Some MARTA cuts not so devastating

MARTA mini-bus No. 341 sat outside the Medical Center train station, waiting for passengers to board so it could begin its last run of the night. None did, and at 10:15 p.m. the doors fell shut. Around the corner it picked up two hospital workers, the only commuters for the entire route of more than  six miles.

In three months MARTA will make wide-ranging system cuts that will eliminate more than 10 percent of its service, including Route No. 341. MARTA’s leaders have called the service cuts “devastating” and “draconian.” Some of those reductions, however, may raise questions of MARTA's efficiency.

Five of the 40 MARTA routes scheduled for elimination carry fewer than one person on a bus per mile on weekdays, according to route data provided by MARTA. Fare revenues on six of the weekday routes are so low they pay for less than 10 percent of the cost of running the route. That’s on top of routes so unproductive they were already cut last year, according to MARTA officials.

“It’s hard to me to use the word ‘fat,’” said MARTA CEO Beverly Scott, but she concedes there was “service that was nonproductive.”

“We have in fact wound up taking all of that service that we can find, and taking it out,” she said.

Public pressure on transit agencies is generally to provide more service, not less, and to provide it to all areas, not just the efficient ones, said Brian Taylor, director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.  Transit officials may not have the will to cut until they can blame it on something like the economy.

"Some systems have used this as an opportunity to shed some of their least productive routes that during good times it would be very difficult to do politically," Taylor said.

Johnny Dunning, MARTA’s senior director of transit system planning, and other MARTA officials noted that MARTA has consistently used data to tweak routes or save money, and that most of those lowest-productivity routes were mini-buses.  Scott said that her board had never strong-armed her into keeping a route.

She said the unproductive service was a drop in the bucket compared to the larger cuts.  It has cost MARTA $3.1 million a year to run those six lowest-productivity routes, according to MARTA, and the cuts are aimed at a deficit of more than $100 million.  The real story, Scott said, was the severity of the vast majority of cuts.

"It’s almost crazy that we’re having this conversation," Scott said. "All of this discussion of productivity and non productivity must be set within the broader context of how skeletal and scarce the service is to begin with."

MARTA officials said  that even when the economy improves MARTA is positioned to root out bad routes in the future, and that it always keeps track of routes' efficiency.

Hundreds of passengers at public hearings have bemoaned the life-changing problems that cuts to their routes will cause, but the passengers on No. 341 were divided. One passenger said eliminating it will force her to move.  But Mary George, a housekeeping dispatcher at Children’s Hospital, said that compared to her other, more critical route, "It makes sense" to eliminate the No. 341 if MARTA is budget-strapped.

All the same, every decision can't be driven by data, Taylor said, because government has additional responsibilities.  Each community must decide for itself how much it should pay to transport senior citizens, the handicapped and others who can't drive or can't afford cars, and how much range they should have.

"If it was all about the bottom line and the bottom line only, it would all be privately operated," Taylor said.

MARTA has used data to define exceptions that can be tolerated: for service it deems a "lifeline" to jobs, medical facilities and mandatory destinations; for "core" service connecting major travel centers such as the airport; for maintaining connections between bus and rail, and other metro transit systems.

For example, MARTA is preserving at least one route where fares pay less than 10 percent of the cost of the route: the No. 148, which runs between the Sandy Springs train station and a Powers Ferry employment center.  It will eliminate the first leg of the route, between two train stations, and streamline it to make it speedier in the hopes of attracting more passengers.

Measuring by fare revenues, MARTA’s bus system was more cost-efficient than the national average, with fares paying back 26.5 percent of the route costs, compared to 21.2 percent nationwide, according to 2008 figures from the American Public Transportation Association.