King County Metro Spot Improvements

23 Replies to “King County Metro Spot Improvements”

1. I’m glad King County Metro is not neglecting this. Each spot improvement may be small individually, but taken together, they add up.

   There are plenty of other spot improvement opportunities. For instance, in the U-district, buses turning left from 15th Ave. onto Pacific Street typically get stuck at that light for over a minute, even during off peak hours where the intersection is mostly empty. This should be fixed.

   1. I’ve driven the 255 and 44, and this is partly due to the Burke Gilman trail’s crossing at this location.

      But I agree that the signal tends to be too long for vehicles waiting to make that left. IMHO, its a pattern of SDOT using timed lights, and timing them for the peak period, instead of using lights that are activated by waiting traffic.

      1. Do the traffic light trigger sensors work reliably for bikes?

      2. bike sensors in the road generally don’t work for carbon bikes. That’s why SDOT has started to use infrared sensors installed at the traffic light instead.

   2. My AB operator friend reported this years ago. I think they are working on it.

2. Great article, Wesley! Your summation should be posted on the back wall of the Coubty Council and every City Council meeting room in the County in large BOLD FACE characters where Councilors can read it at every meeting.

3. Thanks for highlighting these improvements Wesley! Spot improvements can easily be forgotten with all of the much larger projects being built in the region. I hope we continue to see more of these projects, especially on routes that don’t warrant a $100 million RapidRide conversion.

4. Great article, and great job by Metro as well.

   I would love to see the time improvements multiplied by the average number of passengers at that point in the route.

5. All very nice, but come on, SDOT, you should know better. Nobody spells it Elliot with two Ls and one T, not even T.S. Eliot. It’s ELLIOTT AVE like Elliott Smith, Missy Elliott, Chris Elliott or…. and this is the key, Elliott Bay.

   1. It is a Metro Transit piece. Where was Elliott misspelled? Service planners too often add an “e” to Wedgwood or to Colman.

      1. Elliott is spelled “Elliot” in the first time items reviewed in the article. I’ll go in an fix the headers, but the misspelling remains in the titles of the Metro slides. Funnily, Elliott is spelled correctly in the body text of both slides, so someone caught the error there at some point.

6. The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward all-day bus lanes.

   1. I was wondering if someone was going to bring that up. I assume the only reason they kept the (midday) parking was because of load/unload areas. Hard to argue it is important for any other reason.

7. The speed and reliability section has been publishing these good reports for several years.

   Note that items 10-13 are very old; it is good to get at them.
   For item three, Main Street does not get a directional.
   Item five is for Route 249; that segment of the route will (sadly) be deleted with East Link Connections.
   Item eight is for a very weak Route 333.
   Item 13: move Route 62 to NE 65th Street, Latona Avenue NE, and NE 56th Street.

   Routes 31 and 33 also operate on the 25-foot 22nd Avenue West and should be moved to a different street.

   1. Yes, the 333 is quite flawed. From 148th to Shoreline Community College it could be better but it isn’t terrible. It should be the tail of the 65 or the future 72 and it should go up 5th from the station and then over on 155th to Aurora before doglegging to the college (like the old 330).

      But things get really bad north of there. It runs along 175th and somehow manages to miss the station at 185th. This means that if you are coming from the north (on Link) and headed to the college you have to transfer at Mountlake Terrace (a long bus ride to the school). You also miss the connection with Swift Blue. Along 175th your only option for connecting to Link is to either ride the bus all the way north to Mountlake Terrace or ride the bus far to the west, loop around the college and then take it back east again (somehow managing to cover the most congested corridors both directions). The folks north of 180th on 15th are in the same boat. They are forced to go north (even though most want to go south) or take the huge detour through the college (or make a transfer just to get to Link). I can understand why the bus on 15th doesn’t go to 185th but it should at least go to 148th.

      The planners got too excited and “shot out all the tires”*. Folks have been complaining for years about the lack of east-west service in the north end. Some of that was sorely needed. But the planners got too excited and ran too many east-west routes. The result is a network for Shoreline that is way too expensive and just not very good.

