There Are No Safe Streets under Fascist Occupation (streets.mn)
Transportation:
- Sound Transit Board Abruptly Removes Key Committee Chair Ahead of Pivotal Year (The Urbanist)
- New Seattle bikeways coming to Space Needle ahead of World Cup (The Seattle Times, $). Free coverage from Seattle Bike Blog.
- World Cup Cities Set to Win $100 Million in Federal Transit Aid (Bloomberg CityLab)
- The Light Rail’s Cross Lake Connection Will Be an Aries (The Stranger)
- ‘Moving San Francisco’ exhibit highlights 122 years of SF Muni magic (Mission Local)
Land Use and Policy:
- Public officials can make the greatest difference when they focus on their communities’ housing, transportation and utility costs (Governing)
- Washington to Scrutinize Eight Local Housing Plans Under New Accountability Law (The Urbanist)
- Conservation Groups Join Push Against Seattle Growth Plan (The Urbanist)
- Researchers argue greenbelts are essential to stop urban sprawl, but cities need additional policies that encourage densification to achieve sustainable futures (Concordia University)
- Trump’s EPA is taking itself out of the regulation game, by attempting to eliminate its own power to govern pollution (Grist)
- Mayor Wilson’s Inner Circle Is the Opposite of a Boys’ Club (PubliCola)
This is an Open Thread, but comments should focus on topics clearly related to transit and land use issues and be mindful of our Comment Policy.
The mayor of Redmond? I don’t know her, but that doesn’t sound promising for expansion driven by analytics and rider experience.
I agree. Balducci seemed to be one of the few board members with an open mind. The rest of the board (as well as Dow) seemed hellbent on the current approach which is clearly a failure.
Birney has generally been good on housing and transportation issues in Redmond. I think Redmond has come quite far in the past decade or two, and she’s one of many pushing on increased housing density and improved transit access. I don’t know if that will translate well to the Sound Transit board.
Redmond has had a couple exceptionally good mayors, and has been a shining light in the suburbs on housing density, station areas, and Link permitting. I don’t know whether Birney was one of the ones who did that or what she’s doing now, but Redmond has a lot to be proud of.
Claudia Balducci was the embodiment of analysis paralysis that’s so typical of inefficient and costly decision by committee which plagues American transit projects that ultimately yield below average results. good riddance.
I’m assuming she was done on the board a while ago, but they kept her on as a courtesy so she could cut the ribbon on Crosslake, because it was her baby for so long.
Claudia Balducci was the embodiment of analysis paralysis
What are you talking about? She was the one that spearheaded the East Side Starter Line. She was also open to alternatives to the second downtown tunnel (which means that other projects can be built first). What project was delayed because of “analysis paralysis”? Are you thinking Pinehurst Station? Maybe Graham Street Station?
Paul had told us in the past he prefers the 12 floors of escalators plan at Westlake, rather than have passengers actually be able to get places easily.
So I’m guessing that’s the plan he’s upset about interrupting.
Claudia Balducci can do simple arithmetic — and much more, of course. You, however, believe in Tooth Fairy Budgeting. There is absolutely no way that North King can afford to “Build The Damn Trains” as defined by the ST3 vote.
Nor should it. The second tunnel alignment “rail south” of the Uptown station is a boondoggle of major proportions. The stations are so deep that intra-downtown trips will be non-existent or made in the old tunnel. The alignment poorly serves South Lake Union only in its southwestern corner. The SLU Station lies within the walkshed of Denny Way and has a primary ridership generator of snagging riders from the E and 5 a mile from downtown. Ther is to be no downtown station between Westlake and “East Pioneer Square”, and the two transfer points with lines in the existing tunnel will either require a half dozen level changes or a long walk on the surface and about ten minutes’ time.
This is a textbook example of digging the wrong hole. Stop digging.
Apparently she didn’t do enough arithmetic to realize her plan didn’t save the 30 billion needed and never favored in the cost of additional delays under inflationary trends. she was the embodiment of penny wise pound foolish.
And $50 billion in construction for light rail lines that will be slower than the buses they replace isn’t?
Nobody “favored in” anything. Did you perhaps mean “factored”?
Two things can happen at once.
Take, for example, Federal Way Station ridership. It is doing much better than expected already.
Meanwhile, ST Express 577/578 ridership might still be growing. We won’t know until the rest of December ridership numbers come out.
The 577/578 has a limited purpose of serving Federal Way – downtown Seattle riders, along with riders among Federal Way, Auburn, Sumner, and Puyallup Stations.
The 1 Line gives Federal Way riders a 1-seat ride to 21 other destinations, and serves 66 other trip pairings just within the south side.
If there are enough riders to justify continuing to have express buses for a niche market, so be it.
Balducci was/is nothing like that. She has consistently understood rider experience better and offered better ideas going all the way back to when she was on the Bellevue City Council when the East Link alignment was being drawn up. She’s suburban so she doesn’t have as urban a vision as some of us do who would like to see Seattle and Pugetopolis be more like Chicago and a smaller footprint, but she’s one of the best suburban politicians. She’s within the top three of those, and within the top three of the ST board’s history. (Joni Earl was another, and I’ll leave the third open to debate.) My family has been Balducci’s consituents for twenty years and strongly feel she’s one of the best.
She’s critical in ST’s current turning point in ST3. Somers removing her from the System Expansion and Executive Committees may be an attempt to sideline her innovative ideas, which are at odds with Somers’s status-quo vision. In any case, she landed on the Rider Experience Committee, which is also one of her fortes, so at least rider experience will get better attention than it has so far.
Maybe she can influence the second tunnel design now from a rider experience perspective?
i.e. the lack of same direction transfers at sodo….; or the deep stations and horrible transfers….
She has been raising this all along. She and her Bellevue constituents will be impacted by it going from the Eastside to the airport. The problem is, only two or three boardmembers want to do anything about it, and that’s too small a minority to win a vote at this point. It’s related to the issues of where to put CID2 station and whether to have DSTT2 at all: a similar minority more or less wants reforms on all those, but it’s too small to win a vote or even force it to a board vote, and Somers (Snohomish County executive) is the board chair and is pushing back against all these.
The move could actually free Balducci from having to be politely accepting ST’s expansion choices and backroom decisions.
It will be hard for her to unseat Zahilay in the future if she demurely goes quiet about ST and its horrific expansion funding deficit — and its refusal to only look at token cost-cutting measures. She now has the opportunity to turn on the way ST spends our tax money — and she may find that becoming an outspoken critic is the best political move she could do.
She can now be a fierce rider advocate against the toy-train-type leaders who seem to not give a “damn” about the riders — as opposed to the tracks and stations.
All of this on the backdrop where ST will be mainly judged about how well they “operate the damn trans” rather than “build the damn trains” by the end of 2026. Upcoming system expansion decisions are nowhere near as major as the 2021-2026 openings have been in terms of serving new Link riders. The agency’s primary public perception is about to permanently shift from builder to operator after the cross-lake trains have been running for a few months. Outside of transit to SLU and Seattle Center, every other planned expansion won’t have regional significance, will only improve transit travel times for a limited number of people (and actually make them longer that some trips today) and won’t serve very many new riders.
The upcoming Systems Expansion Committee work will be painful this year anyway. Telling people “no” is not good for anyone’s political career no matter the reason. Maybe she even wanted off.
Another good step suggested by Councilmember Balducci was syncing the North Eastside Metro project with the Connection 2020 ST Link project. She suggested the Route 255 truncation be delayed until after ST completed their DSTT work. They destroyed the bus layover south of IDS to get ready for the East Link hookup.
A large factor for her is that she has been a transit rider; she has first hand rider experience. She understands some of the tradeoffs. Most ST boardmembers gain their transportation experience by driving in traffic.
