by MIKE ORR
[Ed. Note: I’m unable to confirm that any STB staff writers will be there, but consider this is a semi-official meetup of the STB reader community.]
Tomorrow is Metro’s service change, so I invite you to join me on a tour of RapidRide E’s first day and the #65 Jackson Park extension. Meet at the Yesler Way and Prefontaine Place station at 9:30am. Here’s the schedule:
9:35-10:24am, RapidRide E (#675 in the trip planner), Yesler & Prefontaine Place – Aurora Village TC. See the new Linden configuration.
10:33-11:10, RapidRide E, Aurora Village TC – 46th & Aurora. See the Aurora routing without Linden.
11:15-11:30, #44, 46th & Aurora – 45th & University Way NE
11:33-12:05pm, leisurely walk down University Way, possible quick glimpse of the Farmer’s Market, takeout lunch opportunities at Thanh Vi (banh mi), Gyro-cery (gyros), Pagliacci (pizza)
12:05-12:42, #65, Campus Pkwy & University Way NE – 145th & 19th NE. See the 145th Street extension. Walk four blocks to 15th.
12:53-1:15, #348, 15th NE & 145th – Northgate TC.
1:16-1:45, #41, Northgate TC – Westlake Station.
If you’re coming for just part of the tour, the 9:35 E and the 12:05 #65 are the best meeting points.
Previously I had suggested an earlier 65 but that doesn’t leave enough time in case one of the buses is late, it’s better to wait in the U-District than elsewhere, and it gives time for a lunch. I nixed the 512 because the 347/348 is both more frequent and closer than walking to I-5.
What route does the E turn into after downtown?
None. It lays over at the same terminal as the 358 used to.
It looks like it just turns around downtown and heads back up north (Still a Rapid Ride E)
Does anyone know why the E-line doesn’t go south of Yesler to the Jackson Street hub? It seems like that would be a major transfer point that it shouldn’t just barely miss.
I’m guessing for the same reason that Rapid Ride D doesn’t go to Northgate… funding?
So frustrating that RR E doesn’t have a stop on Jackson given that it loops around on it.
Anyone out there know why?
The E Line doesn’t turn on Jackson – It turns on Washington St, lays in Pioneer Square near the birthplace of UPS, and returns via Main St. You’d likely have to layover at the base to serve Jackson. There’s plenty of room, but the deadhead along Seattle Blvd & 4th S already gets congested during rush hour.
Not to mention it would require at least one extra bus to run down there. Is running to Jackson worth the expense of losing 12-minute midday service?
If that’s the trade-off, then I’ll choose the twelve-minute service.
(Though I might choose fifteen-minute evening service over either of them.)
Be happy that the RR E at least goes into the south half of downtown.
Interestingly, the difficulty of getting from Aurora to 35th NW illustrates the almost complete isolation of north-central Seattle from northeast Seattle we’ve been discussing. It’s like the Duwamish River is between them. The 330 is the only crosstown route that fully connects them, and it’s weekday-only. At 45th you can take the 44 and walk a half mile. At 85th you can take the 48 and transfer to the 71. At 105th you can take the 40, spend twenty minutes getting in and out of Northgate, and transfer to the 75. At 130th and 145th there’s no bus at all. But the distance is only two miles, so it’s not unreasonable to expect a one-seat ride somewhere.
This gives another reason for that 48/71 route people have suggeted, as well as that 44/Children’s route and that NW 65th/NE 65th route. And of course the 130th/125th route. (Just reroute the 75. Do it.) And, um, the 65 could continue as the 330 instead of just petering out.
A NW 65th/NE 65th route would be difficult. It would have to go up to 85th or down to 46th to get across Phinney Ridge.
So? The issue is whether there’s travel demand between NE 65th and NW 65th, not that it has to go around the lake. I had thought that going around north side of the lake would be best, but David L thinks the south side would be better. Also, the fact that there’s no bus on NW 65th has become a negative cycle: people don’t go there because there’s no bus to it, so they don’t know what’s there or what they would want to go to if there were a bus, and the businesses there are missing out on that patronage.
