Friday Roundtable: New Battery Buses

87 Replies to “Friday Roundtable: New Battery Buses”

1. I like the new livery but is it a temporary promotional livery or permanent?

   1. I think it’s permanent!

   2. does it matter? It can be covered at anytime with advertising which should be the focus to bring some much needed revenue. I’m very happy to see trains wrapped and ST should capitalize on the world cup by selling ad space.

      1. Advertising wraps are terrible for the rider experience. https://humantransit.org/2009/09/berlin-seen-through-a-buswrap.html

      2. Tinted windows can be two things at the same time: (1) depressing to look through; (2) making it harder for some crazy guy with a gun to randomly shoot at passengers on board. Since the latter is not a thing, I’ll take better views from within the bus, thank you.

      3. I think there’s a policy against bus advertising. What’s the actual barrier?

2. I think it would be good to do a deep dive on charging logistics for the new battery buses. For instance, is their range sufficient to drive an entire service day on one charge? If not, do the buses charge during layover, or do they have to deadhead back to the base to charge? If the latter, does that mean that every route requires twice as many buses to operate, so that half the buses can be charging while the other half are in service?

   It would also be good to talk about the logistics of charging at the base, such as how long it takes, and whether the buses can be cleaned and charged at the same time. And also, what the backup plan is to maintain service if an equipment failure at the base prevents the buses from charging? If it’s just one bus, you can swap in a diesel bus, but that’s hard to do when 100+ buses are impacted all at once.

   1. Also of interest would be what the range of the buses is in winter, particularly the coldest day of the year. I would imagine that buses, with a huge passenger cabin and doors that open frequently, would require a lot energy to heat, and that energy is going to reduce the driving range.

      1. Gillig’s own press says their deployment in Juneau, Alaska was ok.
         https://www.gillig.com/2025/04/02/capital-transit-juneau-alaska-pleased-with-gillig-battery-electric-bus-performance/

         Temperature-wise, Seattle’s winter is not that concerning. GILLIG Low Floor EV 40′ seems to sell well in the past few years.

   2. TriMet has layover chargers at some of the transit centers. Pantograph chargers are pretty nice. I saw them in use in Germany in 2016, and it’s just a matter of the driver pressing a button. The pantograph arm comes down and connects automatically.

      As with battery cars, the amount of distance per minute of charge depends on the charger power.

3. re Proterra. The “short” Eastside routes were routes 226-241; they were through routed, so longer than it may have appeared; the bus numbers changed at Eastgate and BTC. The charging was at Eastgate. The routes were chosen for length, grade, and load to test the BEB. Route 241 has been deleted during the East Link Connection project.

   The routes chosen are of note. All are from South Base; the new BEB Tukwila base is next to South Base.

   Before Covid, Route 105 had very high productivity. Metro placed Via and now Metro Flex atop of it. Though Route 105 deserved attention, it was not included in the ELC scope, but routes 111 and 240 were included. If Route 105 had been extended to East Link, it would have had the Renton TC as its southern terminal and a stronger draw.

   Route 161 was implemented in fall 2020. It absorbed the north part of former Route 180.

   Route 165 was also implemented in fall 2020. It is part of the South Link project. In the summer 2025 P3 material, it was to be split into routes 164 and 166 and some trips through routed (even though the headways will not match and Route 164 will cross the BNSFRR main line and be subject to delays).

   The F Line has had articulated coaches since it implementation. Now, it will have a standard BEB. Some used to think that articulated coaches were part of the RR brand. There significant passenger load turnover on the F Line; it is a crosstown service.

4. There is also the question of what happens to the charger at Eastgate? Could the high powered utility connection be repurposed for car chargers if Metro doesn’t need it for buses? I’m imagining some of the soon-to-be obsolete parking capacity at Eastgate P&R being replaced someday with a large Tesla Supercharger site.

   1. “soon-to-be obsolete parking capacity at Eastgate P&R”
      Why is there going to be less demand? I would expect more people will park there once they can get a short hop to MI (or S Bellevue) and take light rail. That’s assuming the spaces at S Bellevue get filled. Although some might still prefer Eastgate since it avoids the worst of the I-90/405 congestion. Especially in the afternoon getting out of S Bellevue to go east on 90 is a nightmare.

      1. I think demand went way down because of the pandemic (and its aftermath). Here is a recent post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/eastside/comments/1nyu3gq/eastgate_park_and_ride/.

         But I also think that a lot of people that used to drive there and park will drive to South Bellevue and park. Of course that assumes there is enough room to park there. Eastgate will be overflow parking for South Bellevue just like Ash Way is overflow parking for Lynnwood. It still should be pretty empty.

5. I feel like King County Metro should order ADL Enviro500’s also. Since it would look weird with the regular livery, they should use the battery electric livery. I can see them being used on the ST operated routes, and also their I-5 routes. I would love that.

6. Pierce Transit will be free next Wedneday, February 4th, for Transit Equity Day. Added update to article.

   1. Cool, but I can’t go all the way to Pierce County since I have to go to school in Lynnwood.

   2. Pierce Transit has had several free days in the past year. It’s going strong on equity due to the lower-income demographics in Pierce County. I won’t go down for it because with my monthly pass it wouldn’t make a difference, and I’d rather go to Pierce when I’m motivated to rather than whenever it declares a free day. I posted the link mainly for people who live in Pierce County or know people who do, who would want to ride it on a free day.