Of course, the North Eastside restructure project was implemented just as Covid struck The project had a odd scope and outcome; the ridership impacts have been masked by Covid. IMO, the project scope should have included all the translake routes; those not included were routes 542, 545, 424, 252, 257, 268, and 311. The scope should have included Route 249 that was reduced in fall 2014; its hourly midday headway made it very weak. The project could have implemented a route mimicking the future K Line; instead, Route 250 was implemented. All-day routes and peak routes are parts of the same overall network. An earlier project had attempted to change the translake routes and not the local routes; it was stillborn. It was impacted by the so-called “mayors’ letter”, a response to a Seattle Times columnist (Blankinship?) who had misundestood the ST proposal for routes 545 and 542.
“The project could have implemented a route mimicking the future K Line; instead, Route 250 was implemented”
Route 250 was created to prefigure RapidRide K, which was then going to go to Redmond. Kirkland fanagled a reroute of RapidRide K to Totem Lake after the 250 was implemented.
Mike Orr
No, that is backwards. The East Link integration network for modeling had a Route 231 consolidating most of former Route 235 and the east part of Route 271. A similar route was in the planner version of Metro Connects. Later, during the public process for the North Eastside project, routes 234, 235, and 248 were compared in productivity and Route 248 was selected for improvement and hooked to the south part of the former routes 234-235. Now, the K Line process would seem be carving up both routes 250 and 255. Many riders want the local connection to the hospital district. A successful part of the 2011 restructure was to flip routes 249 and 234-235 and improve service to the hospital district. The future K Line will serve it.
That’s not what I remember when route 250 was created. RapidRide K was proposed as a Bellevue-Kirkland-Redmond line, and the 250 was created to prebuild ridership north of Bellevue TC, and I didn’t pay attention to south of Bellevue TC at the time.
I remember that because the 235 was one of the routes I rode in the 80s, from my apartment on north Bellevue Way & NE 29th south to downtown Bellevue or north to Kirkland. Later when the 230 (231?) replaced it, it was moved from Bellevue Way to 116th to serve the hospital district. I had moved to Seattle by then so it didn’t affect me, but I watched with dismay as north Bellevue Way at various times lost service to Kirkland, was reduced to hourly, or lost all bus service. I thought that was bad for the continuous row of apartments there.
But anyway, later there was a big deal about creating a route that would connect downtown Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond, the 250 and eventually RapidRide K. So the 250 went in and got better frequency over the previous routes. Especially on 85th, which I thought even in the 80s should have frequent service. (The existing routes were on 70th and 80th, but they were much less direct.) Then Kirkland started arguing to reroute the K to Totem Lake instead of Redmond. I wondered why Redmond didn’t make more of a fuss about it, or how the RapidRide it had been promised could be just taken away because Kirkland wanted Totem Lake. But in any case it happened. Then there was an debate about whether the K should go on Market Street, 124th, Lake Washington Blvd, or 108th. That was resolved and became the current preferred alignment. But all that left the 250 as an orphan, prefiguring a RapidRide corridor that no longer was. That raised the question of why continue the 250 any longer? Metro never answered that; it’s just letting the 250 run until it’s subsumed by the K, and then at that point there will have to be something to replace the Kirkland-Redmond service.
“I watched with dismay as north Bellevue Way … was reduced to hourly”
Actually, no, the 235 was hourly when I lived there, as were practically all Eastside routes. But when the 249 replaced it, it may have been half-hourly at some point?
All the discussions about the 250 bring back memories of using it in the late 80’s for commuting when it ran as rush hour only from Redmond to Overlake then via SR520 express to downtown (Seattle). It ran south through downtown then onto Boeing Field. The schedule worked out well that several of us would once in a while take a break at the Bar in the Mayflower Hotel for a few Anchor Steams.
Funny how routes evolve. But I guess that is the flexibility of buses.
I remember that 250, although I never rode it. I lived a half mile south of the 249 and 250, which if I recall went on NE 24th east of Overlake Village, then north on Lake Sammamish Parkway to Redmond, and the 250 was a peak variation of that. I never went that direction: most of my life was between NE 24th and SE 6th. The 249 was on Bel-Red Road west of there, and my route the 226 was on NE 8th. So when the 226 was moved to Bel-Red Road, it took me years to remember the route on Bel-Red was 226 not 249, and the 249 had moved to Northup Way (which didn’t have bus service when I lived there).
I’d completely forgotten about the old 250 when the new one to Kirkland started. Instead the number gave me an industrial connotation because of the number’s similarity to the 150 and the importance of the corridor.
Jeeze Paul!
Do you plan to share with the class where Sound Transit plans to get the funding needed to build that second tunnel? Sound Transit doesn’t have a leadership problem…. Sound Transit has a money problem. Balducci is smart getting off the Sound Transit train now, because Sound Transit doesn’t have the cash to keep expanding as planned and a whole bunch of math-allergic transit fans keep ignoring the financial cliff… Stop bad mouthing Balducci!
Yelling “Build the Damn Trains!” over and over again doesn’t actually “build trains”. The STB crew understand this.
Balducci is not leaving Sound Transit; she’s just switching committees. She’s still a Vice Chair. We want her on the System Expansion committee because her influence is critical in that area. The public doesn’t know the System Expansion Committee exists, and and the committee it doesn’t make final decisions people could blame ST for, it just makes recommendations to the board, and the board makes the decisions. So we know the System Expansion committee influences what the board considers, but regular people who hear about Sound Transit from TV or the newspaper or social media don’t.
I’ll give her credit that she offered more ideas than a lot of board members, but they were bad ideas that wouldn’t really prevent the fiscal cliff as her savings didn’t cover the gap contrary to the alternative reality the so called “STB crew” you mentioned seems to project while glossing over the obvious negative compromises to the entire system. Simply put, if you’re going to claim to solve the fiscal cliff with her plan, the let’s see the math then because she never presented her homework.
She never said it alone solves the fiscal cliff; it just saves a significant fraction of it. The rest will have to come from other strategies. The biggest would be to just cancel Ballard Link; then the cost of building it would go away completely.
Mike, canceling Ballard Link as designed would indeed be one very effective way to close the gap, because that would stop the second tunnel and will be what happens if the status quo is continued. If West Seattle Link goes ahead as planned, subarea equity will demand that the two extensions of the Spine and the silly Line 4 must be completed before any further work in North King can begin, and then there will be no money left for work north of SoDo.
So “Build the Damn Trains” will create three suburban Toonerville Trollies and an irritating stub from a Post Office Distribution Facility to Alaska Junction, sort of a Quadfecta of Transit Triviality that will hold the “Champeen A Da Woild” title for a very long time.
I’ll give her credit that she offered more ideas than a lot of board members, but they were bad ideas that wouldn’t really prevent the fiscal cliff
OK, so what are the good ideas? Seriously, what you do to save enough money?
So “Build the Damn Trains” will create three suburban Toonerville Trollies “”
Let’s stop invoking “Build the Damn Trains” by name. It’s unclear what exactly that coalition would insist on or what it would be willing to negotiate on. A definitive alternative is the ST board’s current preferred alignment faction (or status quo faction), because that by definition means keeping DSTT2, CID/N&S stations, and the West Seattle stub as in the current plan. That faction is currently 90% of the board if the members who weren’t present or didn’t speak at December’s meeting side with the majority. If the faction shrinks, the term will still be accurate. Maybe somebody can think of a better wording for it than I can.
Mike Orr,
Ah, is the “Build the Damn Trains” a coalition? I’m guessing they’ll never come up with a realistic plan with a realistic price tag for a way forward for Sound Transit. You’d publish their plan here if they emailed to STB right? I give STB high marks for flexibility and open mindedness.
