Author Archives: Ryan Packer

About Ryan Packer

Ryan Packer lives in the Summit Slope neighborhood of Capitol Hill. He blogs at typewriteralley.blogspot.com.

Bus Stop | Locked in — Metro releases proposal for revamping routes around light rail

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Stutter Bus

(Image: Metro)

(Image: Metro)

King County Metro has released the Executive’s Proposal for a restructure of bus service to be rolled out early next year to coincide with the opening of light rail stations on Broadway and at the University of Washington.

If you were hoping for your bus service to mostly stay the same, this proposal should please you. But if you were hoping for a dramatic change in Metro’s approach to transit service, taking advantage of quick transfers to a fast train at any opportunity to reduce duplication and provide more frequent service to more destinations, then this proposal might leave something to be desired.

Almost every bus route on Capitol Hill stays entirely intact. Here are the changes:

  • The biggest change will be to the 43, which will be deleted. In its place on E Olive Way is the new route 11. Between downtown and 19th Ave E, this route will follow the route of the current 43. At 19th, it will turn right and continue south to Madison Street, where it will take a very tricky left turn onto Madison and continue all the way down Madison and terminate in Madison Park like the current 11. This diversion down 19th Ave was not in any previous restructure proposals and is very unusual. Also of note is the fact that this route will not be able to run on trolley wire, leaving the 43’s trolley wire between Summit Avenue and 23rd Ave unused.
  • The 8 will receive the only other change in physical routing and the change does not come on Capitol Hill at all. At Mount Baker Station the 8 will terminate and anyone who would continue south on Martin Luther King Jr Way S will need to transfer to the new route 38 to Rainier Beach. Splitting the 8 at Mount Baker will likely do little to alleviate reliability problems relating to the the Capitol Hill segment of this route. I talked about those reliability issues in the last column. The 8 also retains its 30 minute frequency at night and on Sundays. It will receive some added trips during weekdays and end service later at night.
  • The 25, which serves Capitol Hill’s northwest edge on the way to Laurelhurst in an infrequent manner, will be deleted.
  • The 10 and the 12 stay just as they are, bypassing Capitol Hill Station. Increased service thanks to Prop 1 will bring the 10 to 15 minute frequency at most all day long including Saturday and Sunday. The 12 will see weekday evening service increase to 15 minute frequency as well. Many of these frequency changes were already approved by the County Council with the passage of Prop 1 so it’s not immediately clear of the immediacy of their inclusion in this proposal or if they are merely included to clarify the longer term goals for frequency in the area.
  • The 49, despite also connecting Capitol Hill to the University District will remain entirely in place and increase to 12-15 minute frequency at all times. However, U District Station at NE 45th Street will open 5 years behind the station at Montlake, at which point this route will be truly duplicated by Light Rail.
  • The 48 will, like the 8, become split into 2 routes, in this case in the University District where riders can board the new route 45 which will take over the Green Lake/ Crown Hill portion of the route. With this will come an increase in frequency at most times of the day
(Image: Metro)

(Image: Metro)

After two rounds of public comment and three other proposals, this set of changes is very likely the final one that will get put in place in the first quarter of 2016. At this time, the only changes will probably come directly from the King County Council. The only two council members whose districts these changes are taking place in are Larry Gossett and Joe McDermott but contacting the entire council as well as County Executive Dow Constantine is probably the route to take to communicate any last minute suggestions on this restructure proposal. At this point it is not known when a final vote will take place.

UPDATE: Bus Stop missed the fact that the route 8 will also be making the same deviation via 19th Avenue that was in no earlier proposals from Metro. This deviation to a tricky turn between Madison St and 19th Avenue adds at least 2 minutes to every 8 trip, reducing the impact of splitting the 8 at Mount Baker Station and comes with little apparent justification.

You can read more about the proposals here.

Bus Stop | What to do about the 8

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A line waiting to board an 8 on a recent weekday stretches almost to the end of the block.

A line waiting to board an 8 on a recent weekday stretches almost to the end of the block.

Few bus routes in Seattle are developing a reputation for unreliability like the 8. But let’s be fair: the 8 has it rough. It’s a huge route, traversing the entire Rainier Valley, the Central District, Madison Park, Capitol Hill, north Downtown, and Lower Queen Anne. And it’s the go-to route for people to get between the city’s fastest growing job centers of South Lake Union, Denny Triangle and Capitol Hill.

Unfortunately, it depends on the same road that most people in the same neighborhoods use to get to I-5: Denny Way. There are no other options to get across the freeway to Capitol Hill save heading to downtown streets which are already packed as well, or taking Lakeview Boulevard, which would be a detour so long it wouldn’t benefit anyone.

