King County Metro’s vision for a sustainable, inclusive and innovative commuting experience

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on public transport ridership. What strategies has King County Metro employed to regain passenger trust and encourage a steady return of riders as the situation improves?

We have done a couple of things. The first is keeping service on the road. One of the main reasons that transit agencies can be looked to for the mobility needs of the communities that they serve is if they still have those major connections to get people from home to work, to play, to different community functions. We still have a really robust network to get people to where they need to be so that transit is always an option.

Also, during the COVID-19 pandemic and as we recovered through it, we were constantly confident to use our system, they understood where to get information and we had a lot of different customer‑facing opportunities with our transit ambassadors.

This is a new aspect to our system, so these are operators that, for one reason or another, are temporarily unable to drive buses. They’re stationed at major transit hubs, answering questions, pointing the way to go for a tourist or providing help with the best routes and really just providing that friendly presence of someone who knows the system so well. That’s one example of the ways that we’ve pivoted to welcome people back onto the system.

As you’ve briefly mentioned, accessible and user-friendly technology often play a crucial role in enhancing the passenger experience. How is King County Metro leveraging technology to make commuting easier, more convenient and enjoyable for riders?

We have this really great payment system through our One Regional Card for All, lovingly called ORCA in our region, which also is a very Pacific Northwestern symbology. The different transit agencies are all part of that ORCA system, which means that, if you want to use light rail and then a bus and then a water taxi to make your day happen, you can do so with one payment method. This is a great example of a technology tool that we’re using all across our mobility systems.

Our OneBusAway project is another example of how you can get real-time information about where your bus is. Our trip planner links you to all of the mapping and routing information, and it also has information about re-routes and other impacts, so you have access to that real-time information to inform your trip.

I’m also really excited about our real-time information signs that we have displayed at various locations along our bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor, which we call RapidRide. They’re easy to see, really customer-friendly, have real-time information, have maps, but are done in a way that you can really access them no matter what time of day, no matter the inclement weather. It’s an e-paper technology, new for our system, and it has been getting great results for its accessibility.

In addition, people are using their phones all of the time, so we’re always thinking how we can continue to maximise the user experience and really minimise the ways that they have to engage with the system to make their trip happen. We are in Seattle, which has a reputation of being very tech-friendly, so we want to see our organisation continuing its evolution with more technology throughout all of our different customer-facing tools.

Credit: King County Metro – The agency was the first in the U.S. to put bus racks on its coaches and the first to expand its trolley line and infrastructure in the downtown urban areas.

Improving the perception of safety is paramount for public transportation systems, so what measures has King County Metro taken to ensure a safe and secure environment for passengers, and how has this impacted ridership?

That’s such a fantastic question and it is important not just for our riders, but also for our employees who serve and deliver the service every day. We’re achieving a safe and secure environment through engagements with our operators and other people who are in the service delivery profile, as well as hearing from customers, and then using the information to develop a couple of different approaches.

Especially as we continue to recover, there are workforce challenges all throughout our system, both in our operator ranks, but also our safety and security ones. We’ve been trying to really understand where to focus our investment on presence, and presence means a lot of different things. It means riders back on the bus, it means people available to answer your questions from a customer service perspective, and it also means safety and security officers.

We have significantly increased the number of our transit security officers. These are folks who hop on and off the bus, make sure that the operator’s okay, make sure that the activity in and around bus zones is transit appropriate, and provides a real customer-facing approach, as well as also a safety and security one. So, we’ve doubled those numbers in the past year.

We have also introduced the transit ambassador programme, which is brand new to our system, as I mentioned earlier. This has been a raging success, so we’re going to expand that. Then, we also acknowledge that we work in an environment where whatever you see on the coach is a reflection of the environmental conditions of the city that you live in, and that some of those are challenging. Especially in this environment, where we have different challenges around mental health, behavioural health and drug addiction issues, that can then spill onto or off the coach.

Therefore, we have deployed behavioural health teams, because we don’t want to ask our operators to be social service workers. They’re operators and they have a really important job to do to keep us all safe on that trip, but we also know that people may be in really fragile positions and need some additional service. So, we have deployed both a transit security officer with the behavioural health specialists and others to be in those locations where we know we have some challenging trends, working to build relationships with communities who may be vulnerable or in crisis, and see if we can solve their needs instead of having an escalated moment.