So if any reader is part of “Build the Damn Trains”…. please, by all means, chime right in.
“Ah, is the “Build the Damn Trains” a coalition? I’m guessing they’ll never come up with a realistic plan with a realistic price tag for a way forward for Sound Transit. You’d publish their plan here if they emailed to STB right?”
It was a press release endorsed by several transit/urbanist organizations but not by STB. The press release was ambiguous on whether it meant “build only ST’s current preferred alternative” or “sensible changes are OK but don’t take forever deciding”. I originally thought it was an new coalition, but others called it a “presser”, so I’m not sure if there is any ongoing group after that one press release. None of the STB commentators has mentioned being part of it.
“You’d publish their plan here if they emailed to STB right?”
We’re open to publishing something on them if they sent us information. I’d have to see it first to tell whether we’d be willing to publish it or have an article about it. But why would they send it to us rather than publishing it in a forum of their own first?
Mike Orr,
Well honestly, STB has been around for a long time and if anybody or group has any new idea surrounding Puget Sound area transit, they need to publish it here. Otherwise I think, and I’m far from being alone on this, if STB isn’t the forum a group wants to present new transit ideas in, it’s just poppycock not worth even thinking about.
I’ll calling out “Build the Damn Trains” right here and now. So you folks had a press conference to bitch about Sound Transit. Were’s the Op ed? What is your way forward? Publish it here! Or send it to the Seattle Times, or the Stranger. Sure, I get it. You’re all pissed off about Sound Transit. Big deal.
Seattle Transit Blog is a cut above this sort of “protest behavior”. Let’s dig in and get something done.
“STB has been around for a long time and if anybody or group has any new idea surrounding Puget Sound area transit, they need to publish it here.”
Once we were the place doing breaking news on transit and everybody would publish here. But with the turnover in 2022 (loss of editors and authors due to burnout, having fewer staff, no longer having a paid reporter (the overhead paperwork for it was one of the reasons for the burnout), and the rise of better-funded commercial publications like the Urbanist and the Times and Publicola doing more investivative journalism on transit, and our opinions diverging from other transit activists, all that has led to them doing most of the breaking stories and getting most of the “statement pieces”. Seattle Subway used to publish its advocacy here; now it does it more in the Urbanist and elsewhere (The Stranger?). STB has reverted to mainly covering things the others don’t or that they have blind spots in, and our own view on transit best-practices.
Dang, everyone going at Paul now because he has the audacity of not parroting the blog’s agenda? Sounds familiar…
#ExtendTheMonorail
The Monorail is great, but it is fatally encumbered with its terminus in downtown. It can no longer transition to Pine in order to wiggle over to another north-south street, and Fifth isn’t wide enough to host it southbound. To have adequate capacity to replace BLE it would have to have some sort of loop at each end; guide-beam switches are simply too slow to accommodate high frequencies.
The plan to have it on First or Second was fatally flawed. There’s no “there” there and the hills south of Seneca up to the office core are brutal.
The blog’s agenda? The agenda is to report on transit in the greater Seattle area. I don’t think Paul addressed the blog’s agenda at all.
Paul was criticized because his criticism of Balducci is based on bullshit:
Apparently she didn’t do enough arithmetic to realize her plan didn’t save the 30 billion needed and never favored in the cost of additional delays under inflationary trends. she was the embodiment of penny wise pound foolish.
She never said it did! That is a bullshit argument. She wanted to know how much money it would save to not build the second tunnel. Turns out it would save billions. Is that important information? Hell Yes! Will it fix all our problems? Hell No! She knows that and every board member should know that. There will have to be multiple cutbacks. But this is at least a good starting point, given the marginal value of a second tunnel.
Keep in mind, No one else on the board has any idea how to save that much money, let alone fix the crisis. So why the hell do you single her out, when she is the only one at least willing to explore options that could make a dent in the problem.
https://seattletransitblog.com/who-we-are/
Seattle Transit Blog is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that reports on transit in the greater Seattle area and advocates for improvements.
Obviously the definition of “improvement” is fundamentally subjective.
I’ve asked Paul on several occasions to explain what he supports about breaking the most successful part of Link into two pieces, and replacing what is currently a through trip by a 12 floor transfer using 9 changes in escalators.
So far, neither Paul nor anyone else that supports this has given an answer as to why they think it’s such a great idea.
Extend the monorail? Sure. That would only be about 4 floors above street level, and be better for all involved if they do it without making a mess of Link.
“So far, neither Paul nor anyone else that supports this has given an answer as to why they think it’s such a great idea.”
I certainly think the Westlake transfer setup is horrible. I’ve mentioned many possible ways to make it better — from making Symphony or Capitol Hill station the transfer station to endorsing a cut-and-cover crossing at the mezzanine level to supporting an automated stub that could back into a stub station at Westlake and back out again to cross east of I-5 if it wanted to be extended southward.
I’ve also repeatedly pointed out for almost a decade that SODO Station is the best transfer station for a broken Spine. That’s just two level changes.
And I’ve said for years that a simple change to the station layout could make it a level transfer merely across a platform — by either both lines stopping at the same platform, or a relatively simple change in how the station approach tracks and platforms are built. When I talk about this to a non-informed resident, they actually assume that the system will have a level cross-platform transfer because that’s how other systems around the world are designed.
Sadly, I’m still a lone voice pointing out how relatively easy and useful this change would be. (That includes offering a way for trains can easily move to another track platform in a disruption.) Outside of a few other STB commenters, there is no push on this. No other transit advocacy group like Seattle Subway and no elected official has said anything about this.
And yeah the regulars all agree that Westlake is horrible for going between Seattle center/ SODO and North Seattle and of course fixing SODO does not solve the 2 Line transfer hassle. But it would serve what is likely the heaviest rail-rail transfer volume post ST3 if it ever happens.
And the fact that West Seattle Link construction documents are almost in preparation, it’s now or never.
Oh get over yourself, Al. Haven’t you noticed that other than Martin, you, occasionally Ross, and I almost nobody praises anybody else’s ideas? It’s not personal against you; it’s that the Blog is a lot of high SAT scores climbing a greasy pole.
We’d be a lot more effective if we would declare an advocated consensus proposal, but Mike won’t allow it because it might leave someone out. That’s kind of him, but it means that nothing ever gets decided.
A new headline comes out and off we go worrying about a bus route realignment in Maple Valley. Which is not to say that bus realignments are not important. They certainly are to the riders in the area.
But they don’t lead to the mis-allocation of $50 billion dollars.
Priorities.
I’ve also repeatedly pointed out for almost a decade that SODO Station is the best transfer station for a broken Spine.
Yes, absolutely. But I think you are missing the big picture. The people who understand transit issues enough to understand your point are also the ones saying that a new, very expensive tunnel — remarkably close to existing one — is just a bad idea. So yes, Al, that is by far the prettiest shade of lipstick for the pig. But it is still a Pig! That is why people aren’t focusing on your idea.
“Oh get over yourself, Al. Haven’t you noticed that other than Martin, you, occasionally Ross, and I almost nobody praises anybody else’s ideas? It’s not personal against you; it’s that the Blog is a lot of high SAT scores climbing a greasy pole.”
To be clear, this is not about my ego. It’s about my concern and compassion for future riders. In particular, those riders with mobility challenges will be significantly affected. Not may be significantly affected; WILL be significantly affected. And each level change adds travel time and effort for every transferring rider.
Surely you’ve noticed some new commenters are just now realizing the upcoming hassle with 1/2 Line transfers in the CID at the station and ask about why there is no center platform. Most regulars saw that problem coming many years ago and have dwelled on it to the point that we are even anesthetized to new comments about it. And once the cross-lake connection opens, I’m expecting a renewed round of comments from frustrated first-time riders about it to show up in the comments, especially Eastside residents going to and from SeaTac.
