This is the strongest case for grade-separated rail I’ve ever seen.

by SALLY BAGSHAW

As Chair of the Parks and Seattle Center Committee, I regularly take the bus to community centers and Parks meetings. I want to experience for myself how long it takes to get to a neighborhood on the bus and see what the ride is like.

The problem with taking the bus from downtown Seattle, where I live and work, is that it’s relatively easy to get OUT of town after work, but substantially more difficult to get back INTO town after a late evening meeting. On a dark or rainy night, I admit this makes my decision to take the bus more challenging.

Monday evening I took the bus to Interlaken Park at the north end of Capitol Hill. Hopping on the Metro Route 12 at 5:06 p.m., I jumped off at the end of the route on 19th Avenue E and E Galer Street about 25 minutes later. (For you walkers and joggers, Interlaken Park is a 51.7-acre park, a densely wooded haven on the north end of Capitol Hill. It’s a gem.)

Route 12 is an electric trolley bus with frequent service to Capitol Hill – roughly every 10 minutes during commute hours, every 15 minutes during the day and every 30 minutes later in the evening.

Route 12 was standing-room-only this evening. Two darling children dressed for Halloween crowded into one seat across from me with their mother; a young man in a strap t-shirt offered me his seat when I got on. I appreciated his kindness. More after the jump.

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Something old, something new.

Much of the debate surrounding many of the recently-proposed Metro restructures boil down to frequency versus coverage: given Metro’s tightly-constrained operating budget (among other reasons), Metro can’t operate numerous frequent closely-spaced fixed-route services. Rather, Metro must choose between numerous infrequent routes that attempt to provide service within a few minute’s walk of almost everyone’s doorstep, and a smaller number of frequent routes that focus service on ridership centers, serving riders in less-productive areas either with peak-only service or requiring them to walk further.

In addition to policy concerns and value judgements, there are some general empirical observations that can inform these debates. One I wrote about recently is that more-frequent routes are often much more efficient to schedule than infrequent routes. Another, which I plan to address in this post, is whether riders — regardless of what they tend to say in public hearings — prefer frequent, direct routes, with simple schedules and service patterns, or a selection of less-frequent routes that might minimize walking or slightly reduce travel time but run less frequently and only at certain times.

Conveniently, Metro performed a restructure that can serve as a test case for this question more than a decade ago one of its most important and highest-ridership corridors, and I have obtained historical data to show the results of this change. History, data and analysis after the jump.

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King County Metro 2 by Seattle Public Library

Tomorrow, from noon to 2 PM at the Seattle Central Library, King County Metro will host an open house to provide information and obtain feedback about the initial proposal for the Fall 2012 service change. It is the first in a series of similar events that will be held throughout the city over the next two weeks. These events are a great opportunity to communicate directly with Metro staff, to learn why these changes were proposed and for you to explain how they will affect you. I highly recommend attending at least one of them if you have the chance.

Full announcement text and future dates after the jump.
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Would people perceive Metro’s proposed restructure differently if it were presented like this?

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The depiction of routes and categories of service & frequency have been simplified for the purpose of this map, which took about ten hours to produce from sketch to post.

Addendum 6:40 pm: For those who want to see ALL service in West Seattle, including those that only run during peak period, see this map.

by MIKE O’BRIEN

I want to share my recent experience as I rode Metro’s Route 5 north to the Greenwood neighborhood and how this corridor would be different if Prop 1 passes. I ride transit throughout the city, but I frequent routes 5, 44 and 358 the most because they all serve my neighborhood. Route 5 stands to benefit significantly if Proposition 1 passes next week. The route connects the major job centers and transit hubs of Downtown and Northgate, the neighborhood business districts of Phinney Ridge and Greenwood, Shoreline Community College, and significant residential populations along the route.

The Phinney Ridge/Greenwood/Broadview corridor is called out in the city’s Transit Master Plan (TMP) for speed and reliability investments which Prop 1 would fund. So, what exactly does that mean? It means investing in a series of infrastructure investments along a transit corridor to make the bus service operate much more efficiently. Here is a undown of some of the investments slated for this corridor:

• Bus Bulbs: Bus bulbs are a brilliant low cost/high return investment. There are 35 locations identified in the TMP where bus bulbs would be installed along Route 5. The benefit of bus bulbs is easily illustrated.Anyone who rides the bus is familiar with this experience. When the bus pulls out of traffic to pick up or drop off a passenger, it only takes a few seconds, but often the bus is trapped by passing traffic, forcing the bus to wait up to 30 seconds or more before there is an opening to re-enter the travel lane. This happened on my trip north, but could be a thing of the past if Prop 1 passes. Bus bulbs extend the sidewalk or passenger platform out to the travel lane, allowing buses to quickly drop or pick up passengers while remaining in the travel lane. Then the bus can be on its way without waiting for traffic to clear.
  

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  On average, each bus bulb can save up to 8 seconds for a bus. With 18 bulbs in one direction, that’s 2.5 minutes off of each trip, every day, indefinitely into the future. These minutes alone add up to a regular commuter, but they also bring significant savings to the system. Route 5 makes about 75 trips in each direction on a weekday. The minutes saved add up to over 1,600 service hours for this route. Those 1,600 service hours saved can be re-deployed to add more service to the system every single year, without us having to pay for additional service hours year after year.Aside from providing a travel time benefit, when bus bulbs are paired with crosswalks, they serve to narrow the crossing distance of arterials, making it safer for pedestrians.

• Transit Signal Priority. The TMP calls out 14 traffic lights to be modified for transit priority in this corridor. Buses are given priority at a light when an approaching bus signals to the traffic light, causing the light to stay green if it is currently green until the bus passes, or switching to green earlier if the light is red. It is estimated that these changes will save up to 10% of wait time at each signal. This means more time saved for bus riders, and more service hours for the system. (more…)