   3. Pierce Transit could go a bit further on transit equity every day if it were to honor the Subsidized Annual Pass Program that gives a year of free rides to those who qualify for certain very-low-income programs. They have been in the ORCA LIFT program for just a couple years.

      The whole free-bus fad means having to find new revenue sources to replace successful programs like ORCA Business Passport. Otherwise, it becomes a transit austerity situation, which is where Pierce Transit already is.

      If those new funding sources become available, there is a debate to be had on whether to spend it on more service or more capital improvements for faster transit, or getting the fare box completely out of the way of buses moving. Getting a handle on net fare revenue (after subtracting out all costs of fare collection, including the value of riders’ time) would be essential to having that fully-informed debate.

7. Any suggestions on the best way to catch one of the battery buses for people coming from central/north Seattle? I have no idea how many buses those routes typically have, so I don’t know the likelihood of finding one. (Will all 89 by out at once or will they slowly be phased in?)

   1. The new buses will be phased in over the next few months. Metro only has a handful of them right now, but will be adding more to service as it receives them from Gillig.

      One option to finding out when/where they are running is on Pantograph. Once the buses enter service, they will show on the page below as the 1000 series (eg: 1006). From there, you can view an individual bus’s block schedule to see the trips it will operate later in the day. https://www.pantographapp.com/pugetsound/vehicles

      1. If I’m not mistaken, you can only see the block schedules only if the bus started the first route in the block. Would be nice if we could see a little more ahead, as well as if the bus was logged on in advance so we know it’s not a ghost bus that Metro failed to warn in advance about.

   2. If you’re ever in Portland, the battery Gilligs show up regularly on the 71. You can use PDXbus to see the type of bus by selecting the arrival and scrolling down to the vehicle information.

8. Seriously, what’s wrong with them? Our South King County hating Executive and Council would never approve this for my region if they were confident in their quality. Either there is something really wrong with these buses or, they are not sure about them and are using South King County as testing grounds and the residents, like myself, are guinea pigs.

   1. Really? We also get this in South Snohomish County. I one time caught a new battery electric bus on the 114 to Aurora Village at 6:24 am. What was I doing so early? I was just going to go to my friend’s house in Kirkland. I did this since I enter school at 8 in the morning.

   2. My understanding is King County Metro’s electric buses need to originate from South Base since that is where the chargers are. Metro doesn’t have much capability elsewhere. This site was set aside originally for a big data farm years ago and SCL put in a major line to serve big loads. Fortuitous those big loads never appeared and Metro got the land instead. That hasn’t happened elsewhere yet but will need to.

      As for the pessimism… be glad that someone gets to be first and you drew the lucky ticket! I would love it if they electrified the 40 or 28 buses first so just thank your lucky stars and drop the woe is me… at least for a bit.

      I am most excited about the larger battery sizes for the “trackless trolleys” and the ability to charge while underway from the catenary. The benefits of charging while on route are immense!!!

   3. Everett is trying to sell its 9 Proterra (now bankrupt) electric buses, which turned out to be problematic. The south side is getting the good Gillig electric buses.

      1. Really? They should be consolidating with Community Transit and not selling their Proterra buses.

9. Would love to see a total cost of ownership on these pet projects. The hybrid ferries are already causing issues and with increasing budget pressures, the taxpayers should decide if our leaders are yet again taxing us to death chasing these ridiculous goals. Europe already backed away from bans on IC engines after the math just doesn’t work. Transit agencies ridiculous zero carbon goals see to be the next in the series of dominoes to fall.

   1. It’s not just a pet project. There is real value in having a bus that is quiet and doesn’t stink. Local pollution at busy bus stops is a real issue when you’re waiting for a bus everyday and have a bunch of other buses arrive before your bus.

      Similarly, with the ferry, the sun deck, today, stinks of diesel exhaust, so I don’t go out there, even though it has a nice view. If the ferry were electric, I would. The Vashon Island water taxi decided to put the exhaust vent right next to the boarding gate, so every passenger getting on or off the boat is forced to breathe the fumes.

      The question, of course, is at what cost. If it can be done at similar cost per service hour, it’s worth it. If it requires every route to have twice as many buses to avoid service downtime while the buses charge, then it’s probably not worth it.

      There is another aspect too, which is that battery buses are far more expensive in the US vs. the rest of the world, due to a combination of tariffs and a domestic market for buses in general too small to produce good economies of scale. We could save a lot of money by importing Chinese battery buses instead…if our national government would let us without prohibitive tariffs.

   2. The only effort I am aware of Europe abandoning is the removal of service of some of the hydrogen fuel cell stuff. This is not surprising, as it’s only advantageous if you have a huge surplus of electricity. The overall energy balance is about 30%, while battery storage is pushing 80%.

   3. King County also backed away from replacing the entire bus fleet with battery buses now, which had been its policy since the mid 2010s. It did it for the same reasons you cite: uncertainty that the buses would be reliable enough or could be charged often enough for all the current demand. But it built a base annex and is piloting them on a handful of routes as a starting point.

