Photo by wings777
As Martin correctly pointed out on Saturday, one week is indeed too early to be jumping to conclusions about Metro’s Fall service change, especially since everything happened as we thought it would. One week, however, was enough to convince Metro to make some tweaks to address the most serious overcrowding post-shakeup.
On top of the extra C Line trips that Martin already alluded to, Metro has also elected to remove the Eastgate Freeway Station as an afternoon eastbound stop for the 218 (Issaquah Highlands express), a change that will occur starting next Monday, the 15th. The service change was originally meant to reduce passenger loads on the route by moving its companion, the 212 (Eastgate), to the surface. Ironically, overcrowding worsened after many Eastgate riders remained rooted in the tunnel even as 218 trips were reduced:
This action by King County Metro Transit is an interim step to help ease overcrowding and provide more space for riders traveling beyond Eastgate to the Issaquah Highlands. In response to customer concerns, Metro recently reduced the number of Route 218 trips, added trips to Eastgate-bound Route 212 and moved that route out of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel to 2nd Avenue, locating it with other, similar Eastgate-bound service.
Despite the September 29 service revision, many passengers heading to Eastgate have continued to ride Route 218, forcing some riders to be passed by full buses, and further frustrating those riders heading beyond Eastgate to the Issaquah Highlands.
While the move is only interim as Metro researches other options, Issaquah Highlands riders will be glad to see their buses rid of leeching Eastgate folk. Service adds, of course, are relatively easy to implement, which is why they’ve been the quickest fixes made since the shakeup. But beyond minute tweaks, there remain looming issues, of which only time will tell how lasting their impacts might be.
Someone had posted flyers all over the Eastgate freeway stops this morning urging people to call or email Metro to complain about losing Eastgate service on the 218 because it will force Eastgate riders on to the “packed and unreliable 212.”
This is ridiculous. I’m a 212 rider. And it is rarely “packed.”
And a lot more frequent than the 218. Plus now that it’s on the surface, people have the option of catching a 554 or 215.
The fliers have a row of tear-offs with Kevin Desmond’s email address, a surprising number of them had been taken.
I hope someone puts up a flyer like that at the Issaquah stops, asking people to email and *thank* Metro for the new, faster, much more reliable, direct service, with Issaquah riders finally getting to sit down on the bus. Metro could sure use a little gratitude for all their hard work on this restructure.
The 212 may not be overcrowded, but in my experience it seems to be the most popular of the buses that whiz by I-90/Rainier Freeway Station in the peaks. Admittedly, the 218 isn’t that far behind; those are the two consistently SRO buses that bear Metro liveries, heading eastbound in the PM.
Let’s see how crowded the 212 is starting next week. It is going to get a huge influx of riders who no longer have a direct ride from the tunnel.
Why the heck didn’t they move the 218 ‘upstairs’ too?
They wanted to separate the 218 completely from other Eastgate stop patterns exactly for the reason stated above.
Ah. So those commuting dozens of miles on the Subsidy Express get the comfortable tunnel treatment, while those using the higher-volume, closer-in core service get stuck with all the pains of Seattle surface transit.
That seems about par for the course.
If they had kept the 212 in the tunnel and booted the 218, you’d be complaining that they didn’t take enough southbound buses out of the tunnel to prepare for RFArmageddon.
By eliminating the Eastgate stop on the 218, the cost of express service to Issaquah should go down considerably over previous peaks.
er, picks. Doh!
David, I’m commenting less on this particular service change, and more on the overarching instinct to make things easier and nicer for a specific kind of commuter.
Brent, how do you figure? One would expect that the extra Eastgate volume on the Issaquah trips made the subsidy numbers seem less dire before.
If it is the same number of buses to carry the same number of passengers headed east, then the fewer of them going all the way to Issaquah, the lower the total cost.
I see, you were referring to the total reduction in 218 trips. That’s different than arguing that the elimination of a mid-point stop in and of itself improves the cost-effectiveness of a service.
While this specific change may make sense in these specific circumstances, it still seems weird to argue for uncorridorizing a linear corridor, a.k.a. promoting one-seat rides for very limited destination pairs.
