Route 68 on UW campus, photo by Oran

If you’re planning on traveling through the U-District anytime tomorrow after noon, be prepared for lengthy delays and several bus reroutes.  An evening 5pm football game between the UW and UCLA is expected to snarl traffic and transit along with it.  With most Metro coaches out on regular assignment, there will be no special event service as the University is chartering private coaches to bring in fans.  There will be a special shuttle looping around campus the whole afternoon to get riders from heavily affected areas to 15th Ave NE.  It will operate at 15 min headways from 2:30 to 8pm.

[Update 1:35pm:] Any person holding a Husky Card, with or without the U-Pass, will be able to board any Metro bus tomorrow. (H/T: Commenter Spencer)

Since Metro won’t know exactly when the reroutes will be in effect, the best thing to do is to board at a stop that won’t be affected or simply take another unaffected route entirely.  Unfortunately, Metro hasn’t bothered to list all the affected routes in one clear and concise page so we’ve taken the liberty of doing that for you below the jump.

Pre-game (starting approximately around 2pm, *2:30pm)

Post-game (starting during the 3rd quarter)

UW Commuter Services has kindly listed all the reroutes on one page here.  Some Community Transit services are also affected:

The first two afternoon trips on Routes 855, 860 and 871 will operate as normal around the campus.

After 2 p.m., all northbound Routes 810, 821, 855, 860, 871, 880 and 885 will begin service at the stop at 15th Avenue NE & 41st Street and will depart based on the published schedule for the 15th Ave & 42nd Street stop, which will also be served. Buses will serve regular stops on 45th Street and at I-5. Stops on Stevens Way will not be served during the reroute. See Community Transit Rider Alerts for breaking updates.

20 Replies to “U-District Reroutes for Tomorrow’s Game”

  1. Typos are always fun. On the 373 reroute, you would have a hard time turning left onto Campus Parkway and heading west if you were going south on 15th.

  2. That shuttle seems laughably pointless. 15 minute headways for a 1.75-mile loop? The loop is .67 miles wide at its widest point. When you factor in wait times, most anyone can walk faster than taking the shuttle. Why even bother?

    1. Moreover: the UW has its own shuttle system. Why aren’t they running this shuttle themselves instead of Metro? (I assume Metro is getting compensated for running the shuttle, but it still seems like a waste of Metro manpower and equipment.)

      Unrelatedly, this traffic forecast infographic from UW is pretty fantastic. Clear and concise. I’d like to see that more prominently used when informing the public of traffic during special events.

      1. It runs every 15 minutes and takes much, much less than 15 minutes to complete. So one operator, one piece of equipment (whatever they choose it to be).

        Can’t comment on the specifics but:
        1) It’s Metro (and CT) routes/stops that are moving, not private contractor routes/stops.
        2) It’d be odd to board a contractor bus to take to a public bus. Especially when that bus is a blue one that says “Starline” on the side.

        It’s not uncommon for Metro to run their own shuttles–like when I-90 gets closed for inspections/Blue Angels/etc.

      1. ADA was pretty much the only reason I could think of. But UW also has a Dial-a-Ride program, and it seems like that could’ve handled most or all of folks who can’t make the trek across campus.

        It just seems silly that with the shuttle running exclusively on or adjacent to UW campus, serving almost exclusively UW students and staff, running due to a UW event, and with UW having its own fleet of shuttles, Metro should run this shuttle instead of UW.

        And I hope it’s just one bus and one driver. I remember taking the shuttle from TIBS to Seatac before Link was finished: that was a 5-mile loop, and I counted 4 buses. And I still had to wait at least 5 minutes for the shuttle to leave TIBS. But maybe that was ST and not Metro; maybe Metro knows how shuttles are supposed to work.

      2. I’m not sure what sort of coverage the Dial-a-Ride program is running. I believe that one is actually operated by UW employees, wheras the Health Science Express uses UW owned buses but Gray Line drivers. The Night Ride shuttle, using Gray Line buses and drivers, is not going to operate today.

        The TIBS shuttle was Pierce Transit; they had the lowest bid. One driver explained to me that they wanted to have high quality service to “stay on ST’s good side” as they were looking for a lot more service from ST. They ended up getting it in the form of 578 and some other routes.

        I don’t know for sure whether or not it’ll just be one operator/one coach, that’s just my assumption by reading the PDF.

  3. It’s also important to note that Husky Cards will work on any Metro bus tomorrow, regardless of whether they are enrolled in U-Pass or not.

  4. This is a personal disaster for me. I’ve got meetings all day at work, and then I have to attend an orientation for a preschool in the U-District at 7.

  5. Would it be too much trouble for Metro to draw maps showing the reroutes? I don’t know the names of every street in the neighborhood, and some of these read like hash.

    Bus drivers know how to read the Lefts and Rights, and that’s fine, but for the public at large, maps are what we need.

    1. I guess the question would be why? If you are just traveling through the area, do you really care how you get through it? If you live in the area, you are going to have a general knowledge of the streets around you. The only way (that I know of) to see these re-routes is to be online so pulling up a Google Map or such wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be that difficult.

      Before anyone says it, yes, it would be easier for Metro to just make a map but I just don’t see that many people necessitating a map that they should take the time to make one for each re-route.

      1. I can argue either way. I will say that the reroutes Metro posts are waaay too centric to the internal crowd. Sure they have a key that tells you what “FS” and “NS” mean, but that still doesn’t give the average Joe The Plumber any idea where the stop actually is. A map would be quite useful.

        Also, take a look at some of the UW stops: unless you use OneBusAway or MyBus and know that your stop is actually called “Stevens Way & Benton Ln” who is really going to know what that stop is called? I bet hundreds of people call it “the HUB stop” (or at least they did before it was torn down). Stevens Way might not be too hard to figure out, but Benton Lane?

      2. It really wouldn’t take much time to make reroute maps. It takes less than a minute to click out a custom map for one of these reroutes on Google Maps. The text-only descriptions full of in-house acronyms are completely arcane and not at all helpful to the majority of the riding public. Saying that the customer can just “pull up a Google Map” themselves is shitty customer service. Metro can and should do better.

        And we’re dealing with a commuting hub: people who take the bus to and from campus don’t necessarily know jack about the streets nearby. As Tim points out, streets like Stevens or Memorial Way might be well known, but I’d bet good money that 90% of UW students couldn’t tell you where Grant or Benton are, much less Wahkiakum, Walla Walla, Okanogan or Mason.

  6. Post game day report. I rode the 30+70s southbound at 5:15pm, and traffic on University Way and Eastlake was far below normal, like a Sunday night. Normally Eastlake is packed at this time, but yesterday there were only one or two cars per block. I guess everybody heeded the warnings and kept their cars away from the area. How was the mid-afternoon traffic?

    It reminds me of an article about the Los Angeles Olympics, which a friend who was there also alluded to. There had been so many warnings urging Angelinos to keep their cars away from the area that “the result was, you could waltz on the San Diego Freeway”. (Maybe it was another freeway; I don’t know where the Olympics were located.)

    1. I can tell you that at 5:30pm northbound Aurora was a parking lot. It took me over 30 minutes to get from Aurora/Denny to Aurora/Green Lake Way as a 28 express. The local 28 that had been behind me on 3rd Ave beat me by 20 minutes to the same point at 143rd and Linden. According to the passengers, the traffic was not normal for a Thursday night. Thanks UW…

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