      I don’t recall taxes going up for the electric conversion. King County just redirected a chunk of Metro’s existing annual resources to it. So what it was blocking was expanded bus service. And the state may have required the conversion and gave the county a grant for it, but that is relaxed now too.

      I’ve always been against converting the entire fleet now. It’s more important to get more frequency and coverage on the road, because getting car drivers to switch to transit reduces carbon emissions more than what kind of bus it is. Twelve passengers not using SOVs basically covers a bus’s fuel usage, and any more passengers just adds to the bus’s environmental efficiency. We can convert diesel buses gradually as they reach their end of life. There’s no reason to throw away perfectly good buses are just a few years into their life cycle.

      1. That’s still lost resources to electrification.

         Instead we would be adding more red paint, TSP, queue jumps, and Link automation for both Sound Transit and the local Metro agencies.

      2. I support electrification, gradually as you mentioned, but it has to be done smartly.

         It’s an experimental technology still. We shouldn’t be using any electric buses under the assumption it’s permanent and we most certainly should not be investing too much funds into it yet.

      3. Yes, we should do all those too. Prioritize addressing the low-hanging fruit, while also adding trolley routes.

10. I believe both Austin and Edmonton had serious issues with their BEB rolling stock but I don’t know what models. I guess I’d rather see a more concerted effort to leverage existing trolley buses and infrastructure that are already zero emission. Trolley bus sevice improvements are planned to be very slow.

    1. Whoever is the first to adopt new technology is likely to run into problems, but if we want the technology to advance, somebody has to do it. The solution is for the government to compensate agencies willing to pay the early adopter penalty so that costs can go down and the technology can advance (e.g. using climate funds), not to just give up and refuse to innovate altogether.

       In any case, we should be improving the trolley network also. Electrifying route 48 with trolley buses should not take as long as building an entire Link extension – most of the wire is even already there. But, the vast majority of KC Metro routes have no existing trolley wire, so I’m not sure how scalable that is for the network As a whole.

11. I don’t think king county should put so much money into the battery electric busses yet. The previous auditor report outlined lots of issues and how many buses will either have cut frequencies or king county will need to buy and run extra buses just to maintain the same frequency.

    it will cost billions just to have effectively less frequency

    * Metro Transit’s technical consultant reported that 60 layover charging stations would be necessary to provide the 2023 level of service.
    * Battery-electric buses also have lower passenger capacity than diesel hybrids
    * Metro Transit has experienced reliability problems with its New Flyer
    battery-electric test buses

    https://kingcounty.gov/en/independents/governance-and-leadership/government-oversight/auditors-office/reports-papers/reports/2024/zero-emissions

    etc… this project to force battery buses ahead of american bus makers can provide will severely cripple king county buses

12. I’ll be curious how they will handle hills when fully loaded with passengers. Electric buses can deliver the torque but they weigh more too. Plus I wonder how the heavier buses will affect street asphalt.

    1. Based on my experience with electric cars, I would expect battery battery buses to accelerate up hills better than diesel buses can. They will also recharge the batteries on the downhills with regen.

       What I’m more concerned about is the energy requirements for keeping the passengers heated on the coldest days, quality of support when something breaks, and reliability of the charging equipment.

    2. A nitpick: in Seattle proper, most arterials and streets that carry busses are not asphalt, they are concrete, or have a concrete portion for the bus. Concrete roadway has a much longer lifetime but is more costly to construct. I do not know if the county or other municipalities have adopted this practice. Anecdotally, it doesn’t seem that common in the US; I think it’s one of the things SDOT does well.

       1. I don’t think that’s true. Downtown maybe, but not most bus routes outside of downtown.

       2. I see June’s point though. It is pretty common for SDOT to “harden” a street so that it can handle buses (or more buses). There are exceptions but a lot of the streets are already concrete for that reason.

       3. It’s true that many Seattle streets have a concrete base. There are other places where just the bus stops are concrete.

          It’s also true that battery electric buses are typically heavier.

          There are still some streets that are asphalt that do warp when the temperature rises and buses run on them. And King County runs buses on streets outside of Seattle that are not concrete.

          I’m just calling out a possible side effect to pay attention to.

       4. Delta, I meant that major arterials that also carry busses are most likely to be concrete. Sorry—I now see that my comment can be read as saying that any bus route will have this treatment.

          NE 85th St, 23rd Ave (E), NE 45th St, and 15th Ave NE below 50th are all good examples of this type of street outside downtown. The first two have concrete pavement only in areas where busses drive. Also note that in some cases it can be hard to tell a street has concrete pavement, because it has an asphalt top coat to improve ride quality. You can usually identify these by square-looking reflected cracks.

          Non-anecdotally: more than 90% of principal arterials are concrete, every major/principal transit street that is also a principal arterial is concrete, and every principal transit street I can find is concrete, but indeed this is a somewhat rare designation outside of downtown; there are far fewer of these than there are principal arterials. You can view street designations here.