As for the tunnel-versus-surface question, I’d rather reward those who leave their cars and commute past the worst bottlenecks on the bus than reward those who insist on living in the boonies and commuting 40 miles every day heavily subsidized. If you took the 218 out of the tunnel and put the 212 in, you might find more Issaquah-ers driving all the way to the Eastgate garage than you do today, but I’m not really convinced that would leave any worse of a carbon footprint than the medium-empty diesel-spewers do.
D.p., your last paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
I have little interest in debating Aristotelian models of transit, since, as Aristotle would have been the first to point out, they don’t exist.
218s going to Issaquah Highlands will not be medium-empty. That was the purpose of the reduction in 218 frequency: to match it to existing Highlands demand.
I’m happy to send a bagajillion express buses in all directions when they are all full and there is no hope of rail in the corridor anytime soon. I’m not sure what it would accomplish to redistribute those passengers onto a single route (which would look like the 554, run about every 1 minute, and get everyone home slower for no particular benefit).
Exactly, David L.
d.p., no matter how much you may wish it, people aren’t gonna flee the Issaquah Highlands en masse to move to North Seattle. In the meantime, they’re paying their taxes; they get their bus service.
Arguing about whether Sound Transit should be enabling them to continue their life in the suburbs is futile, because Sound Transit was created with the express purpose of continuing to enable their lifestyle.
Meanwhile, as a region, we can make the most of it by designing Sound Transit around efficient trunks.
If we’re going to “uncorridorize” the route during the peak, the key here is to make sure that:
1) Trips along the I-90 corridor that don’t go through downtown can still be made without either an excessive wait time or a backtrack through downtown.
2) During the off-peak where most of the routes aren’t running, the routes that are left are sufficient to connect all the important destinations.
As far as I can see, making the 218 bypass Eastgate doesn’t significantly affect either of these two criteria.
You all might be right about this one, and ASDF’s stated service principles suggest.
Still, something just bothers me about Metro’s propensity to say:
“Hey you, commuters from the outskirts, we’ll give you a dry, clean, direct-access tunnel to make sure you can get out of downtown lickety-split.”
“But you, commuters from closer in, you get to slog down the avenues with all the other suckers.”
“And you, actual city dwellers, here’s a badly through-routed bus with no real-time info and no schedule.”
It’s all part of the larger “faster trip to Issaquah than to Queen Anne” thing that Metro has made its trademark.
d.p., the issue you’ve identified isn’t with the Issaquah service (or Northgate service for that matter), it’s with the Queen Anne service, and to some degree with central-city bus service in general. (Think about riding the 66 versus riding the 504 in Boston…) So our focus should be, and usually is, on fixing the issues with the city — both by identifying the grade-separated system we’d like to see and by agitating about problems that can be solved more cheaply.
And one-way commuter expresses in Boston cost 1.75 times the subway fare and 2.3 times the local bus fare to ride!
“While this specific change may make sense in these specific circumstances, it still seems weird to argue for uncorridorizing a linear corridor, a.k.a. promoting one-seat rides for very limited destination pairs.”
About par for the course in this corridor, with no fewer than three routes almost completely redundant with the 554, plus the 215 whose only purpose that might not be served, albeit much slower, with a 554-209 transfer is serving the meta-sprawl that is the area along Snoqualmie Parkway, and that’s before you get to all the other routes serving Factoria, Eastgate, and Issaquah in their own ways. See below.
Also, the 48 returns to regular routing Thursday in the Eastbound/Southbound direction.
My money says the 218 skipping of the Eastgate stop will become permanent, and popular, with adequate alternative ways to get between Eastgate and Issaquah.
The biggest remaining problem in the tunnel is the capacity overload at Bay A. Here is the capacity breakdown for outbound 4:00-5:00 trips per hour:
Bay A: 29 buses
Bay B: 8 buses
Bay C: 16 buses
Bay D: 15 buses
I’ve observed how the Bay A peakload makes platooning very difficult (though I can’t really discern if platooning is happening), and so far ineffective at several points during peak.
