Title
A MOTION expressing support for a special session of the Washington state Legislature to address statewide, regional and local transportation needs.
Body
WHEREAS, the global recession has resulted in a steep decline in transportation revenues, including local sales tax revenues for public transportation and local funds used for road maintenance and improvements, and
WHEREAS, the transit division, which is also known as Metro, has reduced its multiyear funding shortfall by implementing the regional transit task force recommendations and through fare increases, reducing expenses, deferral of transit service increases, negotiation of a one-year wage freeze for employees, implementation of transit performance audit cost saving efficiencies, deletion of lower-performing bus routes, spending down of reserves, implementation of the temporary congestion reduction charge and other measures, and
WHEREAS, these gap-closing measures still leave a Metro transit system deficit that can only be closed by reduction of up to seventeen percent of bus service hours, or approximately six hundred thousand service hours, and
WHEREAS, a reduction of up to seventeen percent of bus services hours would eliminate, reduce or revise at least seventy percent of all Metro transit routes and increase personal automobile trips by more than twenty thousand trips per day, thereby increasing congestion costs associated with traffic delays;
WHEREAS, the road services division is responsible for an unincorporated area road network that supports more than one million trips per day serving urban and rural trip purposes. For several of King County's rural arterials, more than half of the commute trips originate in urban areas. The system consists of about one thousand five hundred miles of county roads and one hundred eighty bridges, plus numerous sidewalks and pathways, traffic signs and signals, drainage pipes and culverts and other critical transportation infrastructure, and
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