      *This is a reference to a cartoon which I can’t find. I don’t even remember the name of it. But it had a couple of country cops (kind of like Mayberry R.F.D.). In one cartoon the cops were chasing a robber and one of them yelled “Shoot out a tire!”. They did and the robber pulled over and surrendered. Then the two cops got out of the cop car and one of them yelled “Shoot out all the tires!”. They did, including their own tires. The last caption was all three of them (the two cops and the robber) hitchhiking together by the side of the road. Anyway, the phrase “Shoot out all the tires” stayed with me and applies to so much in this world.

      1. Yeah the 333 is somehow both frequent and a milkrun. I was travelling from Shoreline city hall to 148th station. I just missed a 333, Google had me take the E from 175th to 145th and head the 333 off at the pass as it were.

         I also think that Metro and ST went too hard on east-west buses at the expense of north-south. 145th street between 5th and 30th will have 16 buses an hour (4x 65, 6x 72, 6x S3). While Lake City Way will have 0 buses that cross 145th.

      2. I agree with all of your points Larry.

         145th street between 5th and 30th will have 16 buses an hour (4x 65, 6x 72, 6x S3).

         The worst part is that none of them will actually go all the way across. The planners seemed to adopt (with great enthusiasm) certain aspects of a grid (lots of east-west buses!) but missed the whole point. To paraphrase Jarrett Walker, a grid allows people to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. The idea is fairly simple. For example, if you are heading northwest you take a bus north, then west (or west, then north). But this idea fails if the bus heading west just stops half-way through the journey. Check out at this trip This is someone trying to get from Aurora to Lake City — two areas with some of the best transit north of downtown. This trip takes close to an hour even though it is 15 minutes by car and 25 minutes by bike. Remember, this is after they made east-west travel a large focus. The problem isn’t frequency, either. The E Line is very frequent and the 61 is good. The problem is all the backtracking. It should be a simple two-seat ride by a reasonably direct path. Head south on Aurora followed by a bus going across. But instead the 65 (like the future 72 and 522) just ends at the station (half-way across). This ends up costing Metro a bunch of money even though people are forced out of their way for simple trips.

         To be fair, things will be a bit better with the 77. That particular trip will be much better. But the 77 is quite flawed for various reasons. Furthermore, it won’t help with some trips, like this one. This is the same idea — the destination is just a little bit up the road. Again it takes close to an hour. The 77 will go on 125th but that would mean walking about 15 minutes to that part of Lake City Way. With the next restructure the 65, 72 and 522 will all go on 145th. The 65 and 72 will run right by that bus stop. But neither bus will go across 145th to Aurora (or Greenwood) which means riders are still backtracking using the 61 or being asked to ride three buses for a simple four-mile journey.

         I think they just failed to take into account all the issues. To be fair, ST did them no favors by sending the 522 to 145th and ending at the station. But the particulars with our street grid — and the location of the Link Stations — cause issues as well. It is impossible to build an ideal grid. It just can’t be done. A grid has routes about a half mile apart. Most of our north-south corridors (and thus the routes that follow them) do that quite well. Greenwood, Aurora, Meridian, 5th Ave. NE and 15th NE are all about a half-mile apart. But the freeway manages to destroy the possibility of similar east-west corridors to the north. It is a full mile between 155th and 175th and yet none of the streets go through. Then you have Link. East-West buses easily connect to north-south buses and they should also connect to the north-south Link. But Link doesn’t have a station at every crossroad. There is no station at 155th or 175th. All of this means that building something “grid-like” is difficult. It isn’t obvious where all the buses should go.

