Tomorrow, the Seahawks will be playing for their second consecutive conference championship, in their final home game of the season, against the Green Bay Packers. Kickoff is set for 12:05 at Century Link Field.
For fans flying in, your ride from the airport is Link Light Rail, which comes every 10 minutes or better, all day. Be sure to buy a train ticket at the station. The best deal is to buy a day pass between Seatac Airport Station and Westlake Station — the full length of the line — for $5.50.
The game will also be served by Sounder trains. Two Sounder trains will take off from Lakewood Station at 8:50 and 9:30, arriving at Century Link Field at 9:57 and 10:43. A third train will take off from Sumner Station at 9:37, arriving at the CLink at 10:19. North Sounder Service, weather permitting, will take off from Everett Station at 9:15 and 9:30, arriving at 10:14 and 10:29. The full schedule is available here. In a departure from past practice, the final return train each direction will depart 75 minutes after the game is over, to allow the crowd to linger for the potential post-game awards ceremony and celebration.
As usual, there will be $4 cash-only shuttle buses from Northgate Transit Center, Eastgate Park & Ride, and South Kirkland Park & Ride.
This is in addition to the usual plethora of weekend bus and ferry service.
I don’t understand why the bus has to be cash only… Seems updating the ORCA machine to take $4 shouldn’t be too hard.
That would require a coach-specific fare option. Is the system capable of that now?
Now that I think about it, it must be possible as the buses that serve Lakeside charge a non-system fare and accept ORCA cards. So it is odd that the same can’t be done for the Seahawks shuttles.
That would be a new Feature, requiring a work-around by the vendor, Vix Technologies. Also, making it cash only avoids fare disputes from riders who think they got overcharged or should have gotten a transfer.
ORCA users can of course take the 554, 255, and 41 from those locations, with only a slightly longer ride and longer wait, for a little more than half the cost.
M, the Lakeside fares are a system fare, just a higher system fare.
Brent, the point being that if a $5.25 fare can be in the system and used on those specific trips, a $4 fare could also be programmed in and used on the shuttles. The difference isn’t clear, at least from a customer standpoint.
The transfer issue, however, might be a legitimate one. If someone took a bus to get to the shuttle, the transfer would exist on the ORCA card and Metro wouldn’t get the full amount for running the service. If you blocked the transfer, you probably would end up with some upset customers.
You might also get some customers that were upset that their pass wasn’t used. Or worse, they couldn’t get on because they had been using passes and hadn’t set up an e-purse.
How about just creating a new route with a specific fare?
“ORCA users can of course take the 554, 255, and 41 from those locations, with only a slightly longer ride and longer wait, for a little more than half the cost.”
They can, provided there’s room for them on the bus. If more than a tiny fraction of the people headed downtown tomorrow take those buses, people will be left behind.
FWIW, I am totally fine with the Seahawks and Huskies collecting cash fares, if that is how they want to run their shuttle service. I’m glad they are running such a service.
Don’t we have bigger nits to pick with how transit operates day in and day out? Changing the readers on the buses to charge a higher fare and not accept transfers or passes is really, really low on the list of changes I’d like to see Vix install. The Seahawks and/or Huskies can pay Vix to do that, if it means that much to them.
The special event service has to be self funded. That means that between fares and sponsors the service cannot use any taxpayer dollars.
So I understand that accepting transfers and passes might make it harder to make sure revenue for this particular service stays separate, but even under the current system their assertion that they aren’t using taxpayer money depends on an estimate of revenue and costs, and they’re relying on a lot of agency-funded infrastructure, like the P&Rs (I think all these ones are Metro-built P&Rs), and direct-access ramps that were basically built on the agency’s behalf.
I’m not sure how using their normal payment system would change things that much. They’d have to figure on getting a little less revenue per passenger than otherwise, and maybe bump the base fare up as a result. Unless they’re not going to fill the P&Rs (apparently TIBS gets filled up for the Hawks quickly enough that SeaTac can actually sell parking, but maybe the Metro P&Rs are different) encouraging bus-to-bus transfers seems like a win for everyone. Northgate even has a decent feeder network!
Is the fare $4 each way?
Yes.
Small issue here, Brent, but raises a very large one. For a very long time now, questions are often answered with answers including the word “vendor”.
Which raises another question: Since we’re the “customer” and we’ve “paid” for something…when do we “own” it and are therefore the ones to give the “orders” about it?
When do we get “contracts” that give us the right to right to say “just do it” “damn it”? Just “askin…”
Mark
I have reason to believe Vix is on a short leash right now. More on that later.
Most of us (at least here) realize that both highways and local roads are subsidized such that individual users of those roads don’t pay the full cost of building and maintaining them. We have no problem letting people use them to drive to a football game, yet if you want to run buses to that same game, they have to “pay for themselves”. We subsidize sports stadiums and events in other ways, it seems kind of arbitrary to draw the line at the use of buses.
Congratulations, Seahawks! Second, did anybody burn any buses? (We have a fresh crop of yahoos down here in San Francisco; had to ask).