It can surely feel like a futile effort as you say. I prefer to think of it like being a rational oracle that is looking out for future generations, especially those challenged by each level change.
I am aware of two major interventions by Balducci: getting Downtown Bellevue Station moved two numerical blocks (one real block) west of where it would have been for the Vision Line the other faction on the Bellevue City Council was pushing, and questioning the wisdom of the current awful plan for the second tunnel.
I also recall when she delayed staff’s plan for instituting a single ST Express fare, getting rid of all the zone resets drivers on multi-county routes had to do for lots of passengers. She could have tried to block it, but merely asked for a one-year delay, pushing the fare change past her re-election. That was an extra year of adding unnecessary dwell time for multi-county buses. So she knows how to play the game, and it isn’t always in favor of the passenger experience.
I voted for her for County Executive, and plan to do so again if Zahilay goes along with pushing through the terrible second tunnel plan.
She didn’t “move” the station west because it was there already. The Vision Line was just Wallace’s idea. Did it even get much support on the Bellevue city council, much less a vote to endorse it? In contrast, Harrell and Constantine actively moved Midtown and CID2 stations south in the preferred alignment and got the ST board to vote for it. So those would have to be moved back, whereas Bellevue didn’t need to be moved back: the move east just had to be opposed, because it would have put the station even further from the walkshed of the Eastside’s biggest downtown.
You know it’s a quiet week when there’s an article to Link light rail astrology listed :)
While there are recent important transit items in the local news, I did find this article so silly that I think it deserves derision. I think the article was intended to be humorous but the humor was too deadpan to register. Comedy is harder than it looks.
And astrologically, an opening date doesn’t sound like a birth date anyway. To me, it sounds more like the date when a person graduates from school and takes their first-time career job. And who thinks about the astrology of that? I’d think that the date to assign an astrological sign would be the first date of construction or formal groundbreaking. Even the first date that a train crossed the tracks feels like a baby walking for the first time. That doesn’t happen before birth.
We avoid talking about religion, for good reasons, but make fun of astrology. Hmmm
Brent, if anything, Al seems to be taking the Stranger’s astrological assessment quite seriously. Otherwise, why bother being picky about the “birthdate” of a project, if not to identify the correct astrological sign? Perhaps Al is concerned that the supposed incompatibility of the astrological signs of the cross-lake connection and the 1 Line bodes poorly for the opening?
I don’t believe in astrology so I can’t personally confirm whether this Stranger article is in good faith. There are many people who do believe in it, though, and the perspective is certainly unusual for our local transit coverage so I found it worthy of inclusion this week.
You’re reading too much into it. It was an interesting and unique light article that came up, so it was included in the Roundup.
Not sure if it was covered yet but Sound Transit released their 2026 ST Express Service plan: https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/planning-future-service/2026-service-plan
Looks like they’re planning to axe the 586 and 580, along with having the 556 take over for the 554 completely. Also, there will (finally) be 30 minute service on the 535 on weekends (including new Sunday service). And now that the 2 line is going to Lynnwood this year they’re getting rid of the 515 and rerouting the 522 to Shoreline South.
That was released nearly five months ago. The only change is that they released the routings for the overnight routes, and they redirected the 574 to end at Lakewood Station rather than continuing to Lakewood TC.
*four*
“That was released nearly five months ago.”
We didn’t know what the final proposal would be until now.
We’re working on an article on it for tomorrow, and potentially one or two other articles after that.
The article is being held for confirmation from ST on a couple details, so it may be ready Friday or more likely next week.
The big new here is the details of the 556’s route and frequency. In particular, it’s serving all of the local stops in Issaquah used by route 271, which means a lot more of Issaquah is now connected to the regional transit network than what was the case previously. I am also glad to see 15-minute service 7 days/week, rather than just Monday-Friday.
For hiking Tiger Mountain by bus, the added frequency is a huge improvement, and connecting the 2-line in South Bellevue will make it useful for people who live on the eastside, as well as Seattle.
There are zoom info sessions Friday and Tuesday.
ST released travel time estimates in addition to their service plan. A few thoughts:
– Should the 556 continue, perhaps as peak-only service? Issaquah-Downtown will require a transfer and will be significantly slower than existing service. Alternately perhaps Metro’s 218 should continue to Downtown Seattle, though honestly I think this service should be provided by ST. I think the additional frequency on the 554 will be great but the 556 is a proven route with a fairly strong ridership
– This has been discussed before but the 545 should probably run less often since Link replaces many of its trips. It’s a great bus, but running 10m peak and 15m off-peak seems really excessive to me.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2026-service-plan-travel-estimates.pdf
We (several STBers) put both of those in our survey feedback. ST is not interested in changing the 545 or 556 at this time for whatever reasons. So we can argue what would be more ideal and service-hour efficient, but it’s not going to happen.
At a bare minimum, could Route 542 be extended to the downtown Redmond Link station from the RTC; could Route 545 shift one block south to serve the Link station?
I’m not worried about this. 545 ridership will fall off a cliff soon enough. Then they will change it.
The 218 serves the Highlands to downtown but not downtown Issaquah. When I was living in the Highlands and commuting to Seattle, it was basically always better to take the 218 over the 554. It takes a lot longer to go from the Issaquah TC exit to the Highlands P&R via local streets that it does via I-90 (the 218 bypasses the TC as well). Upwards of 10 to 15 minutes if my memory serves. It will be an even greater difference with the new 556 making more stops.
I’d prefer the 554 to be preserved over the 556. Sure, its duplicating service from Mercer Island to downtown, but it’s an important corridor. And the bus travel time outside of peak hours between MI and C/ID is almost the same as it is from South Bellevue to downtown. Maintaining the 554 will only cost marginally more than the 556 proposal. And it should certainly be a higher priority than maintaining the 545. ST won’t serve the Issaquah – Seattle trip at all, but will do Redmond – Seattle two different ways? It’s baffling really.
Also worth noting that the 554 is the only all day express bus serving Seattle – Eastgate as well. My experience as a 554 rider is that well over half of ridership comes there. Metro will probably have to backfill a significant amount of service as a result of this service change, probably in the form of more trips on the 212/218
RE Issaquah:
The Issaquah transit center location was good in its time as an intercept for Seattle commuting using park-and-ride, but it is frankly terrible for making Issaquah a future walkable destination for both local and regional trip making.
I’m expecting that local leaders will someday want to abandon it as it is a relic of the express commuter bus era. They will need a new vision to rally around before that happens.
None of the Metro or Sound Transit Eastside bus service across I90 is surviving the restructure. The 550 and 554 are going away (with the Eastside portion replaced by the 556) and the 218 will be truncating at Mercer Island station. In addition to the 218, there will also be direct service to Mercer Island from Issaquah Highlands via the 215 and 269.
There was a lot of discussion on the Metro portion of the restructure here: https://seattletransitblog.com/2025/03/20/east-link-connections/
Things are still needlessly vague when it comes to Issaquah. Just to back up here, this was the plan as agreed to after extensive outreach. This is a Metro page but it also includes Sound Transit Express changes. Based on this map and this schedule the 554 would be retained, although it would be truncated at Downtown Bellevue. Meanwhile, Metro would run express buses from the Highlands to Mercer Island. Metro would also run the 203 — an infrequent coverage bus serving the north end of Issaquah (and similar parts of Bellevue). It was hoped (if not assumed) that the 554 would do a better job of serving central Issaquah. The descriptions for the new 554 has this line:
Route 554 will serve local stops along Gilman Blvd in order to serve several employment centers, housing, and provide more frequent local connections
This is quite different than the existing 554 which only stops twice in Issaquah and doesn’t even run on Gilman Boulevard. Having the 554 serve local stops in Central Issaquah went along with Metro serving other areas. That all made sense and seems like a reasonable plan.
