The Sound Transit schedule booklet, effective Sept. 22, has been released on the internet. Highlights:
- Two new round trips on South Sounder, one on North Sounder.
- The new Route 599 connects Lakewood Station with the Sounder terminus. Uniquely, this bus will not accept cash fares; you must buy a ticket off-board to use this service, or have the correct pass, transfer, or train ticket.
- Route 591 discontinued, and replaced with 10 more round trips on the 590.
- Trips added to many bus routes.
- Major schedule adjustments to the 510 and 577.
There’s other stuff. If you use a Sound Transit train or bus, I suggest you check it out, because you’re probably affected.
I asked a contact at ST about the 599 fares. I’m told that because the route is supposed to interface with Sounder, they’ve adopted the Sounder fare system.
Metro’s September service revisions just went up today.
Transit Now improvements on 18 routes (more frequent service during more times), new routes, hourly service between Fremont and Golden Gardens, more morning trips on the 41, etc.
Wow, 599 is using the sounder fare system and doesn’t take on-board payment? I dream of the day when all transit uses orca.
That looks like BRT to me.
[...] commenter Oran. Martin H. Duke @ 7:16 [...]
I wish ST would add an hourly bus service to all the stations when Sounder’s not running…
OR, act like a grown-up transit system and run the trains hourly in both directions. I wouldn’t expect the level of service as exists on the SF-San Jose route, but, one would think that by now we would have had the sense to INVEST in reducing oil consumption and making this a better place to live by having hourly Everett-Tacoma service from 5:00 AM until midnight. Once that is accomplished, let’s extend ST to Bellingham and Olympia. This is NOT a cost, it is an investment in the future.
Sound Transit’s buses do that already.
Lloyd, we don’t own the tracks, and it’s been like pulling teeth just to get BNSF to agree to add four more round trips for ST2. It isn’t up to Sound Transit.
Anyway, lots of other systems have peak only service. We’ll grow as the ridership grows.
You’ll get Everett to Tacoma with the next round of light rail, which we could vote on in only a few years, and we can make all of this as fast as you want by adding money to it at the state level. Those are the fights worth having.