The main issue is, if there were a NW 85th/NE 65th route, would there be enough additional ridership on NW 65th to justify a second route? That I don’t know, and we’ll never know untl there is a bus and we see if people come. San Francisco doesn’t have this issue because there are buses on Fillmore and Divisadero and 19th Avenue, so if you want to go crosstown you can do it without a thought. I think this has also been what helped build up those thriving pedestrian districts and neighborhood businesses, the fact that you can get to them from all the surrounding neighborhoods. So you have to ask not only “What’s the potential with the current businesses and residents?” but “What’s the long-term potential if a complete transit grid caused people to make different house-moving decisions and different business-starting decisions?”
West of Roosevelt, NE 65th St. today is not really built to handle the buses that Metro typically uses for routes today. But that problem could be solved by running the route with smaller buses. Microsoft operates a connector route down 65th St. west of I-5 today (going around Green Lake to the south, via 50th St.). The vehicle is smaller than a typical Metro bus, but still seats 20.
Metro used to run on NW 65th Street with small buses between Greenwood and 32nd Ave NW. It didn’t get very many passengers. Although I wonder if there is a possibility to combine the 16 and 26 and then operate the 28 routing every 15 minutes to 65th Street with trips alternating between going up 8th to Carkeek Park and turning on 65th St and go to 32nd and 85th. Perhaps the 61 could be replaced to help pay for it.
Yes, the little jitney that serviced NW 65th Street was a great [circular] route–from Ballard to Fremont to Woodland Park Zoo, along NW 65 Street back to 24 Avenue NW. There might have been an extension of it all the way to Golden Gardens Park. I took it often, but it was NOT well patronized.
When was that?
I remember it as two loops.
Mike –
There were four variations of 65th street service.
Summer 95: LINC
Summer 97: Route 600: Woodland Park Zoo – 65th – 24th Ave NW – Golden Gardens
Summer 98 : Route 47: Zoo – Fremont – Leary Way, Ballard, 24th, 65th Loop + Route 46 Shuttle Ballard-Golden Gardens only, nights and weekends when full route 46 not operating.
Fall 98 – Feb 2000: Route 86 – Zoo – Fremont – Leary Way, Ballard, 24th, 65th, Golden Gardens. Cancelled due to low ridership in Feb 2000 w/ other I-695 route reductions.
The E Line schedule is finally out. Some notes:
– 12 minute base headways — even on Saturday! This is better than any existing RapidRide route, and sets a great precedent for the future. On Sundays, the base frequency is 15 minutes, which is still decent, and much better than the 358.
– 20 minute headways from about 8 pm to 11 pm, 7 days a week. This is better than the 358, but worse than all other RapidRide routes. It means that the E Line will be the only RapidRide route that doesn’t meet Metro’s standards of frequent evening service. I hope that Metro had a good reason for doing this.
– The first late-night trip goes in both directions, but not the second one. I’m curious if this has to do with the choice of bus base.
Overall, I imagine that I’ll be taking the E much more often than I used to take the 358, especially on Sundays, when my alternative is waiting 30 minutes for the 5.
The last paragraph is the same feeling I have about RapidRide D. Something about how it differs from the old 15/18 combination has gotten me to consider it more seriously, despite the service changes in Ballard actually having reduced overall service because of it.
Four buses per hour on both the D and the 40 in the daytime is better than three per hour on the 15 and 18. It means both of them are frequent rather than infequent, which matters if you live north of Leary Way. And in the evening the D is 15 minutes until 10pm, which the 15 never was. Any lost service on the 17 doesn’t matter because it was a common corridor with the 18 only to a limited extent, and their schedules weren’t coordinated. So I don’t buy this idea that Ballard lost service; I think it gained service. Except for the specific problem of hourly evenings on the 40, but with the D just 8 blocks away I don’t have much sympathy for that. How can we consolidate the 2N and 13 if people think 24th is too far from the D to walk to it?