At this point, it looks like the only change is the numbering. Rather than call the bus 554, they will call it 556. According to the new updated report, there will be
New stops in Issaquah on Route 556
Thus it is quite possible it will follow the previous plan (and serve more stops in Gilman). But we still don’t know what the route will actually look like. As for Metro, my guess is they will do what they planned on doing.
“ST won’t serve the Issaquah – Seattle trip at all, but will do Redmond – Seattle two different ways?”
Redmond is a major jobs center with two-way ridership (Redmondites going to Seattle and Seattlites going to Redmond). Issaquah is more one-way (Issaquahites going to Seattle or Bellevue). And since Redmond and Issaquah are both in East King, they’re competing with each other for ST service. Redmond’s large number of jobs and dense housing close to stations is giving it an advantage. The 545 is about travel time: I used to ride it from Olive & Terry to Redmond Tech, and was amazed that without traffic it can get there in 15 minutes (the schedule says 20 but it was 12-15): eastern Bellevue has never had such fast access to Seattle beyond peak expresses. So it’s probably to preserve that, and anxiety about whether Link would be fast enough to meet people’s expectations. I still think it should have a frequency reduction at minimum, but ST apparently doesn’t want to potentially upset Redmond-Seattle riders even if the likelihood is low. In any case, ST could modify the routes further later.
Thanks for the reminder, I had forgotten about the 215. That does make things a bit better, though I’d still prefer some direct Issaquah-Seattle service. Transfers add up, and I don’t see why Issaquah should be basically the only regional center without a bus to Seattle. Federal Way and Redmond are maintaining express buses despite direct Link connections. Issaquah will have neither a direct bus nor a direct train, basically ever.
I think that the new routes will serve me fine, as an occasional Issaquah visitor within a ten minute ride on the 36 to the 2 Line (or a walk down the hill to Judkins Park), and as someone who is well versed in navigating our transit system. I’m not sure it’ll be a good move for the occasional rider or the commuter who is in Issaquah though. I’d be happy to be wrong though.
And Mike Orr, just because it’s explainable why Redmond is retaining the 545 every 10 minutes at peak doesn’t make it much better. Those service hours really should be split to maintaining the 554 to downtown. Redmond is a big destination, but Issaquah isn’t nothing.
I’m expecting that local leaders will someday want to abandon [the Issaquah Transit Center] as it is a relic of the express commuter bus era.
There are fewer express buses to and from Issaquah but they still dominate transit in the area. There are very few buses making local stops. In the future there will be the 203 and the 556. Even the 556 will run express from the transit center to Eastgate. More to the point, there will be a huge swath of the city being nowhere near a bus stop (of any kind). For some it makes sense to drive to the park and ride at the Highlands — for plenty of others it doesn’t. My guess is someone commuting to Downtown Bellevue will drive to the Issaquah Transit Center and catch the bus. It is easy to argue that the lot is too big, but that is true for a lot of park and ride lots (after the pandemic).
I don’t see why Issaquah should be basically the only regional center without a bus to Seattle
It comes down to time savings and money. Mercer Island to Downtown Seattle is very quick. A train will be faster than a bus, even when traffic is light. Even with the additional waiting (and walking from the bus stop to the train platform) the trip via a transfer will be competitive with a direct bus. Given that, it just isn’t cost effective for Metro to spend a bunch of money making a trip marginally more convenient. It is worth noting that riders from all over the north end have to transfer. The 41 was actually faster to downtown than the train (from Northgate) and yet riders have to transfer. Much of the time, the 522 was faster from Lake City to Downtown then going to Roosevelt and taking the train (even if you don’t count the transfer itself). Direct buses are also popular. About 1,000 riders a day choose the bus from Lynnwood Transit Center to downtown over the train. Some of those riders used to catch a direct bus from places like Swamp Creek. Now they have to transfer anyway and even then, some prefer the bus. Yet that bus is going away. On the East Side, the 550 is going away (eventually). This means that riders on Bellevue Way or the north end of Downtown Bellevue will have to transfer. I’m sure there are some that prefer the bus but it just isn’t worth the extra cost.
There are still expresses in the system but that doesn’t mean they are a good value. The 510 is not a good value. But in a lot of other cases, the dynamic is different. ST is still running buses from Tacoma because they are considerably faster than Link. Where Redmond buses fit on the spectrum is debatable. A lot of us here thing ST went overboard — they shouldn’t run so many buses from Redmond to Downtown Seattle (they should instead run more buses to the UW). But I really think it would be a bad idea for any agency to run express buses on I-90 to Downtown Seattle, whether they started in Mercer Island, Bellevue, Issaquah or Sammamish.
Maybe, although my concern is that, if not enough park and riders will be willing to take a bus to the train – even with 15 minute frequency – when they have the alternative options of just driving to south Bellevue with free parking, eventually leading to the 556 getting frequency cuts due to low ridership. This is especially a concern on weekends, where there is no reasonable possibility of the south Bellevue parking garage ever filling up.
Lynnwood has an alternative to express buses that is significantly faster at peak. The 554 also serves a significant number of riders at Eastgate, and both Issaquah and Eastgate will have to trade down to a slower two-seat ride into Seattle. According to ST’s documentation ridership is fairly good for the 554 (relatively speaking anyway):
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2026-bus-service-plan-title-vi.pdf
@ Ross:
My post was much more about the geographic location of the Issaquah Transit Center on the edge of local development than it is about the types of buses going there. Its location is served heavily by express buses partly because the site concept was the result of thinking at the time when the site was chosen over 20 years ago. It’s rather a self fulfilling prophesy of a transit service envisioned before ST2 and East Link was planned. It also seems to be only a half of the Issaquah transit strategy at the time, with the Highlands transit center and parking being the other half.
It functions for now — but the long-range planning and evolution of Issaquah as an all-day destination reachable by transit could be so much better if it was relocated. Of course, the 4 Line planning is still years away.
ST has generally shown hostility about moving station locations away from what was originally listed in the 2016 ST3 referendum (Downtown Seattle station locations excepted — and those happened because of opposition about original layouts). So getting ST to move where a 4 Line end station will be take some different thinking about its location and it’s best to put into motion before 4 Line designs get too far.
The topic is generally the centerpiece in this Central Issaquah Station discussion from April 2025:
https://www.issaquahwa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/11440/Vision-and-Guiding-Principles–Adopted-April-2025
While not directly identifying a different end Link station site, it does reference creating a walkable, denser station area land use that seems much more difficult to achieve around the current site.
“I don’t see why Issaquah should be basically the only regional center without a bus to Seattle”
Because all-day frequent express service to downtown Bellevue is a big win for Issaquah that it never had until now. Bellevue is where a lot of Issaquahites want to go, and is their metropolis center in the Eastside. This helps the Eastside function more as a self-contained unit that it aspires to be. Bellevue-Redmond is a major urban center that has a lot of what Seattle does even if it doesn’t have everything. It’s like San Francisco and Oakland, or Minneapolis and St Paul. South King, Pierce, and Snohomish have nothing comparable, but the Eastside has. And since Bellevue is between Issaquah and Seattle, there’s some sense in having a one-seat ride to downtown Bellevue instead of to downtown Seattle. Both ST and Metro are saturating the transfer opportunities to Link to Seattle to mitigate the loss of the 554. And the 554 goes only to downtown Seattle: if you’re going to Capitol Hill, north Seattle, or southeast Seattle beyond the Rainier stop, you have to transfer anyway, and the experience is worse and more time-consuming than transferring at Mercer Island or South Bellevue.
