In January, we reported with some excitement on Metro’s initial plans to restructure bus service around the three new Link stations opening in fall 2021. Since then, a combination of COVID-19-driven resource constraints and some mixed public feedback has dampened Metro’s ambitions. The agency’s latest restructure proposal largely maintains the first proposal’s approach of replacing downtown bus commutes with more frequent Link connections, but cancels many of the proposed changes to the all-day network that we praised in January. The resulting network is a missed opportunity for non-commuter trips.

The largest change is the elimination of the proposed route 61, which would have created a slew of new east-west connections to Northgate. Other headline changes include the retention of current, slower routing on routes 45 and 62 that will slow Link connections to Greenwood and Wallingford; the retention of a truncated version of today’s route 26; and retention of current routing on route 67 that will prevent easy transfers at U-District Station.

If voters approve the planned measure to partially renew Seattle Transportation Benefit District funding, it is conceivable that the City of Seattle will be able to fund a restoration of the proposed route 61, although neither Metro nor the city is yet in a position to address how STBD funding would be used in that level of detail.

Metro is still accepting public input through a survey. While some of the changes in this proposal are driven by resource constraints, others were driven by public feedback. If you have feedback of your own, please provide it.

Details about the changes around each of the three stations are after the jump. (UPDATE: Metro reached out to correct an error in the original post on Route 44 routing in the U-District and to clarify a couple of other items. See corrections/clarifications below.)

SDOT’s plan for replacing 4,800 cars per hour that used the West Seattle Bridge at peak includes 1,280 more people per hour riding buses in the peak direction. Once Covid has receded to the point that most people are returning to work, how feasible is this?

That’s a little under 11 full articulated buses over what was running the bridge in 2019, or a 42% increase in people. The July 2020 draft SDOT framework comes up with a bunch of ideas:

• The three e-scooter pilot candidates are Lime, Wheels, and (confusingly!) LINK. Here’s the difference between them.
• The West Seattle Bridge may be reparable ($) after all.
• Keep Moving Streets extended through October 5th.
• Transit lanes on the Fremont Bridge.
• Puyallup reviews its Sounder garage plan.
• Public comment on $4.3 billion in spending allocated by PSRC.
• Everything you wanted to know about collisions in Seattle.
• Suraj Shetty now running ST’s operations.
• Las Vegas Monorail bankrupt.
• How to reform USDOT.

This is an open thread.

[Update: the original post incorrectly implied that the Mercer Island city council meeting will be on 9/16, when it in fact will be on Tuesday 9/15. This has been fixed.]

It’s hard to believe that more than ten years have passed since Bellevue and Sound Transit began their long slog over East Link routing. It took rounds of council meetings, open houses, endless studies, and competing community activism to get to a compromise that both agencies continue to champion today.

Although neither side got exactly what they wanted, both the City of Bellevue and Sound Transit managed to escape the saga free of litigation directly between the two parties. This accomplishment is precisely what makes Mercer Island’s recent actions particularly frustrating. Bellevue — arguably responsible for higher decision-making impact — managed to abstain from habitual litigiousness; yet this act is somehow beneath Mercer Island.

Readers may recall that the 2017 Settlement Agreement was only the result of first a suit from Mercer Island and then a subsequent counter-suit from Sound Transit. Sadly, the city council’s recent announcement shows that the agreement was merely a short reprieve from what looks to be a lengthy legal contest. Most disappointing is the impact that this will potentially have on the rest of East Link’s beneficiaries.

Feigned helplessness is one of the least attractive qualities in a state or local politician. Dunking on Olympia, or on President Trump, is the cheapest kind of talk when policy tools exist in Washington to address our most serious problems. Not all of our current crises are solvable with money, but it could blunt the worst effects, and nothing is stopping us except political will at the state level.

Of course, it’s much easier to blame Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell for failing to rescue state and local governments. This blame is richly deserved: the federal government can borrow at very low interest rates, in a currency it can print in theoretically infinite quantities.

While we lament the loss of Seattle’s frequent bus network (which has largely been in place since the opening of University Link in 2016), Pierce Transit is in a much more dire situation. Due to a smaller sales tax base, and the fact that Pierce Transit currently only levies a 0.6% sales tax (with measures to increase the levy in 2011 and 2012 both failing), transit was already sparse before the pandemic. 30-minute headways would be considered “frequent service” in Pierce County, with only routes 1 and 2 (in addition to better-funded Sound Transit service) ever exceeding that, and frequencies rarely better than hourly on weekends. A recent restructure of service had improved matters, and effectively brought 30-minute headways to as many places as possible given the limited resources, without having to reduce weekend service. Additionally, it extended the span of service on most routes to 10 PM. So while frequency of these routes weren’t all that good, it would still probably run late enough to get you home.

