If you’re planning on doing some local transit travel this holiday season or are plagued with the misfortune of having to work, be sure to check timetables before heading out. All major transit agencies will be running Sunday schedules on both the actual and observed holidays– tomorrow, the 26th, for Christmas, and January 2nd, for New Year’s. Unfortunately, that means no service for Snohomish County Community Transit on those days.
In the intervening period, Metro will be on a reduced weekday schedule, with some routes canceled entirely and others with only some trips canceled. Community Transit, Sound Transit, and Pierce Transit, on the other hand, will all operate regular schedules on the weekdays. Saturday schedules will be in effect for New Year’s Eve, with the exception of Tacoma Link and Central Link, which will run extra late trips to accommodate New Year’s revelers. The monorail will also have an extended schedule that day.
Is Sound Transit not doing special late runs of Link after midnight on New Year’s Day, or is it just going to make the announcement at the last minute?
May I point out the last two sentences of the post?
The rest of the planet is once again stranded and will have to wait until Tuesday to get to Snohomish county.
Don’t some Sound Transit express buses run in Snohomish County on Sundays/Holidays? And what about Everett Transit?
I think the 512 is the only Sound Transit bus running to Snohomish County today. Not sure about Everett Transit.
ET buses run if they have a Sunday schedule. (I’ve only been during weekdays, can’t remember which ET buses do/do not run on Sunday)
As for ST, yep: the 512 is the Sunday route (now if only it would serve the 535 stop at Alderwood Mall…)
ST and ET but not CT.
@Michael: As for the 512 serving Alderwood Mall, that’s sort of interesting… in order to do it, you’d have to stay on surface streets all the way to Ash Way P&R. It’s something like 3-4 more miles of surface running, which probably costs 6-12 minutes SB and a little less NB (the P&R loop for Ash Way is worse NB), depending on how many stops there are and what traffic is like.
If this was all part of King County and Metro was running the route, I can imagine them running this route along the CT 201/202 route all the way to Everett on Sundays (201/202 stay on the surface to 128th, then take I-5 to Everett). ST is really more concerned with regional travel, though, and I don’t see them sacrificing that much time on the Seattle-Everett run for Alderwood Mall unless it’s a real regional transit destination.
Sunday schedule for 26 December seems a little extreme. Especially when you consider it’s a major shopping day both for people to return unwanted/defective Christmas gifts and to snap up after-Christmas sales. This seems to me to be as out of whack as when King County Metro used Sunday schedules on Presidents’ Day. IMHO “Reduced Weekday & No UW” would make more sense.
Twin Cities Metro (Minneapolis/Saint Paul) used to do the same thing (run Sunday service on the 26th) when the 25th was a Sunday (including double pay for drivers, which ironically *didn’t* apply on the 25th because it was a “Sunday”, not a “holiday” – an insult to bus drivers who missed out on family/religious stuff because they had to work that day). Now they have a “reduced” schedule for this and similar situations. Basically it’s Saturday service plus a few rush hour trips from the weekday schedule. This year, reduced service applies both 26 Dec. 2011 and 2 Jan. 2012. (I don’t know if special pay for drivers is in effect. I do think anyone who drives a bus on Christmas Day, even if it’s a Sunday, deserves holiday pay even if the *legal* holiday is the next day.)
Typically, reduced schedules are used in the Twin Cities the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve (when Christmas itself isn’t on a Sunday or Monday), and sometimes just before or after the 4th of July if it happens to be a “long weekend” that year.