And the problem is getting worse, and spreading outside peak hours. In the 2014 Metro Service Guidelines Report, King County reported that the route 8 ran late 30% of the time- and 44% of the time during peak hours. In 2010 only 25% of trips were running late, though the peak hour percentage was relatively constant at 43%. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | How’s your Capitol Hill bus route doing?

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It’s been five weeks since Seattle started seeing added service on King County Metro buses. It is only the first phase in what has been promoted by members of the city council as the “best bus service Seattle has ever seen” and the improvements that have been made on the Hill are more targeted than the ones being applied elsewhere in the city, but I’m devoting today’s column to what Capitol Hill bus riders are seeing at the stops.

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The most noticeable change is the return of the 47. This Summit Avenue/Bellevue Avenue bus, deleted in September (we gave it a nice sendoff) is back, with even more limited service hours than it had before. With only 12 minutes on the schedule from one end of the route to the other, and half of the route being shared with the 43 along Pike & Bellevue. this bus returning to the hill is a large chunk of the service hours Capitol Hill is receiving from the increase in the sales tax rate and car tab fee.

Continue reading →

Bus Stop | Metro releases less ambitious plan to restructure routes as light rail comes to Capitol Hill

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proposed-midday-frequenciesThe proposals for improving the bus network in Capitol Hill that have been coming from King County Metro over the past few years have varied pretty widely. From an emergency service proposal to staunch the effect of massive bus cuts, to a Seattle-only expanded service proposal that hasn’t even taken effect yet, the ideas for changing bus service on the Hill have been all over the place, and it would not be unreasonable to assume that the average Hill resident has not been able to keep up with them.

This week, Metro released its latest University Link restructuring proposal for Capitol Hill and northeast Seattle, set to take effect in the first quarter of 2016. After taking comments regarding its two alternatives, Metro has released a third proposal, dropping most of the really frequent service and retaining almost every area’s direct connection to downtown. The result is a proposal that falls short of a frequent service grid that was its clear ambition with alternative 1.

Here are the proposed changes, with the most dramatic stuff first. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | The 25

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17140300270_da8e4b8608_cThe 25 is probably the most infrequent bus to run through Capitol Hill during daylight hours, and is also very likely the one with the best views of Lake Union and the Olympic mountains.

Never heard of the 25? It runs between downtown and northeast Seattle, and it takes a meandering route between there and Eastlake Avenue via Lakeview Boulevard and very north Capitol Hill. It runs every hour, until early evening, 12 times per weekday. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | Considering the alternatives

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Metro is clearly trying to get you to think about frequency.

In the early 1980s, as Portland was building its first light rail line from downtown Portland to Gresham, the public transit planners in that city decided to make substantial changes to its bus network. Like Seattle now, Portland was served by a large number of bus routes that all headed downtown; if you weren’t going downtown you frequently found yourself there anyway because that was the only place to catch a bus to a different neighborhood.

After the reorganization, the redundancy that came from having so many buses running downtown was reduced, freeing up money to provide service between neighborhoods that were not connected before by bus, and to increase frequency of service along those routes. Service every 15 minutes all-day became the standard, making it easier to transfer between buses. The number of places that could now be reached in the same amount of time that it used to take you to only get downtown increased dramatically.

Last month, King County Metro released two proposals for what bus service could look like after the opening of two new light rail stations north of downtown in 2016. Capitol Hill Station and the University of Washington station are clearly envisioned as jumping off points for a reorganization proposal that will trade current levels of coverage for frequency of service. The first round of public feedback on the proposals closed with the end of March.

With a trip between Montlake and Westlake shaved down to 6 minutes, it makes sense to ask riders to transfer when their trip could become much faster overall. Alternative 1, the more ambitious of the two proposals, has the potential to mirror the transformation that Portland saw 30 years ago. What remains to be seen is how reliable the portions of the new, more frequent transit network that are not in their own tunnel will be. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | The 545

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16452122607_deca224184_cSound Transit has been busy on Capitol Hill for years but, for a long time, the only public transit that Sound Transit has actually provided directly to Capitol Hill has been a dogleg on the 545.

The 545 is Sound Transit’s express bus to Redmond, home to Microsoft’s campus and many other tech companies. At most times of day, the 545 comes through downtown Seattle and gets directly onto I-5 via Olive Way. But in the morning, it takes a zig-zag up Pine to Bellevue Ave and picks up Capitol Hill “v-dashes” before getting back to its normal route and onto the interstate.

