metrognome
huindekemi — the concept is called ‘user-side subsidy’; taxpayers fund the basic system and people who actually use the service pay as they go. This is becoming more common as a way of reducing the burden on the general taxpayer, esp when statewide funding is involved (parks, major road improvements, etc.) and citizens who won’t use the service complain about paying for it. It also can be used to reduce or redistribute demand to times when there is more capacity.
Metro is a good example of a user-side subsidy system; locally collected sales tax funds the basic system operations (and some capital projects) while users (or, technically, whomever buys the passes) pay about 25% of operating costs. With the peak surcharge, some people plan their trips for slightly different times, which helps reduce demand during high ridership times while putting more riders on buses that aren’t standing room only. Otherwise, you have to buy more buses, build more base capacity, hire more drivers and mechanics, etc. Non-riders benefit because the 100,000,000+ rides Metro provides on an annual basis reduces traffic congestion.
Same with roads capacity; if you don’t manage demand to some level, too many people try to use the roads at peak times and end up sitting in traffic instead. Goods that are being moved along that corridor end up stuck as well, costing consumers more when prices go up so businesses can recoup their costs.
That’s the theory anyway; however, to the individual who may have to pay the toll, the theory may not be as popular as when it applies to someone else.
as far as the South Lake Union Streetcar (and the initial phase of Link), I would see it an investment in future needs by laying out infrastructure before more evelopment occurs (basic urban planning principle.) The initial phase was laid out so that future tracks can go up Eastlake and connect to the UW. Employment, residential capacity and recreational opportunities are all burgeoning in the South Lake Union area.
There really is no room to add road capacity (altho the project to address some of the issues related to the Mercer Mess should help, particulaly when integrated with the north portal of the tunnel at Aurora and the rebuilt Alaskan Way connection to Elliott are finished). The streetcar was a long-range effort to provide transportation in that area to residents, workers and visitors, with eventual connections to other high-demand locations, such as the UW.
It’s easy to criticize portions of projects when their is no understanding (or mention) of how it fits into the greater scheme of things. It’s called vision; if conservatives and car lovers hadn’t opposed the rail/bus public transportation network in the Forward Thrust initiatives in 40 – 50 years ago, we’d be talking about how easy it is to get around the Greater Seattle area without a car.
As far as possibly inflated ridership projections, blame Congressional Republicans who consistently try to derail public transportation funding (yes, that was a pun.) Re: the lack of automated ridership counting on the SLUS, the city opted not to go to the expense of putting in registering fareboxes; if they had, kman would have complained about the unneeded expense. In addition, it would have limited boardings to one door. Now that ORCA is operational, and remote terminals are available, automated counting is available but probably not worth the expense.
BTW, prior to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, transit agencies relied on on- and off-board ridership counts as well as Automatic Psgr Count mats at the front door of a percentage of the fleet to estimate ridership; ‘final’ ridership counts were extrapolated by feeding farebox revenue collection data and ridership estimates into a complex algorythm.