I agree completely. Interbay obviously lost service, but I don’t really care. You can argue that the lower few blocks of central Ballard lost service, to the extent that folks were willing to walk to the stop at 15th/Leary. But for anybody living at Market Street or further north, it’s inarguably an improvement.
I know you know this, but the argument for deleting the 2N is a lot more complicated than whether people will walk further for more frequent service.
Just by the numbers, 24th has 3135 daily riders, while Galer and 6th have 852. (This includes express riders, who would not be losing service if the all-day 2N were deleted.) Lest you think the difference is the distance the route travels, note that the relevant segment of 24th is 1.5 miles long, while the unique segment of the 2N is 1.2 miles long — not really that much shorter. So this difference alone makes 24th Ave service much more compelling than the 2N.
Why is this? There are a number of possible reasons.
24th has long been a (relatively) frequent corridor. It had 20-minute service at a time when most routes had 30-minute service (as the 2N still does), and Metro clearly thought that it merited 15-minute service. There’s no realistic universe under which 2N gets upgraded to 15-minute frequency.
24th is about 0.5 miles from 15th. In a city with a perfect grid (e.g. Chicago), this is pretty much the ideal spacing for frequent routes. In contrast, 6th Ave W is only 0.3 miles from Queen Anne Ave N — a distance that makes it much harder to justify two parallel frequent services without an elevation gap, let alone two parallel *infrequent* services.
24th is 1.5 miles long (30 blocks), while 6th Ave W is 0.5 miles long (5 blocks). This means that you would expect the unique ridership along 6th Ave W to be much lower, which further reduces the case for running a bus along that route.
The walkshed of 24th extends pretty far. West of 20th Ave NW, riders will probably walk to the 40, at least when it’s frequent. And there’s no frequent services further west, so riders coming from as far west as 32nd will still walk to the 40. In contrast, the walkshed of 6th Ave W is much smaller, since the 1 captures most of the ridership to the west, and the 13 captures most of the ridership to the east.
South of 65th St, 24th Ave is a destination in itself – the walkshed is jam-packed with shops and apartment buildings. Even further north, most of 24th is zoned for commercial or multi-family use, until you get to 80th St. Galer St is relatively dense, but that’s still within the walkshed of the 13. 6th Ave W is basically single-family except for a tiny cluster of shops at McGraw — and because the 13 turns on McGraw, those shops are within walking distance of the 13, too.
Finally, there are important scheduling benefits from simplifying the QA network. The proposed changes allow Metro to delete the current terminals for the 2N, the 3N, the 4N, and the 4S. The 3/13 can be scheduled to ensure consistent headways between SPU and downtown. In the case of the D and the 40, Metro has completely disentangled these routes, and so there wouldn’t be any operational advantages from combining them further.
One last thought. The 1 isn’t going anywhere. Depending on route scheduling, you could imagine extending it a little bit (e.g. to the 2N’s terminal at the small commercial district at 6th and McGraw), or a lot (along the entire 2N route, then up Queen Anne Ave for a block or two, then east to the existing 4N terminal). Either version uses only trolley wire and turnbacks that already exist. Either version avoids increasing the number of terminals, since it deletes the existing 1’s terminal in favor of a new one. The longer version costs more, but maintains service at every existing bus stop. Again, this type of routing revision doesn’t really apply in Ballard, where service runs along a straight arterial (24th) rather than a series of twisty hill-climbing roads.
There used to be a bus back to Ballard every fifteen minutes until midnight. Now the D has a 30-minute gap after 10:57 and a 34-minute gap after that one, while the 40 is hourly and non-staggered. Now every return from every evening event is noticeably more painful.
That is lost service. Period and fucking exclamation point!