Then the pandemic happened, and this threw a wrench in the slowly-improving prospects for a usable transit network in Pierce County. In a series of changes in April and May, Pierce Transit reduced service to match ridership demand. As a result, service would generally run on weekdays would run as often as it would on Saturdays, but would run as late into the evening as it normally does on weekdays (with some exceptions). With Pierce Transit planning for the future, Pierce Transit is faced with pressure to restore service while facing financial troubles in the future. With Pierce Transit’s September 2020 service change schedules out, we see their solution: cut frequency on Sundays to bring back mostly normal service on weekdays and Saturdays.

• Alex Pedersen floats the idea of canceling RapidRide J (Roosevelt), but it’s still on track.
• Update on Rainier Ave improvements.
• Metro rolls out new Covid safety measures.
• This TNT editorial ($) is wrong, but does provide important information about how Pierce Transit will change.
• After Council vote, scooters are formally coming to Seattle. Alex Pedersen is only vote against.
• Spin joins Lime e-scooters in White Center.
• Some Intercity Transit service coming back Sept. 20.
• SF Muni Metro closing for the rest of the year (!) due to maintenance issues.
• Uber boosting electric vehicle incentives.
• The trouble with angled parking.
• Similarities between the USPS and transit agencies.

This is an open thread.

Sen. Markey defeated Cong. Joe Kennedy III, the first ever primary loss for the Kennedy dynasty, last Tuesday.

This is an open thread.

• Sound Transit’s 6-year Draft Transit Development Plan is out. Not much interesting in it, although yearly ridership charts show ridership was plateauing across all modes in 2019. There’s a public hearing on it Thursday.
• Clallam Transit also has a 6-year plan.
• Incredibly, the Point Defiance Bypass is still not operational ($).
• King County promises 50% cut in emissions by 2030.
• Rep. Jayapal “pretty confident” Feds will fund part of West Seattle Bridge replacement.
• More Bellevue Tunnel pics.
• There’s a survey on Route 44 Improvements.
• The passenger ferry study Dan wrote up in June continues. 45 potential routes are down to 8: check out the 80 minute webinar, or a much shorter writeup.
• Sound Transit’s Federal Way art program vandalized. It might be racially motivated.
• Real-time app “transee” now has estimated bus load factors.
• A list of outdoor dining streets.
• Too many cars, not enough parking at Mt. Rainier National Park. If only there were a technology to move more people with less road space…

This is an open thread.

Metro has been signaling for a long time that major service cuts were coming. Between the impending expiration of Seattle STBD funding (with only very partial replacement) and the major loss of sales tax revenue caused by COVID-19, the funding picture is drastically different than it was a year ago. Now we know just how major those cuts will be. On Saturday, September 19, Metro’s network will regress to its worst state in years.

Very little is spared. We lose most of the additional frequency on the Seattle network that STBD funded. Much night and weekend service that became frequent in recent years won’t be frequent anymore. Express service suspended during the pandemic because of lower commute ridership isn’t coming back for the time being. Outside Seattle, service restructures built on increased frequency (including those in Kirkland and Kent) are going to lose some of that frequency. There are so many cuts, affecting so much of the network, that we have little choice but to present them in chart form. But the big picture is that local service is largely back to 2013 levels, and peak-hour commuters will have to use that reduced local service instead of the expresses they were used to before the pandemic.

This is not a formula for continuing Seattle’s transit mode share growth, reducing carbon emissions, or improving mobility for people without cars. The reduced network makes both commute and off-work trips slower and wait times longer. More people are going to drive and park, especially those traveling nights and weekends. As traffic volume recovers, expect worse traffic than Seattle has seen before. The city is going to have a tough time meeting the mode share goals it set for the West Seattle bridge closure. Even once the pandemic is over, it is going to be a sustained and difficult political effort to restore Seattle bus service to where it was at the end of 2019, let alone to make any of the further improvements Metro imagined in Metro Connects..

If there is any good news, it is that Metro wisely has sought to spare those routes that have carried the most essential workers during the pandemic. Workhorse routes that have seen only modest drops in ridership, mostly in the south end, are almost totally unaffected.

In addition to the cuts, there is a significant restructure of service in and around Kent. Normally we would give this much more coverage, as it will improve service for Kent-Auburn riders (even after the cuts) and make some east-west trips faster and simpler. But since the cuts are so sweeping and will make this post so long, we’ll refer riders in Kent to our earlier post for details. That post remains accurate except for COVID-related cuts detailed below.

Two charts listing out all the cuts are below the jump: one for all-day service and one for peak-hour service.