13. I would like to see an analysis of the capital cost and ongoing operating cost of battery electric vehicles versus electric trolley buses. It’s not self-evident that having to carry around tons of batteries and needing to take a bus offline for charging, requiring more buses, is better than expanding the electric trolley grid. I think we got 30-40 years of service life out of the ETBs. How long will the batteries last before they need to be replaced?
    There is a certain amount of shiny new thing about spending all this money on battery buses versus the tried and true ETBs. Fixed route buses are particularly well-suited for ETBs.

    1. It seems that they are starting to take another look at trolleys as an alternative to battery buses: https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/10/13/metro-plans-trolleybus-investments-with-long-implementation-timelines/

    2. I would too. We have the consultant’s report that another commenter linked to. But, it’s just a summary, with no details. But, there is some basics that I tell, just from familiarity with fundamentals about transit and electric vehicles.

       In summary, there are essentially four ways to electrify a transit bus:

       Option 1: Find a bus with enough range to last the entire service day. Charge only overnight at the base.

       Option 2: Install bus chargers at the layover point, in addition to the base, allowing buses to partially recharge themselves between trips. This option itself has a sub-option, in that you can install charges at either both ends of the route or just one.

       Option 3: When a bus battery gets low, send the bus to the base for charging, while also sending out another bus with a fresh battery from the base to take over the service. With enough buses, you can get through the entire service day, with charging only at the base, even if each individual bus has sufficient range to cover only part of the day.

       Option 4: Overhead wire (e.g. trolley buses)

       Option 1 is easiest for buses that have limited hours of operation, particularly peak-only routes. But, may not be feasible for many all-day routes without a huge battery that cuts into passenger space. And, even if an agency is willing to sacrifice 1/4 of the passenger space for a bigger battery, the option might not exist, as battery size options are limited to what a tiny number of companies that make battery buses choose to actually offer.

       Option 2 allows a route to be operated with much smaller batteries compared to option 1. But, the charger itself is expensive; to be cost-effective, the charger usually needs to be located somewhere like a transit center, where one charger can serve multiple routes, but careful coordination is required to make sure that buses don’t have to wait for other buses to be able to charge, which can have ripple effects on scheduling (e.g. the feasibility of timed transfers). But, option 2 also has several hidden costs. Namely, if the bus needs to charge, it must have a longer layover time to ensure that, even if a bus gets delayed and arrives late, it still has time to charge to begin the next trip on time. This longer layover time requires either more buses and more driver-hours, or a cut in service frequency. On top of this, the field charger also becomes a piece of critical infrastructure, where an entire route gets suddenly taken offline if the charger were to ever break. To mitigate this risk, the agency must maintain a fleet of diesel buses to serve as backup – but, if a single piece of equipment failure can impact several buses at once, now, this backup diesel fleet must be larger to maintain reliable service. This is expensive. Option 2, if not done very carefully, can also make for an inflexible service pattern, where any kind of minor route restructure that changes the layover point becomes cost-prohibitive. Over time, this can lead to a sub-optimal bus network. Option 2 also risks that the field chargers might become obsolete if battery improvements make option 1 feasible in the future for routes where it isn’t currently.

       Option 3 limits charging equipment to only at the base, without the range requirements of option 1, but it is extremely expensive to implement. For example, if each bus has the range to reliably get through half the service day, running the route with option 3 requires a minimum 2X the number of buses compared to diesel service. On top of this, running buses between the service area and the base and back mid-day requires a lot of extra deadheading, which means a lot of hours where you have to pay the bus driver with no passengers inside the bus. For this reason, I would guess option 3 to be the most costly, to the point where it would only get used if a zero-emission mandate requires it, and a route has no other feasible option.

       Option 4 avoid the problems of the huge batteries required by option 1, the extra fast chargers required by option 2, and the fleet and service costs of option 3, while also avoid the need for such a huge power draw overnight at the base. Option 4 also has the advantage of being proven technology, with a track record spanning at least 100 years, and is already used in Seattle by routes such as the 7, 43, 44, 70, etc. However, option 4 comes with one big Achilles heel, which is the capital cost of the trolley wire itself, which is proportional to the *distance* of the bus route, not the number of buses. For short routes that run all day, very frequently, a relatively small amount of trolley wire can go a long way, but for longer routes that run less often, option 4 ends up turning into a huge capital cost for a relatively small number of buses. Option 4 also has a tendency of “lock-in” current route patterns in a way that can make future service restructures very difficult or expensive. For example, option 4 makes it very difficult/expensive to provide a connection between upper Queen Anne and Fremont, or to reroute the 44 in the U-district down 45th St. to the U-Village.

       So, in summary, there is no fixed answer as to which option is best. It all depends on individual characteristics of a route, such as how often it runs, how long the route is, how crowded the route is, and the relative costs of various technologies and bus driver labor. To get more insight as to what exactly Metro intends to do, it would be nice to know which of the above 4 options are planned for each individual route. But, the summary report from the consultant doesn’t go into that level of detail. But, reading between the lines, I see a lot of option 2, probably some option 3, and a little bit of option 1.