This includes handing out socks, asking people if they need the location to a shelter that has availability, seeing if someone wants to have some mental health support, but really just meeting people where they’re at and ensuring that they’re using our transit system for the appropriate transit intended purpose.

This has been really successful, but that success comes from our operators and customers telling us where they’re seeing places that need support, and we look at that data regularly so that we can deploy those resources where the system needs are. We’re a really big transit system, serving over two million people in King County, which is a very large geographic span, so we need to make sure that we’re highlighting and putting those resources where they can be of best use.

Public transportation is often closely tied to environmental sustainability, so could you please elaborate on any eco‑friendly initiatives or practices that King County Metro has adopted to attract environmentally conscious passengers?

This is such a great question for us right now, because we are so excited and proud of – and even a little daunted by – our goals for a zero-emission fleet by 2035. It is a huge exercise to convert a 1,400-coach system to be zero-emission, starting with electrification.

I would like to note that this is something King County Metro has been very good at. We were the first agency to put bike racks on our coaches, we were the first to expand our trolley line and infrastructure in the downtown urban areas, so we have a track record of leading innovative climate-friendly solutions. We have been using those tools to tell our different riding populations how they can continue to move the needle in the positive direction from a climate perspective.

It is really important that we provide a robust transit agency so that people can use Metro as their first option and not even think about getting in their car. We want to ensure that our delivery of the public service is through green and clean technology. That’s where we will be by 2035, and the folks in this region are really excited about it. If they have a bus that gets them to where they need to be and it’s clean, they’re going to choose us. 

King County Metro serves a really diverse community. How does the organisation ensure that the needs and preferences of different passenger groups are considered and accommodated in efforts to improve the passenger experience?

There is no perfect way to meet everyone’s needs at the same time. This is hard to do from a resource constrained environment, which is where we work in transit. We had an incredible moment during COVID-19, as we looked at the data to see where ridership dropped off, to actually discover places where ridership had either stayed the same or, in some cases, grew.

We knew through that data analysis that we serve incredibly transit-dependent populations, and that those populations often were either people of colour, or low-income, or English is not their first language, or immigrant communities or they had different vulnerabilities, which made their need for transit even higher, and it was our responsibility to double down and make sure that they had the service profile that they needed first. That’s where we need to be as an agency.

We centre equity, safety and sustainability in our decision-making, and that data from COVID-19 really showed us that the service profile for our transit-dependent riders was in very key parts of the county. This allowed us to ensure that, where we had to cut service with workforce shortages and such, we would try hard not to cut it in those spaces where we knew people didn’t have another option.

Secondly, we also know folks are coming back onto our system differently than before. People are no longer following the traditional Monday through Friday, 9-to-5 commute pattern, and instead it’s moving to those all-day connections. Our weekend service is at 80% of riders, because people are using it for different reasons. They’re going to a Taylor Swift concert, or a baseball game, or the opera or church, so they need a system service profile that fits this.

Instead of having those heavy morning and evening commutes, patterns are changing. We’re spreading it out so that people who want to leave work at 15:00 have a bus to catch at that time. Both from a transit-dependent perspective and from a commute change to an all-day profile, that’s where we need to be. This gives us an opportunity to try to get there a little bit faster.

You’ve highlighted the importance of multimodality, and how seamless integration with other modes of transportation like biking or ride-sharing can really enhance the overall commuter experience. How does King County Metro collaborate with other transit options to provide passengers with a comprehensive and convenient travel solution?

The fixed-route bus service is a key component of what we deliver, but we are a mobility agency and part of our charge is to connect those modes to each other. Our sister transit agency, Sound Transit, which is light rail, begins its expansion in 2024, and it is our responsibility to bring people to that system, to feed it with our fixed-route service, then we can deploy our service in the neighbourhoods that aren’t fed by light rail.

The other is in Metro Flex, which is a large umbrella app that hosts a bunch of micro‑mobility options that gets you to that system. Say you live in the suburbia of King County, it’s a little bit harder to get to, as it doesn’t have great land use patterns, but you still want to use transit to get to an urban core. You can use this app and it will find a ride-share type approach to connect you to transit. Same with the bike network, as well, making all those different connections along the way from what we call a mobility hub perspective.

The other thing that I would say, just because it’s fun and a niche programme, is that we have a bus shuttle service that actually gets you to the trails. So, if you live in an urban area and you don’t have a car, but you want to go hiking, we have a Trailhead Direct programme in the summer that takes you. These innovative, specific ways that meet people’s whole life experiences are what we’re trying to offer as a mobility agency.