This is not what restructures are supposed to do. This — and the similar evening botch of the E — discourages walking further and thinking of the network in terms of preferable core services, because the reward for your walk is never a faster or easier walk.
Metro instead encourages thumb-twiddling for the next half-hourly (or worse) direct bus… then opposing future restructures because you can’t trust ’em not to botch it.
Metro’s abandonment of evening users has also been a fantastic boon to Uber and Lyft, and to the agency’s own downward spiral into irrelevance for choice users.
(the reward is never a faster or easier trip)
What’s this 20-minute evening and 15-minute Sunday service I see on the E schedule? How is it worse than the 30-minute service on the 358? Many times I have been inconvenienced by the 358’s 30-minute periods, or decided not to make trips to avoid them.
As for your “bus back to Ballard in the evening”, what about buses from Ballard? The 15 and 18 were each 30 minutes evenings and Sundays. That meant you had to figure out whether the next bus would be on 15th or 24th, and if your bus was late you had to choose whether to continue waiting and maybe your bus would come, or walk to the other stop and possibly miss both buses along the way, and you also didn’t know whether the other bus would be on time. The new schedule avoids all of that hassle, and I wish it had been in place when I lived in Ballard.
That glorious 20 minutes isn’t worth walking to. 5 riders will only make themselves later by indulging the extra walk. And so they wait for their crappy, infrequent, late 5, and they wonder why Metro’s increasing costs and “improvements” never mean a damn to them.
Ditto Ballard. The RapidRide “improvements” have not made it worth walking or feeder-ing to. I’ve tried doing so, and on the balance it backfires well over 50% of the time. (As in, I would have been warmer, drier, and taken less or equal time had I just twiddled my thumbs for the next 40, even when the 40 is half as frequent).
When will it get through to you that transit systems shouldn’t be awarded “A”s for effort? Either the average point-to-point access+travel time and the sense of “on demand” mobility improves or it doesn’t.
Metro sucks at understanding this basic concept, and apparently most of our “transit advocates” do too.
No one’s giving Metro an A. We’re making a point of praising Metro when it makes good changes, and criticizing Metro when it makes bad changes.
Compared to the old network (15/17/18), the new network (D/40) has better reverse-peak frequency for everywhere north of 15th/Leary. The same area has better mid-day frequency, and better Saturday and Sunday frequency. The 15th Ave corridor has better evening frequency until 10:30 PM. In addition, the new network is simpler and more legible than the old network, and it provides an important connection (Ballard to Fremont) that the old one didn’t.
Metro should be praised for these improvements. They’re important changes that stand in sharp contrast to the “typical” Metro service pattern, i.e. a series of half-hourly routes that provide no useful connections to anywhere other than downtown. We need Metro to know that there are people who appreciate a simpler network and more frequent core routes, because otherwise, Metro will have a harder time making similar improvements in the future.
Compared to the old network, the new network has worse frequency through Interbay. It has more “difficult” inbound frequency at 15th/Leary, in the sense that you have to choose which bus stop to wait at, whereas you didn’t before. It has worse frequency to 15th/Leary from 10:30 PM till midnight, and it has worse frequency along 24th for much of the evening. And it has worse frequency between Ballard and downtown for folks who were willing to take either the 15 or the 18.
While there are definitely people (like you) who made a habit of juggling between the 15 and 18, I don’t really prioritize this scenario very highly. In a city with a really good transit network, you never have to choose which of three buses to take to your destination; you take the single frequent bus (or buses) that go where you need them to go.
Of course, I agree that the reduced evening frequency to 15th/Leary and central Ballard is a big problem. We should criticize Metro for this regression, loudly and often. Metro needs to know that frequency is important, especially in the evening, and that its entire frequent service network should remain frequent until midnight.
