In 2015, Mayor Ed Murray’s administration unveiled what would become the 2015 Levy to Move Seattle. It included a goal to “Provide 72% of Seattle residents with 10-minute all-day transit service within a 10-minute walk of their homes” by 2025 dubbed the “Very Frequent Transit Network”. Using Seattle Transportation Benefit District (STBD) funding, access to that network increased significantly. In 2015, only 25% of Seattle was within walking distance of the Very Frequent Transit Network. By 2020, 70% of the city was.
In 2015, only the 3/4, 7, 36, E, and Link were considered “Very Frequent”, with service every 10 minutes or better during peak hours. Between 2015 and 2020, routes 40, 41, 44, 48, 65, 67, 70, and 120 (now RapidRide H) became part of the every-10-minute network.
Service cuts in 2020 significantly reduced access to very frequent transit. In 2022 (the last year SDOT published data), 52% of Seattle was within a 10-minute walk to very frequent transit.
The Very Frequent Transit Network Today
The original goal was for 72% of Seattle to have access to the Very Frequent Transit Network by 2025. Now it’s 2026. Did we reach the goal?
Using a custom script that parses transit feeds and census data, I recreated SDOT’s maps with current bus service. You can interact with the maps here. These maps show only 53% of Seattle residents are currently within walking distance of a route with service every 10 minutes or better. When Judkins Park station, Pinehurst station, and the J Line open, still only 55% of the city will have the luxury of very frequent transit service, far from the two-thirds of the city served in the late 2010s.
Seattle’s Better Goal: The (new) Frequent Transit Network
But with the 2020 pandemic inspiring major shifts in when and how people use transit, SDOT has reconsidered bringing “very frequent” peak-oriented service to most of the city. Instead, in a somewhat confusing but certainly warranted pivot, SDOT’s new north star is the far more ambitious Frequent Transit Network (FTN). The new FTN is laid out in the 2024 Seattle Transportation Plan with an aim to bring 15-minute-or-better service from 6am to 9pm, 7 days a week, to nearly every bus route in the city. Most routes still have a midday frequency target of every 10 minutes, but the FTN captures that some bus frequencies should be better than 10 minutes and that frequency is still important on nights and weekends.
SDOT reports that as of 2024, the FTN is 81% complete as measured by the percentage of trips funded. Access to the a “very frequent” network of service every 10 minutes is still a goal in the Seattle Transportation Plan (STP) and will still be reported on, but the FTN will guide SDOT’s service investments through the Seattle Transit Measure.
I see my home-route is on the list: route 28. That can barely garner 5 riders midday. Even though it’s the bus I use the most, I don’t believe it should have 15 minute frequency and the service hours could be better spent in nearby routes, such as the D, the 5 or 40…or simply elsewhere in the city.
Are there routes on the list that *shouldn’t* get 15 minute service? The 79 comes to mind
How much of Route 28ās low ridership is due to the routeās frequency (15 min peak, 30 min off peak)? It has decent peak direction ridership (20-30 pax per trip) but the off peak ridership is higher on inbound trips than on outbound trips. Iād guess this is because people can plan when to leave their home such that they donāt have to wait long for a Route 28 bus. Coming home, however, they may prefer a Route 5 or D Line bus to avoid waiting a long time for Route 28.
I donāt know if Route 28 deserves more service hours than another route, but increasing its frequency will increase its ridership.
Route 28 ridership plot
Yea my Ballard friends take the 28 when itās coming or Link/44 or D when itās not. If it was more frequent, theyād definitely ride more
I think it also has something to do with 28X not fast enough on Aurora Ave on the edge of Queen Anne. I believe the fastest route between NW Seattle and Downtown is something like 17X although its average speed can be hammered by Ballard Bridge open.
As for 28X, in the morning on southbound direction for example, all-day bus lane and skipping all stops along Aurora Ave probably didn’t help enough because eventually it will have fight the same traffic 5 is fighting at off-ramp to 7th Ave N. It would be ideal if there is an HOV or bus only off-ramp on the right-hand side using the empty lot at SW corner of Mercer & 6th Ave N. With E running so frequent (12ish E Line trips during AM peak hour), the bus volume can even justify a bus only ramp. If this works well potentially more NW Seattle express can go this way.
There is just no perfect route to bypass traffic between NW Seattle and Downtown. You either have to fight draw bridge or freeway volume traffic.
HZ, agree strongly on the bus-only ramp just south of Mercer. I wrote about imthe same idea a few times about five years ago, but everyone else ignored it or thought the center ramps would work better.
To make it really work, though, the SB route would have to stay on Sixth North all the way to and past Denny. Otherwise the bus would end up in the same traffic jam on Seventh.
A bus lane would probably be required in the half-block north of Denny and the “Bus Only” restriction on the off-ramp would have to be controlled with an exit gate that only a bus or emergency vehicle triggered.