       As to what should actually be done, I’d probably start by improving the trolley system, while, at the same time, piloting battery buses for buses that are needed during rush hour only, either for peak-only routes, or adding extra service to all-day routes for the peak period. Rush-hour-only buses are the easiest to do with batteries, since you get to charge them both at night and during the day, and the batteries only need enough range for a couple of trips. Option 2 would come later, and option 3, I would just flat-avoid altogether and say that any route that needs it to electrify should just run diesel buses until the technology improves enough to do it with option 1.

       Yes, I realize this is a very long-winded answer. But, it’s really hard to answer this in just a few sentences.

       1. There is a 5th option: swap batteries at the layover spot. It means more battery and equipment expense, but reduced the peak demand at the layover spot (this can be cheaper due to power company demand charges).

          Only company I know of that marketed this option in the USA was eBus in the early 2000s,but I don’t think anyone bought their robotic battery swap machine. I think BYD may be doing it in China, and they are definitely doing it with taxis in China.

       2. Option 4A — Use buses with smaller batteries that are charged up via wires. This is the best of both worlds. You don’t need to run wire everywhere — you just need enough of it to handle the periods when the bus is running off wire. This is common in Europe. Basically cities are going down two paths: Electric buses and trolley-battery hybrids. The cities that already have some wire (like Seattle) are largely investing in the latter. We should do the same.

          Here is a link to new development in the trolley world. (Scroll down and you can see a 24 meter bus!) Worth noting, it isn’t just cities with existing trolley wire that are investing in the technology. Norway bought a few (for the first time). Oh, and here is a little video of a bus going back on-wire. It is a pretty quick transition.

       3. This is the most acceptable form. Also taking advantage of regenerative braking (highly effective in city driving).

          – Overhead wire on bus dedicated freeway lanes or longer distance corridors… Kind of acts like a de facto train

          – Regenerative braking and battery usage on multi stop shorter corridors

          Best of both worlds. Even better use some of the tech China has been working on, having automated driving on virtual tracks. We wouldn’t even need rail or trains except for specific high speed as well as tunnel scenarios.

    3. Trolley buses would be a much better investment. Batteries are just less efficient than electric wire, and moving a large battery requires additional energy.

       In the mid 2010s Metro debated whether to renew the past-expired trolley fleet, expand it, or dieselize it all. It decided to renew it and to do a few minor expansions. The new trolleybuses have been running for several years now.

       The push for battery-bus conversion came after this. As said above, King County was going all-out on it but has since pulled back. It’s continuing slowly with the minor expansions identified years ago, but there’s opportunity to do a lot more.

       I wouldn’t expect all non-freeway routes in Seattle to get converted to trolleybuses, but there’s certainly room for a few more entire routes. If we can build light rail lines and RapidRide corridors, we can build trolleybus corridors.

       Metro also needs to start using the off-wire capacity it paid for. In the 2000s that wasn’t possible, but now buses can serve quarter-mile or mile gaps and extensions, so why not do so? Metro says it’s studying it, but it has been studying it for a decade, so it’s like cold fusion: it’s always in the future. Make the future now! We can’t do it with cold fusion, but we already have the buses and batteries to do it on trolleybus routes.

14. One reason I love the First Hill Streetcar is that it is electric. I just wish it had a larger fleet, so it could run more frequently. Yes, I know there are emissions from building any livery.

    1. With the Washington DC streetcar closing, they could get the cars from there. They’d have to add more battery capacity, but shouldn’t be impossible.

    2. One reason I love the First Hill Streetcar is that it is electric

       A lot of the buses on First Hill are as well. There is a lot of wire up there.

       1. The 60 is not electric.

       2. No one said it was. But the 2, 3, 4 and 43 are.

    3. FHSC has 7 Inekon 121 streetcars in its fleet. It should be able to offer 10-minute headways at peak times with 6 cars in operation. Five cars are needed to offer 12-minute headways. Seattle is the only operator of the Inekon 121 in the world that I know of, so expansion of the system or improving headways would require a new supplier.

       I’m not sure what is available in hybrid streetcars from other builders that would be available for Seattle.

       1. SDOT should truncate the streetcar at 5th Avenue south; it could achieve better reliability and shorter headway and waits.

       2. Why not just get rid of the streetcar entirely?

       3. Why not just get rid of the streetcar entirely?

          This would make sense if you were just focused on transit. But the streetcar has tourist value. It is an attraction by itself even if a bus could do a better job of moving people from one place to another (in this case).

          To be clear, streetcars have their value. There are places where they are a superior form of public transportation. This is why Paris (which already had an outstanding bus system) replaced some of their busiest routes with trams. This reduced crowding which means they could run the vehicles less often. They then shifted service elsewhere. That doesn’t apply in our case (people want to run the trams more often).

       4. The FHSC is a case study in so many basic bad choices that it’s hard to “fix” things by doing just one “repair”.

          I do think it’s important to point out its fundamental mistake, which is that it’s a very slow “overlaid” service that doesn’t replace any existing bus route nor offers a faster way than nearby bus routes do to get to most of the destinations on the route.

          The unique vehicle specs further hinder its ability to be improved with more frequent service or route extensions and getting more vehicles. Trying to throw more low-capacity bespoke rail vehicles at it wouldn’t seem to improve productivity. Even modest track extensions or deletions wouldn’t accomplish much.

