Currently, there is no bus service on NW 65th St. Apparently there was a bus during the 1990s that served this corridor, but it eventually got axed.
There should be a bus that runs along NW 65th St between 36th Ave NW and Aurora. It would provide a good connection between Ballard, Phinney Ridge, and Green Lake.
My bad, forget the Seaview Ave NW part. I was originally going to post both on the same article, but I transferred Seaview Ave NW to a different article.
Metro tried this more than a decade ago and found it unused. Yes, from a grid pattern network design, it’s necessary, but there are no activity centers anywhere along it other than Ballard High School. Both ends of the line “hang in the air”.
It is true that there are not enough activity centers along this corridor, but this route will provide a more efficient connection from Ballard to the Phinney Ridge shopping district, and Green Lake. Another possibility is to extend this route to Golden Gardens via Seaview Ave.
Metro’s 2040 plan has a Frequent route on 32nd NW, Market, 15th NW, NW 65th, Greenwood, and Northgate. It won’t be a full NW 65th route but it will provide east-west connectivity within ten blocks of it. And 2040 means “sometime between 2026 and 2040”.
Metro has tried routes on Seaview Ave NW multiple times but they always failed due to severely low ridership. In the 80s, 90s, and 00’s route 46 ran as an infrequent all-day express on N 40th Street with some trips on Seaview, at least peak. For a while there were reverse-peak 46 shuttles from 24th & Market to Golden Gardens. Of course, Chicago and Europe have buses to all their outlying parks. But it would require a higher level of citywide/countywide investment in the bus network to do that here.
Since then Seattle has built a nice bike trail from the Locks to Golden Gardens, so one alternative might be bikeshare stations at each end. As part of a Burke-Gilman bikeshare corridor, of course.
One of the reasons the Seaview Ave NW routes have failed is because they ran peak-only, and people do not usually go to Golden Gardens during those hours. Metro could test such a route by running it 7 days a week at hourly frequency during the summer, when demand for a route to Golden Gardens is higher.