The northbound outbound 4:00-5:00 trips are broken down as follows:
41: 12 buses
71: 2 buses
72: 2 buses
73: 2 buses
74: 2 buses
76: 3 buses
77: 3 buses
255: 8 buses
316: 3 buses
Splitting these trips up more evenly between Bays A and B ought to help significantly in getting northbound peak tunnel operations back on track. I do think the tunnel can handle its current peak bus schedule, with just a shift of more buses to Bay B.
There is the separate issue I’ve always advocated of repairing trunks. I bet riders of the 255 would be happier having all the SR 520 routes serve one set of stops on 4th Ave. We’ll see how Eastgate commuters like having all their buses serve one set of stops on 2nd Ave. If it is popular (and I think it will be, once they try it), then I hope 255 riders will get similar consideration in an upcoming pick.
I’m just not sure there’s that much overlap between 255 and 545 riders downtown. It’s plausible that some ridership could develop between downtown and the Montlake Flyer Stop, but it would be snuffed out in 2014 by WSDOT’s unwillingness to rebuild the most important freeway bus stop in Seattle and Metro’s unwillingness to fight for it. It’s plausible that if we built a flyer stop at 108th (and moved the South Kirkland P&R there and got rid of all the stupid loops and backtracking in every route in that area) that it would generate a decent number of trips, but I think the opportunity for that is past. So it’s pretty much just Evergreen and Yarrow Points, and them rich folk don’t ride the bus.
Because the tunnel has a direct ramp to I-90 and not 520, I-90 buses should be using the tunnel (to the extent that there’s tunnel space available) and 520 buses should be on the surface. Move the 255 upstairs and you free up enough capacity to move the 554 downstairs. The 554 runs less frequently than the 255 during the peak, so this swap would actually reduce congestion in the tunnel in addition to taking better advantage of the available infrastructure to make the average trip faster.
It was my understanding that Metro/ST had decided that with the loss of the Flyer stop, they’d have the freeway buses take the Montlake exit, do the interchange zig-zag, and hit the HOV onramp stop.
So that service pattern (downtown-montlake) and the 48′s eastside transfer will still exist, even though it will now be several times more expensive to serve.
My understanding was the zig-zag wouldn’t be any worse than the zig-zag for Mercer Island P&R at least most days. However, anyone who wants to go from Redmond to downtown on a Husky game day is now going to have to sit through a 20 minute delay at the Montlake exit while the bus inches forward in the line of cars going to the game. Today, thru-buses on 520 bypass husky traffic completely, while still stopping close enough to the stadium to allow people to ride the bus to the game.
The Montlake lid design is hardly a zig-zag. Transit will exit from the new HOV lane and re-enter directly. Instead of having to wait down in the concrete canyon you’ll have a nice park and instead of having to figure out if the bus stops on the ramp or the flyer stop less people will miss eastbound connections. The only issue is if the HOV ramp will be backed up because of Montlake which is quite likely but still better than today.
Bernie: That’s only the case for westbound buses. Eastbound have it worse, as there is no HOV ramp to exit eastbound. They will have to come up the GP ramp, make a left turn onto Montlake, and then an immediate right onto the HOV ramp.
Perhaps Bay B can be eliminated without kicking the 255 upstairs?
No, we need two bays because only the two buses closest to a bay are considered to be stopping there. With one bay, every outbound bus would have to either open its doors twice (which causes runners and backups), or wait until it is one of the front two buses.
It’s an ADA issue, I believe.
What I meant was finding a way to make the front-two-buses-only rule southbound-only, but it sounds like it’s not that simple.
I do have to take issue with describing Eastgate commuters as “leeching”. The bus went there. Nobody said, “Please don’t choose that route.” Eastgate riders did nothing wrong.
Brent, it’s tongue-in-cheek. I’m an Eastgate commuter and leeched plenty off the 218 prior to the shakeup.