          While major, the connector on First Ave seems to just be more of this creating more slow transit service to run without actually making the streetcar more productive (like more riders per service hour).

          It’s often touted that rail transit is good for encouraging TOD or for providing an opportunity for street beautification or underground utility modernization opportunities. But these things can be achieved without a slow small streetcar. For a transit investment to be sustainable in the long run (say over 20-30 years) it has to offer service that achieves a basic level of reasonable productivity as well as travel time improvement. Otherwise, it becomes a token “loss leader” that one day can’t survive a transit operating budget crisis when its appeal inevitably fades.

       5. The FHSC provides unique all-day service along a busy stretch of Broadway, including a major hospital and the second-largest university in the City. The problem is not that (non-existing) buses serve them faster. It is that walking is faster than any of the transit options.

          Overlaying two routes to improve headway has never worked for long. Metro quickly forgets that two lines are working together to cut headway in half.

          Removing the streetcar? I don’t even know where to begin with that incredible waste.

          Removing bus service from the front door of the primary (non-UW-controlled) public hospital in the City is not gonna happen.

          I agree with Jack that turning back the streetcar at 5th would do wonders for its reliability, and hopefully enable more frequency in a much shorter period of time.

       6. The problem with the streetcar is it terminates at Denny and turns at Yesler/Jackson. That makes it unusable for trips going further north or south or both, so it’s not interchangeable with the 9, 49, or 60 for those trips. It only works for trips within that segment, or that go to Jackson Street. That’s an artificial subset of trips, and you further can’t interchange services because the streetcar stops are at difference places than the bus stops, so you have to decide beforehand which stop to go to.

          If the streetcar were extended north to Roy or Aloha, it could be used for more trips, and fewer people would have to transfer or walk at the end.

          I still see a Broadway-Jackson route as useful, but a fully-gridded system would have an ultra-frequent north-south route through all of Broadway and beyond, transferring to an ultra-frequent Jackson route. We have the ultra-frequent Jackson routes, but Broadway is a spaghetti of less-than-ultra-frequent routes.

          And I haven’t even gotten to the streetcar’s time-consuming button-hole to 14th, or how that creates three turns instead of one, or how the train sits for a minute waiting for permission to turn.

       7. Overlaying two routes to improve headway has never worked for long. Metro quickly forgets that two lines are working together to cut headway in half.

          So you are saying that if the 60 stayed on Broadway they would cut headways of both the streetcar and the 60 in half? That is absurd. The 60 does more than just serve First Hill. It is one of the more productive routes in our system. They could reduce frequency on the streetcar, but as you pointed out, it has a unique route (connecting CID with Broadway). Of course riders could transfer but there is value in making that a one-seat ride (as slow as it is). No, if anything I could see Broadway becoming a spine. Sure, it is more efficient to only have a bus and a streetcar running there. But maybe the 49 could be extended to Jackson and take the same pathway to the CID. You would have the 60 (running five times an hour) the streetcar (ditto) and the 49. The 49 should run every fifteen minutes which would mean fourteen buses an hour — that’s a spine in my book.

          Removing the streetcar? I don’t even know where to begin with that incredible waste.

          That is a sunk-cost fallacy. I get it. We spent a bunch of money on the streetcar. But I think it is pretty obvious that from a transit standpoint it is a big failure. (I don’t want to get into the tourist or development benefits of the project — that is a different matter.) From a transit perspective it was a mistake. The routing is bad. The mode is inflexible and more costly.

          Just imagine if we replaced the route right now with a bus. Have it follow the exact same pathway — including the silly detour to 14th. Already this would be an improvement. It would be a bit faster. Not only that, but it would be much easier to make it considerably faster. You would have the same movement to add BAT lanes to Jackson as you have Denny. So now the bus is following the exact same route but it is considerably faster and more reliable. Yet the cost of red paint is probably less than the money they gained by selling off the land used to store the trains.

          But wait, there is more. The northernmost stop of the streetcar is Broadway & Howell. So yeah, it serves Broadway but it stops way short of serving all of it. A quick glance at the map shows there is plenty of density to the north. A bus could easily be extended to Republican (where the 60 turns around) or better yet, Aloha (the northernmost point of the 9). Now you’ve increased the functionality of the route for very little money. It is quite likely you’ve increased productivity. In other words, more riders per service hour. It is just a much better route and we haven’t even dealt with the 14th Avenue detour. Do that and the people who are making the turn (what is essentially the only unique trip combination provided by the streetcar) would benefit greatly. They get to their destination much sooner. Those two changes could probably be done together at no extra cost (but increased ridership).

          That is all before you start thinking about a restructure (which the city is in dire need of). Look, I get it. Some people like the routes just the way they are. Of course they do. Every textbook routing failure is bound to have fans. Run two buses parallel to each other a block away and you are bound to have some people loving it. They would rather wait fifteen minutes than walk an extra block. This is how you end up with so many bad routing decisions. Throw in inertia and you have an agency afraid to change things. The end result is quite predictable: crap. Crappy routes lead to crappy frequency which leads to crappy ridership. The streetcar is by no means the crappiest aspect of our system (or even the crappiest part of the routing on Capitol Hill) but it still crap compared to what we could build (while also saving money).