This seems to be a place to comment on ST I-90 service. (I also have serious concerns about Route 522, routes 542-545, and I-5 South).
I will begin with a positive comment: Route 269 is good, but it is overdue. The north part could have been restructured years ago when routes 542-545 provided frequent Redmond-Overlake service. Adequate local service for Sammamish has been planned since 2002.
Second, the ST service levels seem too low: Route 556 at 15/15; should the headways and waits be shorter? Link is planned at 8/10 headway. For Issaquah, routes 214 and 554 will be deleted. For the Eastgate local bays, Route 212 will be deleted.
The Metro network is in the can; the ordinance was adopted; and, implemented in phases as Link opens after the plinth delay. The meat of this note is on the ST routes; can they be improved? (But the Metro network is weak. The Council added an amendment asking for a ridership review after implementation. Missing aspects include bus-to-bus connections at Eastgate, good outer terminals for routes 111 and 222, Link connects for the north part of Route 226, bus service at Bel-Red station, lost frequency on upcoming routes 220 and 270 relative to Route 271, directness for Route 240, there is not a frequent and fast connection between the local Eastgate bays and Link, and any sound rationale for Route 256).
The two agencies held outreach jointly. ST is delaying its implementation. Given the Link, WSDOT, and Sound Move infrastructure is this the best ST network? There are center HOV lanes connecting the Mercer Island station and the Eastgate freeway station. The ramps to eastbound I-90 from Bellevue Way SE are congested in the p.m. peak; the ramp between eastbound I-90 and southbound I-405 are very congested in the p.m. peak (see Route 111). Current and future Route 566 is impacted a bit by this before it weaves over. The infrastructure and running times of routes 554 and 556 imply that east-west routes should meet Link at Mercer Island and that north-south routes could meet Link at BTC, East Main, or South Bellevue; the last has the most congestion. Eastgate would be served by both MI and SB routes; outbound riders would face an awkward choice: alight at MI and wait for routes 215, 218, or 269 or alight at SB and wait for Route 556? The best choice might vary by time of day.
I have proposed three ST routes to complement the Metro network; one Metro route would have to change. Route 240 would shift to Bellevue Way SE from 112th Avenue SE to cover for Route 550 and 556 in the ST proposal. New Route 555 (similar to a route of the same number from about 2010) would connect Issaquah TC and BTC via Richards Road and 112th Avenue SE, connecting with the Main Street Link station. Routes 554 and 552 would be oriented to Mercer Island Link station and through routed, taking their layover in Issaquah and Eastgate, respectively. Route 552 would provide a fast connection between the local bays and Link (See ELC routes 220, 240, 223, 226, 245); Route 554 would provide a fast connection between Issaquah and Link; both are missing from the joint ST-Metro network. ST Route 556 goes through congestion eastbound on Bellevue Way SE and on I-90; conceptual Route 552 (ala Route 212) does not. Route 555 could extend to the Highlands are serve downtown Issaquah per the ELC Route 554.
Link is powerful. We should use the WSDOT and Sound Move infrastructure well to get buses to and from Link. Placing bus routes in known congestion is counterproductive. South Bellevue was important due to the Route 550 pathway and its parking. But with Link, all the East Link stations can provide a connection with good service to the regional destinations. Link is like a pneumonic tube whisking riders to urban centers. We should not use congested pathways for buses attempting to reach Link when congestion free pathways are available.
Route 566 is a clever route consolidation. Many consolidations are great. They often improve frequency and reduce waiting. ST should be consolidating routes 542 and 545 are delaying that for some reason. But Route 566 seems too slow for Issaquah and Eastgate riders. Could the connections for Bellevue and Link be served by different routes?
My post was much more about the geographic location of the Issaquah Transit Center on the edge of local development than it is about the types of buses going there.
So was I. The point being, there has to be a transit center somewhere in the general area. Maybe it could be farther away from the freeway. It doesn’t need to as big as the current one. Whatever. The point is, Issaquah is a huge, sprawling mess of a city. It has 40,000 people and they are very spread out. This makes it very difficult to serve them with any sort of bus service. Unless you spend way too much money trying to serve very few people you are bound to have really bad coverage. (If Issaquah wants to create their own transit benefit district, go for it.) Otherwise, you need a transit center of some sort. At the same time you are bound to go down the main corridors (that is where the few handful of apartments are) which means if you did move the transit center it would likely be similar. I really don’t see anything special in terms of the development potential of this park and ride compared to the one in the Highlands or any other parking lot you would end up building. The area is certainly not “built out”. Might as well keep it.
Also consider the ridership. The 208, 269 and 271 get more riders at the Issaquah Transit Center than all the other stops in Issaquah combined. The 554 is a little more balanced, but mostly because it has to compete with the other big park and ride (in the Highlands). Again, the Issaquah Park and Ride has more riders than all the non-park and ride stops in Issaquah (to be fair, the 554 only makes a couple other stops). The same is true of the 556. If not for the transit center these buses would only get a handful of riders and would have a hard time justifying their existence.
Lynnwood has an alternative to express buses that is significantly faster at peak.
So does Issaquah. Same idea. That’s my point. They don’t run express buses from Swamp Creek to downtown anymore (despite the existing demand). The 515 is only meant as a temporary band-aid until they get more trains.
@Ross
Link from Lynnwood to Seattle is faster than the freeway at most times of day, reaches many useful destinations before downtown Seattle, and is located 15+ miles from downtown. None of that is true for Mercer Island-Seattle.
Probably most importantly transferring will typically be slower than just riding the bus, especially if the 554 took the route of the 550 from Mercer Island into Seattle. Link will take roughly 10 minutes from Mercer Island to CID. Add in the transfer overhead and compare that with the time tables for the 550 and 554.
Errata. A few times, I typed 566 when 556 was intended. Route 566 is a different story.
“The point being, there has to be a transit center somewhere in the general area. Maybe it could be farther away from the freeway. It doesn’t need to as big as the current one.”
At 428 parking spaces, the Issaquah TC parking is actually not that large. The Highlands TC has more than double that at 1,000 spaces. Eastgate has over 1,600 spaces. South Bellevue Link garage has 1,500 spaces.
The Central Issaquah Plan from 2019 identifies three additional sites for the end Link station in addition to the current TC:
https://www.issaquahwa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1139/Central-Issaquah-Plan?bidId=
It’s clear that the City has visions of doing something different than blindly putting a Link station at the current TC and calling it done. Good for them and good for transit and hopefully good for TOD!
Link from Lynnwood to Seattle is faster than the freeway at most times of day, reaches many useful destinations before downtown Seattle, and is located 15+ miles from downtown. None of that is true for Mercer Island-Seattle.
Nonsense. It takes 14 minutes for the 550 to get from Mercer Island to 4th & Jackson at noon. This is with no stops in between. It will take about 10 minutes with Link (and that includes Judkins Park). The same thing is true with an express from Lynnwood. It takes Link about 30 minutes to get from Lynnwood to Westlake. According to the schedule, it takes 27 minutes to get from Lynnwood to 5th & Pine (Westlake Station) at 6:00 am. (Obviously that was before they reversed the express lanes.) The point being, you likely save more time under normal conditions with an express from Swamp Creek than you would with the bus from Issaquah.
The only part of your paragraph that is true is that there are more destinations between Lynnwood and Downtown Seattle than between Mercer Island and Downtown Seattle. That is irrelevant. The bus wouldn’t serve those areas either.
