Low-income people who ride a circulator that travels between social service agencies don’t have to worry about being left at the curb at the end of the year: The free downtown service will continue through 2014 and may eventually include weekend hours.
“The word is we’re going to continue this service,” said Kari Ware, interim transportation coordinator with the anti-poverty nonprofit Solid Ground, which operates the circulator.
Created as a pilot program to mitigate the loss of Metro’s downtown Ride Free Area, the circulator is one of the last remaining transportation options for low-income people.
It will continue ferrying low-income riders until at least the end of 2014. The new date extends the proposed end date of the city’s only free transportation resource for at least another year.
Last fall, officials with Solid Ground signed a $400,000 contract with the city to operate the circulator as a pilot project that would run from October 2012 until December 2013, when officials had planned to reevaluate the service.
But early signs indicate an evaluation may have already taken place. Ware said a county official told her in late September that the county supported continuing the service. City and county officials voiced similar sentiments in July, she said.
Until the circulator contract is renewed, Ware said Solid Ground officials have shied away from making a formal announcement of the program’s extension.
“There’s always that .01 percent something could happen,” she said.
The circulator runs a one-way, 4.5-mile loop through downtown, with seven stops. The first vehicle leaves Harborview Medical Center at 7 a.m., and the last vehicle leaves from the same stop at 4 p.m. Service runs Monday through Friday.
Ridership has exceeded expectations. In October 2012, during its first month of operation, 3,535 people rode the circulator. With minor exceptions, the number of riders increased each month.
In August 2013, the last month statistics were available, 6,530 people used the service, almost double its initial ridership.
In less than a year, the circulator has provided free service to 53,517 people.
Ware credits word of mouth with increasing ridership. When service began, she said some stops were deserted or rarely used. But as regular riders informed friends or other social service clients of the service, circulator stops, once empty, begin to fill up. Now, she said, riders at one stop might occupy every seat in a vehicle.
Solid Ground operates two wheelchair-accessible vehicles, one that carries 23 people and a second that carries 19. There’s also one stand-by vehicle.
In the fall of 2011, with Metro facing a $60 million deficit, the King County Council voted to stop the Ride Free Area, which had provided free Metro bus service through a large swath of downtown for nearly 40 years. Service providers worried low-income or homeless riders would be stranded.
“You wonder how people who don’t use the circulator are getting around anymore,” Ware said.” Or maybe they just aren’t.”
Shortly after the RFA ended, the county council created a low-income fare advisory committee. Committee members declined to recommend a specific fare for low-income people.
Instead, the committee provided county councilmembers with eight recommendations, including continuing a discount bus ticket program to human service agencies and coordinating a potential low-income fare with Sound Transit. The county council will not discuss a low-fare option until the fall of 2014.
The current one-zone, non-peak bus fare costs $2.25.
Ware said that when circulator service started, some riders longed for the accessibility the RFA had offered, including traveling down Third Avenue, the city’s busiest transit corridor. Even now some riders would like longer hours.
Numerous riders also expressed an interest in weekend hours for the circulators. Since service has come in under budget, Ware said the extra money frees up Solid Ground to test weekend runs, which will begin later this year.
Even though ridership was low when circulator service began, Ware said that city, county and Solid Ground officials view the program as a success, “So it will be refunded for next year.”