       8. “Overlaying two routes to improve headway has never worked for long. Metro quickly forgets that two lines are working together to cut headway in half.”

          I think that happens only in recession cuts, or where Metro doesn’t see the overlapping headway as a primary purpose of the route. For instance, the 10 and 12 intentionally alternate to double the 20-minute frequency. The 3, 11, and 49 go around them and give supplemental service, but they’re not evenly timed and Metro doesn’t promise to keep all of them there. The 31 and 32 intentionally alternate for 15-minute service on N 40th Street and in U-Village: that has not been broken for a couple decades daytime, even if one of them may have a shorter evening span in a recession. The 131 and 132 intentionally overlap on 4th Ave S to provide 15-minute service for all the workers and visitors in the SODO. That’s a long-term intention: to give 4th 15-minute or better service. It remained during the 2014 cuts and during the pandemic.

    4. Never mind the train cars. It would be a waste of service to run the streetcar more often. Just run a second bus along Broadway. The obvious choice would be the 60. This could be done with no extra service. Just move the 60 to Broadway and time it to run opposite the streetcar.

       The vast majority of the streetcar riders would benefit just as much as if they doubled frequency on the streetcar. A lot of the riders are just trying to get from one end of Broadway to the other. Even if you are making the turn (i. e. Broadway to CID) you would benefit. There are plenty of buses on Jackson and the bus would avoid the 14th Avenue detour of the streetcar. Thus even with the transfer you are likely to make the trip in about the same amount of time. This means that you will have effectively doubled frequency of the streetcar pathway* at no additional cost.

       *The only exceptions would be the stop at Occidental and the one at 14th. These are relatively short walks from existing bus stops. It would be crazy to spend all that money just so that riders would get better headways to those stops (and those stops alone). The existing streetcar frequency is fine for those stops.

15. The 2 is currently not electric either.im pilot is there is a plan to ever return thev2 and 13 to trolley service…

    1. The overhead for Route 2 was disrupted by the G Line project. The G Line opened in fall 2024. At last look, the overhead for Route 2 as not in place. The disagreement that SDOT and Metro had about the inbound pathway between East Madison Street and East Union across 12th Avenue East seems to have been solved; SDOT may have added a signal for the north-south ped and bike traffic. Please recall that was the site of the Councilmember Rinck press conference on better bus pathways.

       Metro also wants a bit of new overhead for Route 12 to go between East Madison Street and East Pine Street.

16. The homeless encampment in Sturgus Park, located at the south end of the Rizal Bridge on 12th Ave. S. is being cleared today. Interestingly, I didn’t see any Seattle Police presence at the scene. But there were about 30 people wearing orange vest picking up trash and moving debris.

    I wonder if there is a change of direction in City Hall regarding homeless encampments. The previous admin certainly regarded clearing homeless camps as a law enforcement operation. What I saw today looked more like a social services operation than law enforcement. We can watch and see how clearing the encampment impacts the behavior at the 12th and Jackson bus stops.

17. The New Flyer buses were suddenly taken out of service.

    Why do we need to urgently experiment with these buses and spend billions for it? Really the manufacturers should be paying US for testing them.

    Putting money into transit reliability and speed will increase transit ridership and reduce single occupancy vehicle ridership, helping climate change far more than electrifying a fleet that no one will ride. I wonder how destructive making those batteries used in the buses are for the environment.

    1. Ah yes they were recalled..who would even be surprised? Someone on me told me it was because they were preparing for the new base opening 😂

18. Which are the first routes you’d convert to trolleybus? I don’t mean filling in small gaps like the 48, but where the entire route would need new wire.

    My first thought is RapidRide E, because it’s such high ridership and has so many on-offs along the entire route. What I’m not sure about is if trolleybuses can operate on a 40 mph expressway without falling off the wire.

    The 8 is another candidate, because again it’s so high-ridership.

    1. What’s the top speed of a trolley bus? If the E were a trolley, would it have to plod down Aurora in Queen Anne at 30 mph, while the cars around it are doing 50?

       1. It can’t do 50 when the speed limit is 40. That would have on-duty government employees breaking the law, and taxpayers would be paying the fines.

       2. Obviously if trolley buses can’t go faster than 30 mph without falling off the wire, they would be incompatible with Aurora between Denny and 73rd, but I assume they can go 35 and maybe 40.

       3. I guess there are some modern, high performance models that can go 50 mph. If I was dealing with Aurora though, I would treat the middle section like a freeway. In other words, I would run wire on both ends (north of Green Lake and south of Lake Union. There should be plenty of battery power to run between there. If and when the “reimagine Aurora” and run buses in the middle of the street I would add wire. The bus could do 35 mph (pretty typical) over the bridge and on the few sections that are slower and it wouldn’t matter that much (since so much of it would be slower — like 15th West).

    2. I don’t think the construction delays of adding trolley wire and nothing else really justifies the benefit of slightly lower noise and pollution, especially in the context of thousands of other cars using the road. What I would like to see is every new RapidRide project from here on add trolley wire while construction is already happening. That should be much less disruptive and makes the cost worth it.

