HART airport service misinformed, misdirected

Today, I reported on HART’s 2009 proposal for service improvements, service reductions, fare increases and ad valorem property tax increases for the Tampa blog Sticks of Fire. Since the 5 year period that I lived in Boston out of college, I’ve been an advocate for public transportation; as much as a guy like me can be an advocate for anything.

Living in Boston all those years, without a car and with an extensive transit system in the MBTA right outside my door, I still found that even my modest 4 mile commute to work could be covered in about half the time on a bicycle as it took riding the “T”. Likewise moving back to Tallahassee, after Boston, I found that city’s StarMetro service to be severely lacking and for almost two years, I made my bicycle my primary and only form of transportation.

Thus, an unfortunate series of events brought me back to this Tampa, the fair city of my youth and more unfortunately, I discovered that riding your bike in most of Hillsborough Country is more or less a suicide trip. I’m no stranger to the car culture. I have a valid Florida drivers license. I’ve previously owned several cars. I grew up HERE, after all. I just didn’t want to get back behind the wheel, saddle myself with more debt, just to spend two hours in sizzling traffic every day, commuting to a job so that I could afford the privilege of…sitting in sizzling traffic for two hours a day!

So, here I am, in Tampa, and I’m taking the bus. Thus, the primary criteria on which I’ve evaluated my perspective employers has been their accessibility to the services of the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (HART).

My bus is Route 30. I take it to work every day, Monday through Friday, from my neighborhood off Hanley Road in Town N’ Country, through Tampa International Airport and the Westshore Corridor, to the Palma Ceia area which is sort of like Tampa’s Midtown. The ride itself takes about 45 minutes but there is a healthy 15 minutes of walking on each end of the bus ride.

Compared to other cities where I’ve lived, the HART transit system is pretty good for it’s size. I’ve been particularly pleased with the buses on-time record. They are hardly ever late. The buses may be on time, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough of them yet. Most of the busy buses run every 30 minutes on weekdays and every 60 minutes on weekends. For someone, who can choose to jump in a car and get to their destination within 15 minutes, 30 minute service just isn’t flexible enough. 15 minute service would be ideal.

More service, of course, costs money and in this area Hillsborough County has only recently caught on to the whole idea of adequately funded transit. For the past few years, when the county was flush with new real estate dollars, HART started to expand service. Then, last year, the legislature decided that local taxing authorities like HART needed to cut their arbitrarily cut their millage rates. That resulted in a level-funded HART budget last year. Next, we got the ‘Save our homes amendment’ forcing more cuts to the max millage rate and HART is now pushing a 16% fare increase just to break even with another level funded budget year.

Despite these setbacks, HART brought in a new CEO, David Armijo and he has managed to squeeze every last nickel and dime to improve service in key areas. Route 2, Nebraska Avenue, the busiest route in the system, was the first HART bus to achieve 15 minute service during peak periods. 15 minute service is also planned for implementation on Route 34, Hillsborough Avenue, by 2010.

And finally, as part of it’s annual recommendations for service improvements, HART recently announced a proposal for weekday 15 minute service on Route 30, Town N’ Country, and an improvement from 60 minute to 30 minute service on weekends. These improvements were projected to cost an additional $1.2 million in operating expenses. Unfortunately, for me and everyone else that rides the 30 to work from Town N’ Country, the weekday improvements were only proposed for the segment of the route that runs from downtown Tampa to Tampa International Airport.

As familiar with the 30 as I am, I was almost sure that there were just as many people riding the bus West of the airport as there were riding East of the airport. I spoke to a senior staff member at HART about the discrepancy. He assured me that my self assessment on the ridership was not accurate. “However”, he said, “the service improvements are not about ridership. The downtown business community has been pressuring us to improve service between downtown and the airport. We don’t think that there are people waiting at the curb to catch that extra bus. We do think that 15 minute service will provide that extra incentive to get people to take the bus who wouldn’t have previously considered it.”

I have to agree with that logic. However, I think the argument that more service will eventually bring more riders is just as true in Town N’ Country, if not more so, than it is downtown. I also wasn’t convinced about the ridership. So, I was able to get HART staff to pull the ridership reports for me.

The first thing that I learned from the ridership data is that the ridership data isn’t that accurate. Up until very recently, HART has only had a limited number of automated passenger counters (APCs) available to audit their ridership. A great deal more were recently ordered and are currently being deployed but as far as current data is concerned, any given route is only surveyed a handful of times, 3 times a year. The senior staff member was right about more people coming from Downtown, but not by as much as he let on. Of passengers originating East of Westshore Mall, versus passengers originating West of Westshore Mall, it’s about a 60-40 split skewed towards downtown.

When you just look at people getting on and off at the airport, it gets even more interesting. Within 5%, there are just as many people who get off at the airport from either direction. The statistics for people who get on the bus at the airport as basically the same.

The bottom line is, if you’re trying to improve service to the airport, then you should heavily consider those people who already use the bus to get there. If you do that, then it doesn’t make sense to double service on the downtown side and leave the West side as is. Especially in a lean budget year.

Last year, when the budget started to get lean, the HART budget voted to eliminate weeknight service after 10:00 p.m. on Route 30, West of the airport. By there own estimates, HART staff concluded that by eliminating these two late night buses, over 900 riders annually would be affected for a savings of $26,000. Now, one year later, HART wants to put $1.2 million in new service East of the airport.

Needless to say, I was incensed. I prepared my analysis of the ridership data and submitted it to HART as part of their public comment process. I also testified at their public hearing on July 16. I asked that HART improve it’s ridership data collection and to compromise on the service enhancements by spreading the extra buses out over the whole route on a 20 minute interval.

Wednesday, HART staff released their revised proposals, based on the public comment process. They have recommended that the Board of Directors defer it’s decision on the Route 30 enhancements until March 2009, halfway through the 2009 fiscal year. The stated reason being that the new buses that were to be dedicated to the route will not be available until then. I have no reason to doubt that my testimony on the matter has had little effect and that HART still intends to pursue the downtown enhancement of Route 30 at Town N’ Country’s expense. I can only hope that the delay will provide additional time to convince the HART staff and board to take a more equitable stance.