Metro is currently wasting a lot of money on downtown express routes. Some of them make sense, but Route 101 is a bit duplicative of Link.
One possibility is to have Route 101 go to Rainier Beach Station instead of taking I-5 to Downtown. It would go via MLK, and then take the Henderson loop. Route 102 can keep its current routing so that commuters still have the one-seat ride during peak periods. This Route 101 would provide a nice connection to Rainier Valley with a transfer in the Rainier Beach area.
Here is a map of my proposed 101: http://bit.ly/2m8Po2s
Problem: off peak from Fairwood to Seattle would now be a three seat ride. Me and anyone else who relies on the 105 / 148 / 169 would see their travel time drastically increased.
I agree; proposals like this would be better coupled with something like Aleks’ broader South King restructure which routes the 105/148/169/etc directly to Link stations without any transfer required.
If we can get the 101 to every 15 minutes midday Monday through Friday (it’s 10 min or better peak in peak and 15 peak opposite peak) and all day Saturday then truncating at RBS would make sense. With the 107 no longer terminating at RBS there should be layover space, and the time savings outweigh the double whammy that I face.
Well, I wouldn’t call the 105 or 169 Fairwood, which to me is the single-family neighborhood around 140th & Petrovitsky Road. But yes, Aleks’ restructure takes the 3-seat ride problem into account. Bu extending the neighborhood routes to a Link station, it puts the entire Link network at your fingertips, which is important if you’re going to the U-District or ST2 Bellevue or SeaTac or anywhere not named “downtown Seattle”. And in ST3 it will put you direct to Ballard. Let the peak expresses go downtown as Aleks’ plan does. The all-day routes should connect to the nearest Link station.
This is another topic that has been discussed to death. The problem is that it takes Link 26 minutes to get from Westlake to Rainier Beach, then add another 2 minutes to transfer from train to bus stop, then add on another 5 minutes to allow for random connections. That’s a total of 33 minutes before you’re likely even on the 101 at RBS. Now, look at the off-peak schedule for route 101. If you board the 101 at University Street, where will that bus be 33 minutes later? Answer: you’ll already be at the South Renton P&R. Forcing transfers at Rainier Beach creates an enormous time penalty for Renton riders.
That’s the tradeoff, but you’re not allowing that the 101 is infrequent and only goes to one place. Truncating the 101 and getting it out of downtown traffic and I-5 traffic would allow it to be more frequent. If you’re ready to leave now, waiting ten minutes and maybe taking a little longer is not necessarily worse than waiting twenty-five or forty minutes for a direct freeway bus.
The two biggest problems with the 101 are its not-so-great frequency (every 30 minutes), and its long, windy route through Renton. And, the time it takes to get from one end of downtown to the other matters too, and that’s something that’s going to become a lot worse. Plus, as Link gets built out to more and more places, you’re going to have more and more people that are going to be transferring to Link anyway to get to places north of downtown. Once you’re making the connect to Link anyway, it’s not that much more time to make it at Ranier Beach vs. make it at Westlake.
That said, if the point of the 101 is to be an express to downtown, they should at least get rid of the SODO slog, and streamline the route to Renton Transit Center to avoid a 20-minute grand tour of Renton before the express segment really begins.
It seems most riders have figured out that it’s best to get off/on at the stops by the Fred Meyers and walk to/from the Renton TC. There are big changes coming to transit service in Renton (in 5 years…) with ST3, so I expect the 101 will be tweaked or heavily revised in the future.
I’d still be willing to propose building the SODO Transit Center and have most of the south end buses turn back at SODO: https://seattletransitblog.wpcomstaging.com/2014/09/29/sodo-station-transit-center/
SoDo would be better than Rainier Beach, but I still think the best solution is for a Link/Sounder/Bus terminal at Boeing Access Road. The problem with terminating at SoDo is:
1) It doesn’t add anything. These buses already serve SoDo, so for a rider, you are simply giving them fewer options. You save money, but that is about it. I realize that you can put that money into additional service, but you could achieve that simply by spending more money. This makes it different than, say, the 73 truncation. While a lot of the people lost out in being forced to transfer, there were plenty who enjoyed a trip to the south end of campus. I rode the bus today and noticed a large number of people taking the bus from Pacific (and well away from Link) who didn’t have that option before.