         But in their attempt to mimic some aspects of a grid (lots of east-west buses) they failed to provide the functionality of one. You don’t have to have a grid to have grid-like bus trips. It just means you end up with a bit more overlap and ‘L’ shaped routes — something they have anyway! In contrast, consider this restructure proposal I designed (with eddie’s help). It is fairly extensive (it is basically everything north of the ship canal and west of Kenmore) so there is a lot more to it than just this area. But consider North Seattle and Shoreline for a second (everything north of Northgate). It is far more Link-oriented. There are east-west buses, but only on the corridors that contain Link. The buses from the north tend to connect to stations in the south since that is where the vast majority of people are heading. For example the folks on 15th NE (north of 180th) have a bus that connects them to 148th fairly directly (instead of a bus that goes all the way over to the college and back). Coverage routes (like Meridian) are faster and more efficient. The 77 is split into two routes (of course). The mostly north-south part (along Lake City Way) goes farther north while the east-west part (along 130th/125th) goes further east. The 65 goes all the way across to Shoreline College, thus providing excellent one and two seat trips. That means that there is overlap — it isn’t a grid there. Instead you have two ‘L’ shaped routes (the 65 and 522). But you still have grid-like functionality. Despite this overlap it is fairly cost effective. There is not much waste. It is quite likely this would allow the buses to run a lot more often even though the connections are just a lot better. There are a bunch of other changes (and many of them would be quite controversial) but I think overall it is just a lot better.

      3. Not only is the east-west connectivity disappointing, so to are transfers to RapidRide E. Rather than design bus routes with jogs on Aurora to allow for colocated bus stops, many transfers to RapidRide E require walking fully across Aurora and/or maybe a busy east-west arterial too. Not only is this making the transfer seem unsafe, it can add up to 5 minutes just to get between the two bus stops (and that doesn’t include the time waiting for the next bus).

         There are speculative ideas on reconfiguring Aurora for better RapidRide E service. However improvements to stop connectivity are rarely considered in the reconfiguration concepts.

         Imagine standing on Aurora headed to Downtown Seattle. You have to choose between a RapidRide E stop and an east-west stop nearby. You must pick one which makes it hard to switch to the other bus because the stops are different.

         Now imagine automatically going to just one stop on Aurora where some buses are RapidRide E headed to Downtown Seattle while other buses are headed east to a Link station. The upcoming buses would be listed in real time on the same sign. With Aurora being the primary “destination corridor” this situation would be common.

         For some odd reason, Metro instead seems to put duplicative routing on Greenwood and Meridian instead — two mostly residential streets. It’s as if Metro only expects commuters will ride buses as opposed to residents who would use buses for shorter trips to shop and do other things.

   2. Routes 31 and 33 also operate on the 25-foot 22nd Avenue West and should be moved to a different street.

      The obvious alternative is 20th (which becomes Gilman to the north and Thorndyke to the south). The drawback is that you lose coverage. 22nd has people on both sides (including some apartments). 20th does not. It is nothing but railroad tracks to the east. It is tempting to get rid of parking along there but that would be controversial (to say the least). Some of the houses have driveways along 22nd but for a lot of them the only other access is via the alley way (which is gravel) between 22nd and 23rd. I’m sure a lot of people who live there just park on the street and walk up the stairs. Maybe the city could pave the alley way and then remove the parking. The alley way between 21st and 22nd looks much nicer. This (https://maps.app.goo.gl/c2wnBagDEpgDD7iW8) versus this (https://maps.app.goo.gl/G1mnye1cosdVTZ6d6).

8. Anecdotally, I have yet to see buses use either of the improvements listed for Kent. It’s possible I am traveling through those intersections at times where traffic does not necessitate their use but that would also seem to indicate they weren’t as necessary as they seemed. Don’t misinterpret that to mean that they are useless, however.

9. Great article. It really shows how “little” fixes can make a big difference. We should be doing this sort of thing much more instead of fixating on RapidRide routes.

   1. Or do both tbh, like it’s not an either or in my view. RapidRide does provide good bus corridor upgrades and creates a core reliable bus route that’s unlikely to change in the long term other than minor changes. While I have qualms about some bus stop placement on RapidRide routes either too few, too many, or need slight route adjustment (like F would benefit from a route split between Tukwila Amtrak/Sounder and Lind Ave SW & SW Grady to improve bus speed but still serve it at a lower frequency). It also expands night owl service (even if B & F don’t, tho should)

10. King County Metro continues to be the market leader in analyzing, evaluating, and improving their services, something not typical for an organization that’s so huge relative to the next-largest bus service in the region, that one to the north is 1/10 of the size but spends money on media advertising and government relations instead.

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