On a recent Thursday morning, Bus Stop went out to wait for the 545 after grabbing a pastry at City Market. Several Microsoft Connector buses drove by the crowd passing the time at the bus stop looking at their phones. Full time Microsoft employees get to ride in the private Connector buses, but contract workers (“v-dashes” and “a-dashes” in Microsoft parlance) have to wait for the bus with the rest of us.

The dogleg is nearing its 10th anniversary this year and owes itself to the work of one man, Anirudh Sahni. CHS wrote about Sahni’s fight to bring the 545 to Capitol Hill a few years ago.

It’s hard to find another example of a bus route in Seattle that is so saturated with people heading to one particular destination, day in and day out. The 8 between Capitol Hill and South Lake Union is nearing the 545 on this score, but is not there yet.

Eventually Sound Transit will have light rail in place between Seattle and Redmond, in what it hopes will be another 8 years. Then Capitol Hill to Overlake will only be about 30 minutes away by train, not counting transfer time downtown. Sound Transit is also studying the possibility of a transit-only Lake Washington floating tunnel at Sand Point, but this would likely also necessitate a transfer at the University District.

In the meantime, Seattle transit planners dream of installing a freeway station that could make a Capitol Hill stop easier and perhaps lead to all-day service. The Olive Way freeway station would go in right at the on-ramp to I-5 on Olive Way and cut the detour time to serve Capitol Hill to almost nothing. This could also serve riders of such routes like the 255 to Google in Kirkland.

In the meantime, Capitol Hill’s eastside commuters are thankful for the dogleg.

 

 

Bus Stop | Looking ahead to June’s Prop 1 boosts to Capitol Hill Metro routes

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Take the 48 to visit the Jimi Hendrix bus shelter at 23rd Avenue and Massachusetts (Image: King County via Flickr)

Take the 48 to visit the Jimi Hendrix bus shelter at 23rd Avenue and Massachusetts (Image: King County via Flickr)

Are you excited yet? We are less than 6 months away from the start of Prop 1’s injection of service hours into King County Metro’s bus system throughout Seattle. In short, almost every single bus route that runs on the Hill will be coming more frequently at least some of the time. But let’s look into what this really means for Hill bus riders and the schedules of 9 bus routes that run within or along the edges of Capitol Hill that will be receiving added service hours after the June service change. Two routes that serve the Hill, the 9X and the 12, will not receive any additional service hours until September. Many Hill bus routes receive improved service at each change.

Digging into the numbers, the bulk of added service on the Hill in June will be given to three buses: the 10, the 47, and the 60. The 60 is a much longer route than the other two, running through South Seattle, and so the same number of service hours translates into more round trips on a route like the 10 or the 47 than it does for the 60. Improvements to route 60 include increasing weekday frequency to every 30 minutes. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | The year ahead in Capitol Hill transit

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2014 was a turbulent year for Seattle transit riders. After two votes on transit funding, and a reduction in service hours across the entire county, and the deletion of one of Capitol Hill’s historic trolleybus routes, 2015 should prove to be a much more positive year for transit riders all around the Hill. Here’s a look ahead at what is to come in 2015.

More service is on the way by Summer to meet the demand on the Hill.

  • The First Hill Streetcar to begin service: After problems in the manufacturing of the streetcars themselves, Seattle’s second modern streetcar line connecting central Capitol Hill to parts of First Hill, the Central District, Yesler Terrace (soon to be redeveloped by Vulcan), Little Saigon and the International District will soon be running.
  • “The best bus service Seattle has ever seen”, according to city council member Tom Rasmussen. With the passage of prop 1 in November, Seattle is set to spend $45 million on improving bus service in 2015, with many of the high-ridership routes to be receiving the money in Capitol Hill. Service increases will occur in two phases, with the first in June, and the second following in September. Nearly every single route that runs through Capitol Hill will receive additional service hours to either increase frequency, improve reliability, or decrease overcrowding. The most prime targets for this funding are routes like the 2, 8, 49, 10 and 11: Capitol Hill’s workhorse routes. Continue reading →

Bus Stop | The 10

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The 10 is so Capitol Hill it needs two columns.

As the bus riders of Seattle wait to get through the next few cold, wet months with the lowest service level King County Metro’s had in years, the 10 might be the most useful route on the hill right now. As Broadway loses more and more retail outlets, Pike/Pine continues its revitalization, and 15th Avenue turns more and more into restaurant row, the route of the relatively reliable and frequent 10 is a Capitol Hill holiday shopper’s yellow brick road.

Another thing that the 10 has that other hill routes lack is the crown jewel of Seattle’s park system at its terminus. With Volunteer Park’s new playground and the grand reopening of the Volunteer Park Conservatory, there is so much to recommend this route.