King County Metro Transit

Similar to the Boston phase of the project I made extra contacts whilst touring around the facilities of Seattle's traffic experts. I finished off the Seattle leg of the fellowship with two such visits. The first of which was a tour of the King County Metro Transit facility in downtown Seattle, kindly provided by Dan Overgaard.

Bringing up the subject of kiosks with Dan seemed to confirm that they weren't considered a truly viable option in terms of distributing travel information. Dan backed this up with the fact that most offices are now equipped with Internet connections anyway rendering the kiosks redundant. Certainly as far as Metro are concerned kiosk development and maintenance is not seen as an efficient use of funds. In terms of timetable information Metro utilise the internet as well as having over 400 outlets across the city, not to mention over 60 outlets for purchasing tickets. The Internet receives over 8000 user sessions per day, mainly for the excellent schedule and route map information.

The King County control centre monitors the location of its large fleet of buses using an AVL system that utilises radio frequencies and about 255 receivers located across the city. Odometer information is also used to help accurately locate a vehicle and this information is also shared by the University of Washington in the development of the BusView system (See earlier section). More evidence of data sharing is to be found at the control centre where live CCTV feeds from WSDOT's TSMC are displayed to help the control room staff keep their drivers informed of any problems on the network.

The front-end software in the control room is a custom written geographical interface with plenty of functionality to highlight specific routes or vehicles.

Information outlets for Metro KC are limited due to funding. Generally they just include leaflets, maps, an automated phone service and Internet. The phone service is heavily used and is an automated touch tone system that provides information about special events and associated services e.g. Sea Fair 2000, timetable, route and diversion information.

Although the main aim of Metro is to provide a viable bus service to the population of King County they do invest a certain amount of resource for information projects. Discretion is exercised however, and larger projects are only undertaken when capital expenditure is made available. Surveys have shown that most commuters would prefer extra vehicle on the road to sophisticated information services.

My sincere thanks to Dan Overgaard, Metro KC Transit