Public Transportation and Commute Trip Reduction Work!

A full rail car removes 200 cars from the road, a full bus removes 60 cars, and a full vapool removes 12 cars.

For the first time in its 28 year history, more than 100 million passenger trips were taken aboard King County Metro Transit in 2000. By riding Metro Transit in 2000, 57 million drive-alone trips were saved, 320 million miles of traffic congestion reduced, 14 million gallons of fuel saved and 3.5 million pounds of pollution kept out of the air.

Each weekday King County Metro provides 300,000 rides.

On workday mornings in the Puget Sound area, transit carries 10% of all trips and carpool and vanpools carry 9%. For a workday morning commute in downtown Seattle, transit carpools and vanpools together carry 53% of all trips!

Buses and carpool carry 47% of all trips to the University of Washington campus in Seattle (of that, buses carry 36% and carpools and vanpools carry 11%).

Buses, carpools and vanpools carry 33% of all trips to downtown Bellevue.

In 2003, Washington residents around the state took over 162 million trips using public transportation - a 1.57 percent increase over 2002.

In King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, Sound Transit Express buses transport 29,000-plus passengers every weekday on 19 regional routes.

Sound Transit's Sounder commuter trains move more than 3,000 commuters every weekday from Everett and Tacoma to Seattle and back.

Sound Transit's Tacoma Link light rail service is proving to be far more popular than anyone had predicted. Original projections showed a weekday rider-ship of 2,000 by 2010. But in the first 13 days of service, ridership was already surpassing the projections.

In the Denver metropolitan region, it's estimated it would take 175 additional miles of highway to carry all the people who use transit today. Recent public transit investments have been very successful; both light rail and the bus and carpool lanes on north I-25 have exceeded projections for ridership.

Transit carries 30% of all trips into central Los Angeles. Without transit, L.A. would need an additional 1,400 freeway lane-miles to accommodate those trips.

Commute Trip Reduction, like Vanpool Programs and Reduced Cost Bus Passes

On an average workday morning in 2003, Washington's Commute Trip Reduction Program (employer programs to encourage employees to get to work in other ways than driving alone) removed 19,000 vehicle trips from the state's roadways. If the vehicles removed in Puget Sound each morning were added back onto the region's highways as solo drivers, the equivalent of 16 additional lane miles would be needed to accommodate the demand.

Employees at workplaces covered under Washington's Commute Trip Reduction Program (employer programs to encourage employees to get to work in other ways than driving alone) reduced emissions of pollutants - mainly carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds - by 4,800 tons in 2003. These changes in commute behavior also reduced emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, by 50,200 tons in 2003.

With gas prices rising higher there's a burgeoning demand for more vanpools. Statewide vanpool ridership (vans only, not including ridesharing or carpooling) in August 2005 stood at a record level of nearly 15,000 daily riders, a 20% increase over two years ago.

High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes (HOV)

When traffic is congested HOV lanes carry far more people than general-purpose lanes of traffic. For example, HOV lanes on I-5 in north Seattle carry 2 1/2 times as many people as any of the other lanes in that area during rush hours. Even when HOV lanes look less congested than general purpose lanes, they often carry more people.

During rush hours, HOV lanes move nearly a third of the people on Puget Sound freeways in only 17% of the vehicles.

Rail

According to a study by the Federal Transit Administration of six urban corridors served by high-capacity rail transit, passengers saved 17,400 hours daily over auto travel in the corridors; remaining road users in the corridors saved 22,000 hours of delay per day due to the absence of vehicles from public transportation users.

Portland, Oregon's Westside MAX light rail line has outpaced projections since day one. Average weekday ridership for 2004 beat the 2005 projections by more than 6,000, coming in at 33,846.

The Pacific Northwest Rail Corridor (Amtrak) linking Eugene, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. carried 640,000 passengers in 2001.

Salt Lake City's Trax Light Rail, Denver's light rail line and St. Louis' Metro Link line all exceeded the initial estimates of passenger ridership.

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