The point being that in either case, the express bus saves riders some time. That is why over 1,000 people a day were taking the 515 even though it started at the same station as Link! Again, this is not an express that bypasses the need for a transfer — it is the same exact route. But because it skipped the stops in between (and went on the freeway) it was often faster. But the bus is temporary. It is going away. As it should. Yes, riders saved a little time but they still didn’t save enough time to justify the cost. It is the same reason that they now force transfers for previous riders of the 41 and the 522 despite the bus being quite a bit faster (when the express lanes were in its favor). It is why the 550 will eventually go away as well.
The difference between an express and the train is minimal on both the I-90 corridor and I-5 north of downtown. It is bigger on 520 and much bigger to the south of I-5. Of course it is a judgment call but there is no particular reason to favor riders from Issaquah when we aren’t providing the same service to various places of Seattle and Lynnwood.
At 428 parking spaces, the Issaquah TC parking is actually not that large. The Highlands TC has more than double that at 1,000 spaces. Eastgate has over 1,600 spaces. South Bellevue Link garage has 1,500 spaces.
Yeah, just about all of the parking garages are way too big now. Downtown commuting from the suburbs is way down. A lot of the buses that used to serve these areas don’t even exist anymore. To be fair, Link garages do seem to be popular.
Then there are lots that are clearly just obsolete. Kent Des Moines for example. Some parking garages really do become obsolete because of urbanization. Northgate North parking lot is an example. It became a local park well before Northgate Link. It used to make up a sizable amount of service for the 41 but over time Metro offered more alternatives and most of the riders just walked to the bus stop (even then the parking garage was pretty busy). Issaquah is nowhere near that point with their transit system (or their city). They are highly dependent on those parking garages.
“Yeah, just about all of the parking garages are way too big now. Downtown commuting from the suburbs is way down.”
And yet ST is building new Sounder garages at Kent, Auburn and Sumner right now — knowing how the demand fell post-COVID.
And how ST sits around a table and picks a number out of the air with no analysis about the appropriate size of a garage — and then never looks to removing even a few dozen spaces to save budgets once that arbitrary number is determined. Instead we lose escalators and elevators.
It’s just painful for me to watch non-riding officials and senior management at ST be so amateurish and stupid (and arrogant) about their garage sizing.
Ross, the 550 takes 10-12 minutes to CID. The 554 takes slightly longer because it serves Rainier. There’s a transfer overhead averaging 5-6 minutes when swapping to Link, and the added variance of the transfer itself.
It is obviously a judgment call since it’s duplicative service and it isn’t a huge amount of time, but it’s clearly a degradation for Issaquah-Seattle trips.
Totem Lake is a growth center and doesn’t have a direct bus to Seattle either?
The city will certainly look to move the transit node in Central Issaquah (aka the valley floor). The current TC & garage is useful only for travel into Seattle (the 554 is still pretty good serving the retail core and Olde Town), but with the Costco HQ build out, there is now a need to serve commuters traveling *into* Issaquah, not just out. When I live in Issaquah pre-Covid, city staff was proud to talk about how the city wasn’t a bedroom community: it’s daytime population was greater than nighttime, as more people traveled into to work than commuted out. So the new transit service needs to serve the job centers, which will certainly pull a main station closer to I90. This is why the best outcome is to switch to a Stride service and place the station right in the middle of I90, allow for both the Costco HQ and the retail core [which is all zoned for midrise redevelopment] to be within a 15 minute walkshed. The primary transit center will then become the Highlands TC & P&R, with the smaller TC retired or repurposed.
Was there a 219 pre-Covid? I’m convinced I rode the 219 as the express route between Seattle and the Highlands, but maybe that was the 218 and I’m just getting old.
Also, Issaquah’s long term plan includes an additional over/under crossing of I90 at 10th~11th street. Ideally this will be integrated with the ST3 station (Link or Stride). My preference would be the crossing to be bike/ped only, but it’s likely stakeholders will insist on a vehicle crossing. A station like Eastgate with an overcrossing like 142nd Place would still be a good outcome, as it would allow for a local bus grid to converge on the station in an “X” operating pattern, creating the primary transfer node for Central Issaquah but without a need for a TC or layover space because routes won’t terminate there.
The 556 needs to backfill the 550 in Bellevue and the 271 in Issaquah. Overall I think it’s a good route, and Issaquah will finally get decent bus service between the Highlands and Front St/Gilman Blvd.
I think there’s a gap for Issaquah-Seattle trips though. All Issaquah-Seattle trips will take an additional 5-10 minutes and require a transfer. Other than the 556, the replacement routes for the 554 are the 215, 218, and 269, all of which truncate at MI.
The Issaquah-Seattle trips will take longer, but frequency, especially outside peak will be greatly improved. Link will also move more quickly through downtown Seattle, which will regain some of the transfer penalty.
And it will be faster. The current 554 gets off the freeway at Rainier and takes arterials to downtown. Even if it continued on the freeway like the 550 does to the 4th Ave S exit, it would still have to go through downtown streets and stoplights like the 550 does. Link just sails along on its track to downtown and goes directly to the downtown tunnel stations. That’s faster, and a lot faster when there’s congestion on I-90 or downtown streets.
@Mike
It won’t be faster, assuming the 554 takes the route of the 550 from Mercer Island into downtown.
The 550 can get stuck in traffic, but generally speaking Mercer Island to CID will take roughly as long on the 550 as on Link (10-12 minutes at peak for the 550 versus 9-10 minutes for Link). The transfer overhead of 5-10 minutes (waiting plus entering and exiting the station) will get added to every trip in/out of downtown.
For reference the existing 554 is 14-17 minutes from Mercer Island to CID at peak, which is comparable but still slightly faster than transferring to Link.
When there is no freeway congestion, there will be a transfer penalty traveling Seattle/Issaquah, but that’s more than offset by a much more reliable & generally faster trip during periods of congestion. It’s a trade-off, and given most ridership is either during commute hours or major events, I think it’s a good trade for riders.
The intention of the 566 is to improve Issaquah-Bellevue service, both to Bellevue TC and to south Bellevue Way (which has the Bellevue Square stop and the Old Bellevue stop), and to increase Issaquah express service from the substandard 30 minutes to a respectable 15 minutes. Along with this it provides a transfer to Seattle at South Bellevue station, and improves service in the southwest Issaquah retail/job area. The tradeoff is no one-seat express to Seattle, and no express to the U-District.
ST and Metro designed their routes jointly in the East Link Connections process. So since ST dropped Issaquah-Seattle, Metro picked it up with Highlands-Mercer Island expresses (215, 218, 269). If ST had dropped the 542 and 545 we might see a similar Metro route. Early Metro Connects versions had a Metro Federal Way-downtown express to replace the 577/578, which ST was planning to delete in ST2 (as of January 2016).
ST withdrew from the East Link Connections process before it was finalized, but it pretty much had to keep the 556 because Metro’s restructure depended on it (no Metro route on south Bellevue Way or in southwest Issaquah, and those Mercer Island expresses which would be redundant if the 554 continued to Seattle. For months we were unsure what would happen with southwest Issaquah, but ST confirmed to us during the survey process that the then-proposed 554 would serve those stops, and now ST has confirmed the 556 will, so intra-Issaquah transit mobility is safe.
Having a 15-minute express from the Highlands to South Bellevue and 15-minute expresses from the Highlands to Mercer Island may be overkill in some sense, but after a half century of underservice everywhere it’s nice to maybe err on the other side occasionally.
I’m a regular user of the 554 between Issaquah and Seattle, before retirement it was 4 to 5 round trips a week, since retirement it’s more like 1 to 2 trips per week. Back when it took the express lanes it was a remarkably quick trip to Chinatown. However the current slog from Judkins Park to Chinatown is not express-like at all.
