Title
A MOTION relating to public transportation, requesting that the Metro transit department report on unplanned trip cancellations, describe how information about unplanned trip cancellations for fixed-route bus service could more quickly and efficiently be provided to inform transit riders in real time, and describe how metrics about unplanned trip cancellations could be incorporated into the next update of the King County Metro Service Guidelines to inform operational and investment decisions.
Body
WHEREAS, the King County Metro Service Guidelines ("the Service Guidelines"), which were updated in 2021 by Ordinance 19367, guide the development of the transit system through criteria to develop, modify, and evaluate transit service, and
WHEREAS, the Service Guidelines identify performance measures for fixed-route bus service, which the Metro transit department monitors and evaluates to determine if investments or operational changes should be made to meet community needs, and
WHEREAS, schedule reliability is identified in the Service Guidelines as one of the performance measures for fixed-route service, and
WHEREAS, schedule reliability is defined as buses adhering to published schedules within reasonable variance, specifically that a bus route should be no more than five minutes later or one minute earlier than its scheduled arrival time more than twenty percent of the time, or, for routes that provide frequent service, more than three minutes from the scheduled headway more than twenty percent of the time, and
WHEREAS, schedule reliability, which is measured in terms of the number of annual transit service hours that would be required for routes not operating reliably to meet the reliability standard, is reported for each route each year in the system evaluation report required by Ordinance 19367, and
WHEREAS, in the years following the pandemic, a related issue has emerged, that of unplanned transit trip cancellations, and
WHEREAS, unplanned trip can...

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