2) Going to SoDo still means encountering tough rush hour traffic. Things would be a lot better if the state built a SoDo bus access ramp, but I don’t think that project is funded (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/E00DF4D6-5C57-4BAE-81AC-188FDD4B6860/0/i5ReconstructFolio_Dec2008.pdf).
On the other hand, a big Boeing Access Road station would do the following:
1) Give riders another way to access Rainier Valley and the airport (via Link).
2) Give riders an express to downtown (via Sounder).
3) Give riders a transfer to other parts of town via Sounder and the other buses that serve the station.
While some would be better with the current setup, plenty more would come out ahead. That makes a big difference when you are talking about truncating service.
BAR is planned for 2031 and is projected to serve at most 2,000 riders a day. It also doesn’t appear to include integration with Sounder service as no new Sounder stop at BAR is mentioned in ST3 planning documents. So BAR really wouldn’t be a very useful place for Renton riders to make connections (30+ minutes to downtown via Link, the 106 would likely beat it to Rainier Valley and there’s existing ST bus service to the airport that is much faster).
What the plans are is neither here nor there. What I’m saying is that if they built the Boeing Access Road station right (with a Sounder station) then it would be the best place for a truncation. It is no different, than, say, the NE 130th station. Sound Transit had no plans for that at all. They simply had no interest. But with enough public input, they managed to add support for it, and just about everyone now realizes it is the right choice. The same should happen with this. In both cases the stations should be built much sooner, since they are not that expensive (14 years is ridiculous).
To make it work right, though, you would need to bump up the service a bit during rush hour. 20 minutes is pretty good, but I think it needs to be a bit lower. Outside of rush hour, when the Sounder train isn’t running, then the bus should just continue to (and through) downtown.
Otherwise, the options are not very good. I agree, transferring to Link so far south (either at Boeing Access Road or Rainier Beach) as a means to get downtown is bad. It is the worst possible option. But I don’t think transferring at SoDo is great, either. People hate that. After finally getting to the edge of downtown, the bus just quits. It is different than even the proposed 41 truncation, in that at least the 41 gets you close to the heart of downtown. SoDo is really at the edge of nowhere, unlike I. D. or Westlake.
My guess is they simply muddle along with the current approach, except push the bus to the surface. Even with the One Center City, there are no plans to truncate bus service.
Which is why it makes a lot of sense to push for Sounder support for BAR along with an expedited timetable. Otherwise, that station will be a waste of money, no matter when it is built. Even if the 101 doesn’t truncate there, a connection to Sounder makes a lot of sense. That would be the best way to connect the Puyallup Valley to the Green River Valley, which has a growing number of cultural connections.
ST studied both Link and Sounder stations at BAR. Tukwila wanted both. ST rightly realized that Sounder is not frequent enough to make Sounder/bus or Sounder/Link transfers worth the cost, especially since Tukwila already has a Sounder station a mile away. But a Link station with trains every 10 minutes and buses every 15-30 minutes makes more sense. (Even though I don’t think it’s great.) Tukwila’s defense of the Link station is it wants to extend RapidRide A to it, it’s planning an urban village at 144th, and it’s close to Aviation High School and the Museum of Flight.
In the end it probably didn’t come down to the absolute worth of BAR Sounder station, but more that South King has a lot of transit needs and low tax base so other things were higher priority. And Renton was busy asking ST to move the transit center to the P&R; it didn’t get around to asking for a BAR Sounder station.
For the south end, the obvious transfer point is Airport Way. There should be a station serving Link, Sounder and buses. It should be easy to transfer from one vehicle to the other. A bus should be able to get off the freeway easily, and then back on, headed either direction (in the HOV lane). All of this is expensive, but that is by far the most important project remaining for the south end. When that is complete, riders from Renton, Tacoma, Federal and Kent will all be able to get to Seattle much faster than if they were served directly by a subway (or transferred at some other location). The connection with Link is just a bonus, of course, as it enables good service to Rainier Valley and in the case of Renton, even a reasonable transfer to the airport. I have no idea when this will be built, but since it is way more important than, say, a light rail station in Federal Way, I assume it will be built fairly soon.
Sorry, I meant Boeing Access Road. I know I shouldn’t type when I’m sleepy. Anyway, that station (serving buses, Link and Sounder) will be huge, if done right.