetroRapid?  If passengers opt to pay cash, will this slow MetroRapid down?

Smartphone apps handle multiple fares quite easily.

Cash fares will continue to be accepted on all MetroRapid buses, however; although customers can board and alight from the rear doors on all MetroRapid buses, customers paying cash fares will still require boarding through the front door where the farebox is located.  Rear door validators will not accept cash.

7. You dismiss collecting payment for parking as too difficult logistically, yet 100s of private operators consistently collect parking payments for much smaller lots than Capital Metro operates.  If you don’t believe Capital Metro is capable of operating as well as them, did you consider outsourcing the job to one of them?

 Yes, you could outsource. Cap Metro likely would spend more collecting the parking fees than they would earn, even with an outside operator.

I found these answers… rather lacking.  The point of asking for answers in the first place was that I wanted the people who did the analysis to show their work, to explain how they chose $1.25 and not $1.50 for local bus service, how they chose $1.50 and not $1.25 for premium bus service, how they chose free parking and not paid parking.  None of the reasons behind these decisions can be gleaned from their answers, with the exception of question 2.

Regarding Question 1, I would like to know changes in operating costs, not the capital cost of the switchover.

Regarding Question 3, they fail to answer the obvious follow-up: why $1.50?  How would the calculations have been different if they had selected a different fare?

The answer to question 4 is frankly insulting.

They didn’t seem to understand question 5 (I was asking about those who hold a day pass, not those who hold other passes and are purchasing a day pass).

And the answer to question 7 seems to read that they did not do any analysis regarding the ability to collect parking fees, nor do they plan to do any.

I wrote the Cap Metro communications team back asking for follow-up, and I have received this back so far and a promise for more:

4. What would the revenue and ridership numbers be different if you had adjusted the MetroBus fares to $1.10 or $1.50?  Presenting only the selected numbers gives us little room to judge the proposal by.

I don’t think that looking at $1.10 or $1.50 in detail (estimating ridership and revenue) is really necessary at this point. Raising fares by only a dime is not worth the implementation effort and is rarely done anymore in the industry, particularly with such a low base fare. Raising the fares by more that 25% in one stroke is also uncommon because of the challenges and the potential burden on low income riders. I recommended the 25% base fare increase as being large enough to positively effect fare recovery without being so large as to be burdensome.

This answer is improved.  Although it doesn’t have the numbers comparison I was expecting for choosing $1.25 over $1.10 or $1.50, it does give the rationale: both other fares were eliminated by constraints, leaving $1.25 as the only plausible increased bus fare.   I await the rest of the replies to find out whether we get a rationale for the premium bus fare and evidence that paid parking is implausible.

I have been pushing for these answers not because I think the fare changes are egregious.  Neither is it because I believe Capital Metro is hiding a super secret analysis that has been done.  Rather, it is because I believe that transparency means “show your work.”  I would frankly be relieved to find out that there was an analysis that we haven’t been shown yet.  My fear, rather, is that the public, Capital Metro staff, and the Capital Metro Board will all be left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposal that explains the effects of adopting the recommended fare changes, but offers no analysis on any alternative such that anybody could be informed about other options for the choices they’re making.  I have trust that the people who prepared the fare change report are transit professionals. However: 1) the Board is the appointed decisionmaker, not the consultant, and therefore the Board should be well-informed about possibilities for their decision; 2) no decision is better made by one person or group without showing their work.

I look forward to further responses to my questions.  I will be attending the Capital Metro Customer Satisfaction Advisory Committee (CSAC) on Wednesday 8/14 to discuss these emails.  My current suggestion to improve this transparency is to add contract language to all committee reports asking not only for recommendations, but also all information and reasoning necessary to arrive at those recommendations.

Some further half-baked thoughts on fares and metrics.

~ dankeshet

Some further half-baked thoughts on fares and metrics.  My goal in writing this is not to break new ground, but rather to summarize many of the common-sense ideas I’ve heard others say.  I’m sure others who have studied transit have come up with better summaries.

The overarching metric I’m kicking around is mobility per subsidy.   This pushes the hard work back one level into defining mobility and subsidy, but I think mobility is a useful idea inside of which one can compare submetrics.

First, the denominator: Subsidy here means the total revenue the transit agency receives from taxes.  Why per subsidy and not per dollar?  Because, from this perspective, we are judging the transit agency based on how effective it is in working with tax dollars.  If a transit agency sells advertising and uses that revenue to improve the service, the marginal improvements it funds will probably not be as cost-effective as the first dollars spent, but it would be perverse to judge the transit agency as having provided worse mobility to the taxpayer because they found new revenue sources and put the money to use!

How does subsidy interplay with costs?  For the purpose of this analysis, I’m assuming that the transit agency cannot run a significant surplus or deficit over time, and therefore costs are equal to revenues.

What is mobility?  Roughly, getting people where they want and need to go.  I choose this concept because it nicely encompasses some of the other concepts that people have bandied about for transit metrics.

For example, what’s the difference between ridership and mobility?  If ridership is measured as number of rides in a system, this is an imperfect measurement of mobility.  A system that connects linear points A, B, and C might have two buses that connect A to B and B to C .  Through-running a single bus from A to B to C will reduce the number of rides needed to get from A to C from 2 to 1, but increase mobility by making it possible to take one bus from A to C.   In this sense, number of trips is closer to mobility than number of rides, and fits our commonsense notion of what a better system should be.

But number of trips is an imperfect metric as well, as some trips aid mobility more than others.  Setting the fare of UT shuttle buses like the FA to zero has helped them become some of the highest-ridership buses in the entire Capital Metro system.  Many of these trips are vitally necessary: say, students going to class.  Some of them, though, aid mobility negligibly: say, students hopping the bus for a single block they could’ve walked because it was there and it was free.

However, distance traveled itself isn’t a good metric of mobility.  The student who takes a bus 2 miles to go to class could not feasibly walk to class every day any more so than the student who takes a bus 12 miles.  A bus trip of 2 miles therefore is providing as much mobility as a bus trip of 12 miles.

Mobility already encompasses some common sense notions of equity.  Some people are in greater need of transit services: people for whom it’s harder to substitute other transportation.  For example, people with mobility impairments preventing them from walking or driving, or people too poor to own a car.  However, there are notions of equity that are incompatible with mobility.  For example, some of those who need the most help and who use the transit system may be those who use buses as a cheap air-conditioned environment.  However, while these may be people in need, the transit system should not prioritize their needs, as the transit system is meant for providing transit, not any social service that is needed.  That allows city and county governments to compare spending additional funds on air conditioning for the needy to other priorities.

Finally, one note: mobility per subsidy is mainly a useful metric at the margin.  Spending more money overall on transit might reduce the overall efficiency of the spending, as the last bus unit added will probably add less mobility than the first.  However, it can be useful in determining which of many routes should be added or whether it’s worthwhile to raise fares and use the money raised to provide additional service.