There are so many redundant routes on I-90 in the peaks. Commuting to/from Mercer Island? The 202, 550, 554, and depending on where you are, 205 and 211 are for you. Eastgate? Say hello to the 212, 215, 218, and 554. Issaquah? Hop on the 214, 215, or 554, and if you’re headed to Snoqualmie or North Bend you can stay on the 215 the whole way or transfer from the 214 or 554 to the 209, and if you’re headed to downtown Issaquah you can stay on the 214 or 554 or transfer to the 209 or 200. Issaquah Highlands? The 554 and 218, and the only reason there aren’t more is because of how comparatively new the Highlands are and being at the end of the 554. And that’s not getting into routes like the 210 and 211 that take the slow path through Bellevue. If we doubled 554 peak frequency and had it skip Mercer Island (probably the 554′s least popular stop outside Seattle, in stark contrast to the 550 where the stop is well-used, and substantially slower for it than I-90/Rainier or Eastgate) we could probably cut more than enough buses to pay for it, including every last 212.
AFAIK, the 554 is the only way to get directly from Mercer Island to Eastgate. One of the routes has to make that connection.
Getting the 218 down to four peak trips per hour is a hopeful start toward ending the era of half-empty buses on I-90.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any half-empty buses on I-90.
I was gonna say, the 218 is peak only service and I never observed it to be 1/2 empty. For me, it was deciding if it merited the 50 cent premium it charges over ST554.
The other thing is that whether you’re on the 554 or 218, many people get off at Issaquah transit center so that after that point there is room on those buses. Perhaps it makes sense to truncate some routes there and have frequent peak shuttles to the highlands?
Oh, I regularly visit therapists on Mercer Island from my home in Issaquah. I know damn well that steps would need to be taken to make sure my only options aren’t to go to I-90/Rainier and backtrack on the 550, or connect to a bus that slowly meanders to South Bellevue P&R (presumably via South Eastgate and Factoria) at Eastgate.
I’m tempted to consolidate the 214 and 218 while also taking some pressure off the 216 (maybe even allowing it to be rerouted to go through the Highlands to get to I-90, essentially extending the 218) and potentially allowing a simplification of the 269, and run one bus that runs non-stop from I-90/Rainier to Issaquah, then heads up Sammamish Rd to Lake Sammamish Parkway, then takes Black Nugget Rd to the Highlands P&R (or alternately, takes the same route as the 218 snow shuttle, Gilman to Front to Issaquah-Fall City Rd, which doesn’t have the add-on benefits to other routes).
The 214 heads into Downtown Issaquah as it is, but it is nearly laughably empty in doing so, perhaps because the 200, 209, sometimes 271, and to some extent 554 do the same thing, and in fact the 214 has multiple trips, at least eastbound, that arrive at Issaquah TC very shortly before or after a 200 headed the same direction.
Cutting a route that starts with a 2 and using the funds from that route to run one that starts with a 5, or vice versa, is not gonna happen.
Most of those buses are full, which makes their redundancy less consequential (if you restructured, you’d still need just as many buses to meet capacity). But what they should do is rationalize destinations a bit. Have the ST routes be the only downtown buses that serve more than one major destination. The Metro service should go like this, at least until rail reaches Eastgate (which will be a long time coming):
202 Mercer Island
210 Somerset and surrounding areas
212 Eastgate
214 Issaquah P&R/downtown
215 Snoqualmie/North Bend (only)
216 Sammamish (only)
218 Highlands (only)
The 205 will go away — it’s just a matter of time. The 211 is a special case because it serves First Hill and only glances by downtown out of routing necessity.
STB comment fail. This post was intended to reply to Morgan Wick.
I agree, except for the change to the 215. You have to provide at least one transfer point on the Eastside for people who live in Snoqualmie or North Bend and don’t work downtown. I’d keep the 215 stopping at Eastgate and eliminate the Issaquah TC stop.
Won’t they be using the 209?
Agreed. I’m not familiar with Eastside routes, so I don’t understand why the 218 exists.
Delete it.
Riders can take the 554 or 216 to Sammamish. If those two routes are overcrowded, then add serivce to them.
Actually, Metro should phase out of the freeway-express bus business; that’s ST responsibility.
“Won’t they be using the 209?”
Not necessarily. The 209 doesn’t serve Snoqualmie Ridge, and it only runs hourly.
Chad N, the 218 and 216 go to entirely different places via different routes. The 554 is far slower than the 218 and doesn’t go where the 216 goes.