My point is, for the majority of people who aren’t interested in choosing between 15th or 24th depending on the exact minute at which you plan to arrive at the bus stop, the service change in Ballard was largely an improvement, and partly a regression. It wasn’t 100% good, and it wasn’t 100% bad. We should publicly salute the good parts, and publicly condemn the bad parts, so that Metro knows that frequency and legibility improvements have a real constituency.
As far as the E goes, your argument seems to be that the service improvements on the E aren’t good enough to attract riders from nearby services. I’m not sure why it needs to be. The distance between Aurora and Greenwood is 0.5 miles. The distance between Aurora and Meridian is also 0.5 miles. In Chicago — a city that has mastered the art of the grid — there are frequent bus services every 0.5 miles.
In other words, it’s a mistake to judge the E based on whether it can attract people who are closer to the walkshed of the 5 (or the 16, for that matter). Instead, we should judge the E based on whether or not it does a better job of serving the riders who live within its exclusive walkshed. Someone who lives at 90th and Dayton is still going to take the 5, and that’s expected. But someone who lives at 90th and Linden will be more likely to take the bus than they were before, because of the frequency improvements and (possibly) the faster southbound routing.
The introduction of the E has less in common with the B/C/D, and more in common with the E, in that the route pattern in the area was already pretty sensible. The E/358 is one of the few “perfect” routes in Metro’s network, in terms of routing — even David Lawson’s FNP map doesn’t change it in any way. (The only possible exception is the Linden deviation, but fixing this would require a capital investment from SDOT.) With the B/C/D, Metro was hoping to attract new riders from more legible service; with the E, the service is already legible, so any new riders will just come from better frequency and span.
For people who live significantly to the west of the E, the solution is to turn the 5 into a full-time frequent route. For people who live significantly to the east of the E, the solution is to create a sensibly-designed full-time frequent route that serves the same general area as the 16. I think it’s a mistake to condemn the E for failing to serve these riders; in a well-designed network, it shouldn’t have to.
Also, I think you’re mischaracterizing the RapidRide program. In large part, RapidRide was purpose-built to extract the maximum possible money from the federal government for the least amount of effort. None of these changes are costing riders anything; without the federal grants, Metro just wouldn’t have made the capital improvements.
Operationally, the ratio of frequency to service hours is better for RapidRide than it is for other routes, because simpler and more frequent routes are easier to schedule. It’s true that RapidRide routes are more expensive because they’re more frequent, but I hardly think that’s what you’re objecting to. :)
I would love to see Metro eliminate some of its least productive routes, and build a core network of truly frequent routes (i.e. 10 minutes or better, all day). But if Metro made these changes, you’d better believe that a whole bunch of riders would wonder why Metro’s costs were rising while their routes were being eliminated. Any restructure, good or bad, will have that effect. If it’s a good restructure, the hope is that enough other people, including current occasional riders and non-riders, will decide that the new service is truly an improvement for them.
Chicago does not have “frequent bus service every 0.5 miles”. While it’s ridership (and comparative appeal of its network) is an order of magnitude greater than ours, it still only has truly high frequencies on certain boulevards. This is especially true in the evening, when many minor services cease in the 7:00 or 9:00 hour, but the frequent corridors remain frequent and busy well into the night.
And so the people know where the worthwhile services are, and they walk to them, and they use them.
If Metro is claiming to build, for the very first time, a sub-network of backbone routes worth drawing in 24-point fire-engine red across their map, then those routes had damned well better be good enough to draw more than just the riders who rode the skinny blue line that was there before. Otherwise, this network will prove a case study in diminishing returns, and voters will resent the tax hikes and fare increases funneled to services not worth using even if they wanted to.
I am absolutely correct to criticize RapidRide for being such a bare-minimum improvement that its walkshed wouldn’t expand an inch. Metro blew what,for the very reasons you mention,may have been its only chance to introduce the public to a fast/frequent intra-city core system worth reorganizing one’s expectations of the travel process around. Now that chance is gone.