Another really crucial aspect of public transport is making sure that services are affordable for commuters. Can you discuss any fare structure improvements or discounts that King County Metro has implemented to make riding more financially accessible?

We have a really robust fares programme, and I think that people often think of transit agencies and fares as a pretty simple thing. You set a fare, you pay it and you go on your way. As you’re alluding to, it’s actually quite layered in a very meaningful way of how you’re going to gain or lose riders.

One of our philosophical tenets here at King County Metro is that mobility is a human right, and that fare payment should not be an obstacle to use the transit system. We have an income-based approach. If you can pay, you should pay, and a huge part of our fare payment structure is based on businesses. Businesses see it as an advantage for their employees, and so they pay all or a portion of those fares.

But, more importantly, we want to offer support to the people who may not have that same access to resource. If you are low or no income, we have several programmes that qualify you to get a free fare. You can still have an ORCA card just like everybody else, because it’s important not to sort people in a visible way, but you still get that connection onto the system. We’re trying to expand this further. Our challenge is distributing the right tool to the right population.

The other example of a fare programme that we launched nearly a year ago is our free youth fare, and this is exciting for multiple reasons. Up until the age of 19 in Washington State, and in our system, it is free to use transit. They still have a card, as we want to tap it, because we want their data, so that we can see them become the next generation of riders.

The youth fare programme is awesome, because it’s building that new generation of ridership and it’s also helping families who are a little bit strapped of cash, knowing that their child has the ability to come to and from school, or to the grocery store, or to soccer practice. We’re seeing great success with that programme and are looking forward to expanding it and letting more people know that it’s available.

With public transport playing a really big role in reducing traffic congestion, can you highlight any efforts that King County Metro has made to promote the benefits of using public transit, not only for individual passengers, but for the community as a whole?

I would say we’re still a work in progress. We do love our cars in the U.S., there’s no getting away from that, but there’s lots of reasons why people should choose transit, or see the benefit of their neighbour choosing transit. Congestion is always one that we can highlight, the ease of use. If your bus comes frequently and takes you to that urban core, you have the ability to use it.

Our RapidRide programme is our bus rapid transit programme. We just launched our H Line, and that has been incredibly successful, because it does exactly what your question highlights. It shows the benefit of connecting communities that have historically not been connected, so you can get from one city to downtown Seattle in a way that you couldn’t before, in a fast way with a dedicated ride.

Credit: King County Metro

As we look ahead, what are some of the exciting developments or upcoming projects that King County Metro has in the pipeline to further elevate the passenger experience and attract a larger number of riders?

The expansion of our bus rapid transit and our RapidRide lines to connect the rest of the county in those investments of service and high‑quality service is really exciting. Equally exciting is the electrification of our coaches and how we can provide clean service, but it’s also about really embracing a green economy.

These are really great high paying jobs that we’re going to be welcoming into our system, training employees who are currently here in other ways. This green technology is going to be really competitive and a great investment both in our system and in our region from an educational perspective. We create these pipelines of youth who want to go to trade school, because they want to learn how to work on electrified coaches, which is very close to aeroplanes, which is very close to a lot of other green technology jobs. That’s a really incredible gift for us.

The fares programme is another which will see great ways to build our technology and also invite new people onto our system, because our service profile is there. It’s perhaps a boring part of the answer, but I think one of the most fundamental. You have to have the service in order to get people to use it, because they need to see how those lines on that map meet their own individual needs.

Finally, with technology and urban transportation evolving, how do you envision King County Metro embracing innovation to transform the way that passengers perceive and use public transportation services?

There’s two real audiences to your question. One is an internal audience, and transit historically has not been great at innovating quickly or being really flexible. We’re a steady state, low risk industry that likes to just do what we know, and so, really, it’s showing the why and the purpose and the benefit for the employee, and their own experience delivering service.

If we can get different ways that we could manage headway, different technologies to tell operators if there’s a re-route, those are benefits to them. That improves their quality of job, as well, so we have to talk about the larger purpose of why these technologies are coming online and what we want to achieve.

It’s a little bit easier to talk to the riding public, because they know. They know that they want to see better information on when their bus is going to show up. They want better information on the connections, on transfers, on payment methods, on the different ways that they can engage with the system and tell us where to grow next.