Stranded Buses on Broadway – Originally uploaded by mvbseattle
One thing is certain — Seattle’s next mayor (next results drop: 4:30 PM!) won’t have the same old King County Metro snow plan to drag him down. Metro officials have unveiled two more components of an Emergency Service Route Network designed to show people that they did something keep buses moving this winter if our snowy, icy weather trends continue.
- The first is Metro’s new emergency routes.
Here’s what Seattle Transit Blog had to say about the plan:
The 70 routes are basically a core set of Metro’s most important routes, minus some that are obviously impassable in severe weather. However, there are interesting tidbits for armchair planners, like a new Route 90 that serves as Capitol Hill/First Hill/Downtown Circulator, and a modified Route 39 that is truncated to run between Seward Park and the two nearest light rail stations.
- The second component is a new alerts system that will post route updates on the Metro homepage and send updates on your bus routes to your e-mail or phone. You can sign up for the service here.
These initiatives plus the city’s revamped snow plowing strategy — check out which streets get cleared, which don’t — address a lot of the issues and ideas raised here when we went through a CHS groupthink on Metro’s snow problems while the failures were still fresh in mind.
And, if all of this doesn’t work, there’s always checking in with your friends and sharing information.
Obviously they will not be running trolleys on this route as Boren is not wired along all of the mapped route.
The hill on E. Thomas between 19th and 20th ALWAYS gets blocked in snowstorms by a bus trying to make it up the hill, so only running the route down that hill makes sense
However, bendy buses trying to get up the hill tend to jack-knife and potentially block both lanes. It can take much effort from Metros tow trucks to dislodge them. So the snow route may be impassable due to regular buses caught on the route.
Expect webcam coverage of the area during the next snowstorm!
So, getting back to Cap Hill and say, 15th will be not too bad, but the journey from 15th to get to Downtown will be quite the journey.