(You’re also wrong about it not costing us anything — it was one of the few expenses delineated in TransitNow, which we still pay every time we buy a toothbrush.)
In a city with a really good transit network, you never have to choose which of three buses to take to your destination; you take the single frequent bus (or buses) that go where you need them to go.
Indeed. This is called on-demand mobility, and like everyone else, I would prefer it to staring at and incessantly tapping on my phone screen.
Metro does not offer on-demand mobility. Not before, not now. Apply the “walk and wait” approach and you’re likely to spend 95 minutes getting from Ballard to Capitol Hill rather than the “mere” 65 it takes if you attempt to optimize with OBA.
This is why I’m critical-bordering-on-vitriolic. There are clearly people at Metro who think that they are offering a type of mobility that they absolutely are not. These people tout these “successes” in the pursuit of future funding, and are shocked when the non-transit-fanning public pushes back.
Now if only the Sunday frequency of the 48 could be increased to make transfers easier….
Seattle Transit Hikers is also doing an E-line inauguration trip tomorrow. We will be taking the 512 out to Shoreline, doing a 6-mile walk around Shoreline featuring Boeing Creek Park, then take the E-line back to Seattle. Details and sign-up here: http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Transit-Hikers/events/165309012/.
I would love to attend this, but I’m in London :(
From reddit:
http://imgur.com/nQYxY1G
And a couple more:
The video of that headsign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d5iIimh0dI
“Three Fifty Eight” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEMdHQUt3f4
Just FYI, about the 65. Rather than walking from NE 145/19th Ave NE to catch the 347/348, the last stop/terminal is actually on NE 143rd between 15th & 17th Ave NE. Less than two blocks to the stop on 15th & 143rd.
This is good advice and was used. 73E was also an option from 15th/145th but was nixed due to it being 15 minutes late.
Possibly related: A 72 stopped and parked a block north of where we waited for the 348. And the 72 doesn’t run that far north…I r west
Also should mention that there were about 4 people on board the 65 that were taking advantage of the new extension
Five people went on the trip. We followed the route described. Every bus was late, by three up to fifteen minutes. We made all the connections except the 44, which was just leaving a block in front of us. So we walked to Stone Way and waited for the next one. (I didn’t want to wait at a car interchange.) We didn’t have enough time to dally in the U-District, so we went straight to Campus Parkway and stopped in the UW store for sandwiches.
The E was well-used. Nobody standing, but almost all the seats full. Of course, the 358 was pretty full too. I suspect the E will become the highest-ridership RapidRide route. That makes you wonder why it wasn’t the first one. In any case, the route is now full-time frequent, and a new night owl, and the first night owl north of 85th.
There were several little glitches. The OneBusAway screens and the ST trip planner call it the 675 rather than the E line. The yellow-and-black real-time displays call it the E though. The admonition to not tap your card if you’re going two zones peak hours is in fine print at the bottom of the 7pm sticker, so most people won’t even realize it’s there, especially if they have only 10 seconds to tap and get on the bus. A 72 bus sign said “358 ending today, RapidRide E starts tomorrow”, even though it was really yesterday and today. People were confused and looking for the 358, but that happens with every new route.
The 65 extension was used even on the first day: several people got off at residential stops along the way.
Any of the new buses have graffiti yet?
Yes… We’ve been driving them for weeks now. 6112 is the highest number I’ve seen. East Base also has new coaches.
Yes, both buses had that scratched-in, graffitied-in look. I’m guessing that the E-Line got the hand-me-downs from the B, C, and D, and that the other lines divvied up the new buses.
Metro rotates buses among the bases. I’ve driven 6020 lately which is a retrofitted B Line coach, very similar to the current models they are ordering. The major difference I’ve noticed is the retrofitted arm for the passive restraint area. Still not perfect, but far better than the old system.