The 218 exists because there’s demand for it. The 554 goes through Mercer Island and the Issaquah Transit Center so it doesn’t provide the express service customers demand. During peak times, there is demand for individual routes from park and rides or surface streets while off peak they are all consolidated to the 554. It would be like saying the 510 and 511 should become the 512 at all times rather than just on Sunday’s. If I were designing the system, I would get rid of all peak hour/peak direction 554′s.
Please note that the 216 doesn’t serve the Issaquah Highlands Park and Ride.
The peak/peak 554s exist to serve certain marginal trips that would be very hard to connect otherwise, while continuing to absorb part of the heavy downtown traffic. Without a 554, there would be no easy way to get from Mercer Island to Eastgate or Issaquah, from Eastgate to downtown Issaquah, or now from Eastgate to the Highlands. These are important trips, especially those from Eastgate.
The 211 is not a special case. I go to Seattle University, and while the 211 doesn’t serve any part of Issaquah other than the Highlands, it is damn near useless if I lived almost anywhere that it does serve. I’m not sure I’d even want to use it to go to its first stop outside Seattle at Mercer Island P&R. I once said I preferred if the 7/9 went up 12th and the replacement for the 36 and/or 60 went up Boren rather than Zach’s vice-versa proposal, but if we had frequent service connecting First Hill with I-90/Rainier, I assure you the 211 would not exist, and depending on where else it went, maybe a lot of the other peak routes on the Hill wouldn’t exist either.
The 205 is just as much of a special case as the 211, but more so because it also serves the U-District, though it would arguably benefit more from the existence of a frequent connector to I-90/Rainier from First Hill.
As I said upthread, the 214 is utterly unused on its downtown segment, so I’d like to see it pick up the 216′s North Issaquah routing instead and merge the 216 with the 218. I have to imagine getting on I-90 at the Highlands instead of SR-900 would actually give 216 riders a faster ride, though it would force a transfer if their destination is North Issaquah. The downside is that the 216 would probably run half-empty through Sammamish given the size of the buses needed to serve both markets.
The 554 has only a smattering of trips to Sammamish in the early morning and late night, while the 218 doesn’t go anywhere beyond the Highlands, so I don’t know what Chad N is saying at all.
You’d have to do a lot more than double the frequency of the 554 to make up for axing the 212. The 212 runs every 5-10 minutes during the peak, with the majority of them being full.
SRO, or packed? … and is the 20-minute standing rule being violated?
“The 212 runs every 5-10 minutes during the peak, with the majority of them being full.”
By the time I get on at 5th/Jackson, they’re woefully bunched, with 2 or 3 packed buses arriving within minutes of each other. Riders who leave well before 5pm may not experience this, but between 5-ish to 6-ish, the 212 is usually late and very full. I don’t see that forcing all the Eastgate-bound riders who are now using 218 to switch to the 212 will improve matters. But we shall see.
Replacing 212 trips with an equal number of 554 trips would be more expensive because the 554 continues past Eastgate to Issaquah Highlands, while the 212 stops at Eastgate. I suppose you could mitigate that by truncating some peak 554 trips at Eastgate, but if you do that, you’re left with essentially the same system we’ve got now, you’re just labeling the routes a different way.
Labeling the routes a different way… and forcing a bunch of stops at Mercer Island and Issaquah P&R for no reason.
Absolutely. It would also create a bunch of congestion at Mercer Island P&R where buses have to wait for other buses to move out of the way before they can reach the stop. At Evergreen Point Freeway Station, for example, buses can literally wait up to 5 minutes there without picking up or dropping of a single passenger just by waiting for other buses to clear the stop.
Transit planning is a science, not an art. They have the data about how many people take which bus at which times, and how many get off and on at which stops. Doesn’t this “tweaking” really suggest that Metro’s planners initially didn’t do their homework and really study the numbers before making a change? Measure twice, cut once.
I won’t defend Metro, but I would guess transit planning isn’t as solid as you suggest. Consider adding a new route that hasn’t existed before. You don’t have existing ridership to base your estimates on. If you’re really diligent you can do enough surveying to see how many people expect to ride it, but just by creating such a route you’re changing behavior, often in unexpected ways. Take the SLUT – many thought their predictions were far too high, but development took off in the area and they’re 20% above predictions.