I’ll be looking forward to taking the 554/556(?) From Issaquah to South Bellevue Link allowing me to skip the backups that occur on Mercer Island and also give me a wonderful transfer to The 2 Line for a weekly trip to Overlake Medical Center or any of the interesting neighborhoods popping up along the 2 Line. Nothing against the old 271 but this will be faster.
I will be watching with interest the routing of the 554/556 along Gilman and Front Street to Sunset Way. No bus routes serving that area attempt to make the turn from Front to Sunset or in the opposite direction probably because this corner looks to have some restrictive turning radii. So it would probably need to take the Bush St routing that local buses heading to North Bend now take.
When ST Express was laid out originally the 554 was to follow the same routing the 555 and 556 were to use between Issaquah Park and Ride Issaquah Highlands via I-90 but some locals pointed out that these regional buses intended to serve as links between urban centers were skipping Downtown Issaquah, so the 554 was routed via Sunset through downtown but did not become the local bus. The difference in timing is give or take only a few minutes as this routing allowed the 554 to avoid traffic backups getting on to I-90.
The 554 stop in downtown Issaquah gets some nice ridership. It would be a shame to slow the 554 down on its trip through to the Highlands. I understand that Gilman is becoming a new center but I feel that Metro should be responsible for this local service and let ST do the regional thing.
I think an argument could be made that the 556 should be King County Metro, and that the 215 should be Sound Transit, but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. What matters is the combined network.
I’ve observed a recent increased amount of I-90 congestion in Seattle. The combination of the I-5 lane closures northbound at the Ship Canal with the 405 South express lane construction zones are impacting the bus speeds in the 90 corridor. I’m even seeing a noticeable uptick of drivers looking for arterial shortcuts through SE Seattle these past few weeks, clogging local streets.
I am not sure if congestion will fully dissipate when things are completed. But I suspect that the slowdowns are aggravating 90 bus riders these days. They’re probably eager to transfer to a Link train rather than ride across Lake Washington into Downtown Seattle.
Why aren’t there any busses in the 99 tunnel?
I live in West Seattle and would find a bus that goes through the tunnel to ballard of freemont incredibly useful.
Because West Seattle-Fremont is not a major trip generator. The only route Metro has identified is a long-term plan for an all-day express from Westwood Village to the Vashon ferry terminal, Alaska Junction, and SLU. That’s in the Metro Connects 2050 vision (route 2003) after the full West Seattle Link is open. SLU is a major destination and the tunnel goes directly to it. I could also see expresses from Burien and South Park, but Metro hasn’t acknowledged these. This isn’t a commitment to such a route, but a concept Metro is considering and will decide on later.
Burien had peak time express busses prior to 2020 (which I’m sure you’re familiar with). Hoping to see them return in some capacity, because the community is really underserved at the moment. I was really sad to see full cancellation of the routes in their latest update.
The Rapidride H is an alternative, but considering the detour over to Westwood Village, it’s painfully slow for commuting.
I think the problem is that SR509 is such a straight shot to downtown, any route that isn’t explicitly focused on Burien to Downtown is going to be a significant time increase over driving.
Mike – I was just using a personal example.
Why don’t we have something like a express 99 route that runs from somewhere in Northern Seattle through the tunnel, toward South Park/Burien? Put a couple transfer points before/after the tunnel so people could transfer to the D line or C/H line or any other busses that would be useful.
West Seattle lacks service in general. While an express to Fremont or South Lake Union might get some riders, it would probably underperform compared to buses that should just run more often (like the 21, 50 or an all-day 56).
Yeah the 99 tunnel does seem like an opportunity that could be useful.
I often ponder multiple alternatives outside the box. So maybe something like these?
– A bus route from SLU through the tunnel that exits near the Stadium that shifts to the SODO busway. At that point, it could take over Route 101 with an I-5 direct access ramp ending at the new Renton TC.
– A bus route could stay on 99 and then 509 with intercept stations along the way, ending at SeaTac.
– A bus route could directly go between SLU and West Seattle with Westwood Village and continue as the 560 replacement bus to SeaTac when Stride starts from Burien.
A side thought: Fund any needed bus service subsidy out of tunnel tolls. (I’m kind of surprised that ST hasn’t pitched using tunnel tolls to help offset the DSTT2 deficit yet.)
The problem with the 99 tunnel is it has no stops downtown, which is where the vast majority of potential riders are going to or transferring at. The closest stops — SLU and south downtown — don’t really compare. That hinders coming up with a high-usage route for the tunnel. The tunnel was designed as a bypass for cars, as is 99 itself, and the biggest needs of transit riders wasn’t taken into account, because it’s a route for cars.
SLU alone rivals Downtown Bellevue in both jobs and population these days. Parking costs and difficulty are seemingly higher in SLU too. That’s on top of its proximity to Downtown. So it could justify getting service that doesn’t go downtown.
It would be faster to head to SLU via 99 rather than 3rd, but is worth it? Running through downtown to SLU adds another 5ish minutes but serves way more destinations and connections
The 99 tunnel discussion triggers my concern about how transfers work between a planned Link station in SLU with any bus on 99 north or south — like RapidRide E.
An aerial Link station above Mercer Street straddling 99 with bus stops underneath on 99 would instead be a rather ideal transit transfer setup.
Too bad that ST generally treats easy transfers as an afterthought rather than a priority in new track and station layouts.
Few will miss ST Express 586 once it is gone, especially now that the 1 Line provides a more frequent 1-seat ride between Federal Way and UW.
But it sure would be nice to have those buses and operators available for routes serving Seattle Stadium (known at non-World-Cup times as “Lumen Field”) during the World Cup.
Once UW-Seattle Commencement has passed, shut the 586 down for good.
While I don’t expect to change anything about the Fall 2026 ST service change, I would like to see bumping frequency on the 574 up to every 10 minutes off-peak be the next priority, so the train-bus transfers can be timed, or at least the bus waits for the train.
If there is resistance to adding a stop on ST Express 594 at Federal Way, then don’t add any more frequency to the 594 unless the ridership justifies it.
Well, okay, if Intercity Transit routes 600 and 605 and ST Express 574 can be combined in some way to provide a one-seat ride between Federal Way and the Capitol, that would be a higher priority, but I am not holding my breath.
Yes I think there should be a bus every hour between Federal Way and the Capitol if not more frequently. It would give a majority of the state population a one seat or two seat transit ride to the Capitol any time of day.
Given the billions in the state transportation budget, the legislature could help this happen financially. But first, there would need to be joint IT-PT-ST-WSDOT service concept to embrace the idea.
Maybe some legislator can earmark a few hundred thousand towards the idea into a funding bill to at least come up with an initial plan?
PT doesn’t need to be involved. IT has run an express from Olympia to Lakewood or Tacoma Dome for years without PT. PT doesn’t have any resources beyond its barebones network, so all it would be doing is nodding to the state-funded solution.
PT could end up being involved by operating the route, especially if it is an extension of ST Express 574. Metro could conceivably take over some south-end ST Express routes to make this possible, while ST could take over some of its eastside routes from the new STRide base, while CT holds on to Snohomish STX routes a little longer. There is a lot of fungibility.
All the agencies would benefit from their transit-riding constituents having a 1- or 2-seat ride to the Capitol.
I commuted for years between Seattle and Olympia by bus, but I have never in my life used Pierce Transit.
Flix/Greyhound already operates such a service. Maybe just fund some extra trips?
Maybe fund some of these as Seattle – Olympia – Aberdeen trips?
Do these services serve Federal Way Downtown Station?
One trip a day currently serves the SeaTac airport, and two trips a day from either Seattle or Tacoma stop there.
They don’t operate anywhere near as many trips as before 2020, that’s for sure.
The removal of balducci seems like a singularly bad idea but bad ideas are one are one of the few things you can count on from sound transit.