I don’t think there is any conspiracy to stick one base with the old crappy buses – although South definitely seems to have more than their fair share of new buses and I won’t go to Ryerson since they still have high floor 2300’s :)
There’s been a longstanding pattern that South gets the newest coaches first, then East, and North and Central last. I don’t think this is a “conspiracy,” but it irritated me when I drove out of Central (particularly since I was there when the 2600s were replacing the Bredas and it seemed like it took *forever*…)
Coaches almost never seem to rotate in and out of Ryerson or Bellevue; they’re in their own little world.
I rode the E-line too today from Shoreline to Fremont.
The good: the bus had a lot of riders, including many people standing. 12-minute headways are definately welcome. It was also amazing how fast the bus got through Green Lake with the Linden deviation.
The bad: In Shoreline, the bus had its own lane, but between Green Lake and Shoreline, the bus had to merge with traffic after almost every stop because the bus lane had parked cars it in. The parking wasn’t exactly full, but all it takes is one to force the bus to wait for an opening in the traffic in order to pull out from a bus stop. Parallel parking on Aurora also seems dangerous to begin with and feels hardly necessary considering the tiny number of spaces and the fact that virtually all the businesses on Aurora have off-street parking anyway. The parking on Aurora needs to go away, with the right lane converted to a bus lane full-time (not just morning rush hour).
The ugly: Extremely confusing payment system (Who is going to remember to not use the off-board Orca readers after 7 PM or when traveling two zones?) It is also unclear exactly where the zone boundary is. Is someone getting on or off off right at 145th St. expected to pay for one zone or two zones? Metro could make things a lot easier on everybody, acknowledge that nearly everyone traveling between downtown and Shoreline peak hours will be on the 301 or 304, and make the entire E-line one zone.
Around 80th or 100th I noticed that we had a BAT lane northbound but southbound didn’t. So part of the issue was that you saw it only southbound. However, the Aurora routing southbound south of 73rd seems significantly faster than the Linden routing was. And you now get a lake view! The Linden routing northbound seems as slow as it was.
There’s a two-way station at 65th where Aurora and Linden almost meet, and it’s right next to the memorial highway sign, so those are nice to look at at least. The abandoned gas station next to it is still there. I wonder what’s going to happen to it? I can think of some useful things, starting with a coffee-newspaper stand.
The few times I’ve ridden the D and B Lines at night, the readers were still on and the drivers opened the back doors – adding to the confusion. I still see the same people showing me their transfers during the day despite frequent reminders that it’s not necessary. Metro needs to ditch the confusion as it continues to slow the C and D lines down even a year after they opened. With the 2 zone fare system, the E line will be far worse. 40-50 people having to come up front to pay a 2 zone fare during rush hour is not going to be “fast and easy”.
Stops at 145th are always one zone, just like stops at Roxbury Street. Or at least that has long been Metro’s policy.
My impression is that the lack of signal priority had a larger impact in Shoreline than the handful of parked cars. But if is only a handful of cars, that should make it politically feasible to make the lanes full-time bus/bike/turn-only. Seattle didn’t have the acres of off-street parking lots Shoreline has, so that handful of parked cars may take a larger political push to remove.
I drove the E Line training coach and quickly noticed the issue you bring up here. Smooth sailing through Shoreline and then forced to merge at the Seattle City Limits. We didn’t have signal priority during that training run.
A dedicated bus lane is gold, bus bulbs are silver (See 75th, 70th, 65th on D Line), and bronze would be a bus zone with curb paint leading out at least two car lengths ahead of the zone so we can start to get rolling before merging into traffic. If we have to merge from a dead stop while also changing lanes, that’s a RapidFail (NB 15th zones on the D line North of 65th).
Boarding agents?
As the lone staffer (I think) on the ride, I wish to thank those who came for your participation and observations. I’m sorry I did not bring souvenir t-shirts along to commemorate the occasion.
This is likely the first time riders have celebrated a new Metro bus stop by having a group ride to it. Thank you, Metro, for the new connectivity on the 65 and 64!