It seems like predicting ridership is as much science as meteorology. And sometimes just as accurate.
Predicting ridership is harder than meteorology. It involves the behavior of irrational humans… such as those who stay in the tunnel out of spite even though almost all of their service moved to the surface.
Spite, or ignorance? Perhaps there was an assumption of perfect knowledge, which is a dangerous assumption in transportation.
The tunnel is a nicer facility than the surface stops, and people will choose that if they feel they have a choice. Kind of like the way they’ll choose rail over buses regardless of which is the “better” trip.
I applaud that Metro has finally adopted a suggestion I have long felt that Eastgate passengers just take over the 218 and 216. Eastbound both buses should ignore Eastgate and – in the case of the 215 – also ignore Mercer Island as it is obvious that they are not taking on passengers for their final destinations from either place.
In the case of the 216, it should also ignore Mercer Island going westbound – no gain to anyone there. The 550 adequately serves Mercer Island both in the AM and PM commutes.
The 554 is fine, although all buses should start and end at South Sammamish P&R as this is an underutilized P&R right now.
556/555 buses should run all day. Final comment.
Tim
554 to South Sammamish P&R off-peak would drive there and back empty on most trips. ST has better uses for its bus hours.
555 off-peak would attract pretty much zero ridership. 556 off-peak would handle Bellevue-UW traffic that is already served by the 271.
I think there is a significant potential for new ridership by extending the span of the 555. Today, the last trip leaves Northgate around 8 AM, which ignores the fact that downtown Bellevue now has thousands of Microsoft employees, most of which are just rolling out out bed at 8 AM. When the last 555 has left, travel time from Northgate to Bellevue by bus at least doubles, whether you take the 41 downtown and transfer to the 550 or take the 66/67 to the U-district and transfer to the 271. I suspect most people in this situation simply screw it and drive instead. (And no, there is not a Microsoft connector bus that runs from Northgate to Bellevue).
Fortunately, the service hours for at least a couple extra 555 trips each morning already actually already there, but they currently get wasted as 556 buses that arrive in Northgate deadhead 15 miles to East Base, just one mile away from Bellevue Transit Center. Put these deadhead buses into service under the 555 label (just to Bellevue Transit Center, not all the way to Issaquah) and you could get a lot of new riders at almost no additional cost. The fare revenue might even make these trips pay for themselves.
Of course, when East Link is complete, the 555 and 556 should probably just go away completely, but for now, adding a couple of late morning 555 trips seems like the right solution.
asdf, I agree completely with extending the span an hour or more. I’m just imagining midday 555 buses with two riders.
The 555 took a very long time to develop any ridership in the first place, but it eventually did. Perhaps you could also develop midday ridership and I’m just too pessimistic.
I agree – maybe the 555 will eventually develop a decent midday ridership if given the chance, but by the time that happens, East Link will likely come along and make the whole route obsolete. The last time I checked, projected running times for Link to get from Northgate to downtown Bellevue are about the same as what the 555 takes today, when traffic on I-5 and the streets of downtown Bellevue is taken into account.
Even with North Link finished, but East Link still under construction, the marginal time savings of 555 over Link->271 or Link->550 might not be enough to justify the cost.
“556 off-peak would handle Bellevue-UW traffic that is already served by the 271.”
Far better than the 271 does. (Seriously, freaking Medina has frequent service that people travelling between Bellevue and UW off-peak have to slog through? WTF?)
Are you saying people at Eastgate especially Bellevue College students have no legitimate need for east bound service? “They just take over…” come on! They have every bit of right to access to service as downtown users.
The 554 already provides more than enough service for eastbound Eastgate users.
… and the 210, and the 215, and the 271, and the 556 … Did we miss any?
In PM peak, the 554 is often already full when in it reaches Eastgate.
But not after it leaves Eastgate. There is not a capacity problem on the PM eastbound 554, except possibly for people getting on at Mercer Island.
Sorry, instead of the 215 above, I meant the 215. No edit facility!
Huh?
216 – problem when the 5 is right by the 6!!
In lieu of an edit facility, perhaps you should try this newfangled thing called “proofreading”.