       1. Yeah it seems like a of “complete streets” thing, at least if you believe that trolleybusses with big batteries are the best way to electrify most of the fleet (I do.)

          I’m upset that they removed all of the trolley wire on Madison as part of the G Line project. Sure, they couldn’t source 5-door trolleybusses for the current fleet, but the life of the catenary is certainly longer than the life of those busses, and it makes it harder to electrify the 12. It seems so shortsighted.

          [Also, from a pure foamer perspective, the intersection of Broadway and Madison was the only catenary “grand union” in the city and potentially the entire country excluding San Francisco, and now it’s gone.]

       2. I’m upset that they removed all of the trolley wire on Madison as part of the G Line project.

          Yeah, that is crazy. In their defense, maybe it is easy to put it back in. I would imagine a lot of the expense is the supporting infrastructure (the utility poles). Obviously a lot of these are spread out in the city anyway but not always where you need them (I’m guessing).

       3. Perhaps it would be cheap enough to put back in. From historical Street View comparisons, it seems like they really didn’t remove any of the utility poles, which makes it even stranger to me that they removed the catenary! I guess I could look through the project design documents to figure out the reasoning.

       4. “slightly lower noise and pollution, especially in the context of thousands of other cars using the road”

          It may be slight in the context of overall city-wide CO2 emissions, but there are streets like 15th Ave. in the U-district or 3rd Ave. downtown that have very heavy bus traffic, but relatively light car traffic. In these cases, the emissions you breathe while you wait for a bus is, in fact, dominated by the diesel exhaust from all the other buses that come by before your bus, and electrification of buses would make a big difference there.

    3. Yeah, the 8 sounds like a really good candidate. It has very high ridership per mile (which is the big metric as far as new wire is concerned). Even if you branched the 8 (and sent it to Madison Park) it isn’t that far. Then there is the G Line, of course. That was the plan — they just had trouble getting the buses. The D and E Line have almost identical ridership per service hour. I’m guessing the D Line is a bit slower which means it would have higher ridership per mile.

       To be honest I’m not sure I would prioritize either one. Not yet. Maybe the 8 (it is such a productive route) but otherwise it might make sense to focus on small changes like the one you mentioned (filling in the gaps). One of the big issues with wire is that it complicates a restructure. There are very few buses that I feel are about as good as they can get. The E is one — especially if it runs in the middle of the street on Aurora. I think Seattle is long overdue for a major restructure (of the type Miami, Houston and several other cities have done). As long as we have really poorly constructed routes it is hard to see investing a lot of money in wire.

       I would invest in on-off points though. This gives you a lot of flexibility.

       There are also restructure that I would make that would take advantage of some existing wire. For example I would rearrange things on First and Beacon Hill. I would send the 60 to downtown (replacing the 36). Then I would extend the 49 to Beacon Hill (replacing the existing 60) and have it go straight on Broadway. There is wire the whole way although a lot of it is hardly ever used (the 43 has trolley wire along Broadway).

       1. The more I think about, the key metric is the number of buses per mile. But that can change and ridership-per-mile is a pretty good proxy. A bus like the 8 is not particularly frequent, but it should be. It should have lots of buses per mile.

          I also think it makes sense to focus on corridors. Of course you need to complete things so that more buses can be converted so it makes sense to do a bunch of routes in one part of town. For example, let’s say we add a lot of wire for the buses that serve the UW. Maybe, 45, 65, 67, 72, 75 and the (future) 77. Then we decide to send the 75 to Bitter Lake. The 75 would still run on wire. Meanwhile, the 61 could run under wire on both ends (as long as we are OK with it running without wire between Lake City Way and Roosevelt Way). I think we should add wire to just about the corridors within the city. The few exceptions are places that are relatively remote (like western Magnolia, Seward Park, etc.).

19. I prefer trolley buses, but for the suburbs BEBs are cheaper to implement. Solaris produces much bigger BEBs, those would be nice for the E. I rode them in Europe, can’t wait to see them in the Puget Sound: https://www.solarisbus.com/en/press/solaris-signs-first-contract-for-electric-bus-deliveries-to-the-united-states-of-america-2263

20. Germany (both West and East) had trolley buses in 50 cities as power from coal was cheap. Then diesel got cheaper, regular buses were cheaper, and some people complained about wires. Only a few are left in the Germany, but there are still plenty left around the world who are happy to expand their trolley services as they don’t need to worry about re-charging. Batteries and automatic trolley wire dis-/connection has allowed Zurich and Innsbruck to charge on existing wires, get off the wire, and serve the suburbs on battery even on steep mountain roads which diesel buses couldn’t handle well. Bi-articulated trolley buses have expanded capacity. Budapest is expanding their network. Mexico City has over 500 trolley buses, some on separate elevated roadway, people went to the streets when the government tried to shut down the network. Beijing has over 10,000 which they built to improve air quality before the Olympics. Most of these networks are expanding while only few networks are left in the States.
    Here is an great overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjUrk0t3xAc (sorry, German)

    1. It defaulted to English for me. The audio settings have German or English (auto-dubbed).

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