Thank you for the stats, Michael.
Yes, one can make the case for low-frequency = lower ridership. However, it has been my experience when there’s low frequency but the bus is still crowded, then higher frequency is definitely needed. In the case of the 28, if it were crowded off-peak, then I’d argue for more service.
But it isn’t. The nature of the 28 is very downtown-oriented. Looking at the graph, you can see the majority of southbound riders are getting off in SLU (thomas st) and downtown. These areas are extremely peak-oriented and thus demand for them, especially SLU, is weak midday. If the 28 served other neighborhoods or points of interest, like the 5 and 40 do, then there would be more midday demand. But the 28 primarily goes through one lower density area (8th Ave NW) and skirts the outter edge of Fremont. In comparison to other routes, actually, it’s kind of a bizarre route for 2026. There are hardly any “express” routes in the city anymore and given the short distance it travels (only to 100th), it’s a very niche route.
I’m in full support of it being reduced to a peak-hour route only.
Looking at the FTN map, the 28 serves as part of a N-S grid spaced every 0.5 mi. Starting from the āBallardā text to Green Lake: 40-D-28-5-E
It seems like the city should further upzone the 28 corridor, given that its parallel neighbors are productive routes
They’d definitely run into NIMBYs. However, there has been a recent spat of 3-level multi family housing going up along 8th Ave NW. I’m not sure if this was a change in zoning recently. The new housing started going up 2-3 years ago.
I take 28 or 40 up to Ballard from downtown. I prefer 28 as it skips SLU and the Fremont Bridge mess.
What percent of population is served by the new Frequent Transit Network?
“only 53% of Seattle residents are currently within walking distance of a route with service every 10 minutes or better”
Don’t have a metric for access to the new FTN tho
Oh that page that says 81% complete also says:
ā As of 2025, 52% of Seattle households are in the 10-minute network. SDOT continues to track progress toward a version of the 10-minute network metric through the Seattle Transportation Plan (STP) Performance Metrics (link to STP website). Progress toward the metric will be reported every 2 years in the STP Performance Report, with the first report planned for release in 2026.ā
So it matches your measurement
Nevermind I was mixing up the FTN and 10-minute network definitions.
And what is the target for percentage of households within the 10 minute network once the FTN is 100% funded?
I’m not sure. I haven’t looked at that and SDOT doesn’t track it afaik. In the Seattle Transportation Plan, the “Target or Desired Trend” is “77%” for “Percent of households within a 10-minute walk of frequent transit”
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/STP/Appendix_C.pdf
Last year when someone mentioned FTN, it caught my interest big time. So, I tagged the FTN category to a service level layer I’ve created over the years to look at thing from network service frequency perspective.
I did some rough math using the dataset and it looks like among all the Seattle FTN network segments with frequency target, we still have 181 out of 433 miles that is currently not meeting the target, which is about 41% of total network distance. This is just a different way to measure the progress, not necessary saying SDOT’s 81% trip-based measure is wrong. I can understand they did the trip-based calculation because that’s more relevant to STM budgeting need.
The next thing I look at is that in terms of closing frequency target, which route is the most important for frequency boost.
Just some amateurish “planning” work, here are the top routes which frequency boost can close FTN target most effectively.
– Route 50 serves 23 miles of 15-min FTN while it current runs every 20 minutes. A frequency bump can add 5.4% of FTN to meet frequency target.
– Route 40 serves 20 miles of 10-min FTN while it current runs every 10/15 minutes. A frequency bump can add 4.4% of FTN to meet frequency target.
– Route 31 serves 4 miles of 15-min FTN and 10 miles of 10-min network (along with 32) while 31/32 current run every 20/30 minute respectively. A coordinated 31/32 frequency bump can add 3.4% of FTN to meet frequency target.
– Route 131/132 serves a total of 13 miles of 10-15-min FTN while each route runs every 30 minute currently. A coordinated 131/132 frequency bump can add 3% of FTN to meet frequency target.
– Route 128 serves 12 miles of 15-min FTN while it current runs every 20 minutes.
– Route 372 serves 11 miles of 10-min FTN while it current runs every 15 minute. Proposed Route 72 can add 2.5% of FTN to meet frequency target.
– Route 48 serves 9 miles of 10-min FTN while it currently runs every 15 minutes. A frequency bump can add 2.1% of FTN to meet frequency target.
Above are all the single frequency bump that can increase network frequency target met by more than 2%. There are a few other routes that has at least 5-mile running under FTN goal. They are 28X (8 mi), 106 (8 mi), 8 (6 mi), and 2 (5-mile).
I could be wrong with some of the numbers though…
Why so many missed trips today? Over 3000 missed trips according to Pantograph. Or was there some sort of data issue?
I wish we had more frequent transit service on the Eastside, especially outside of Bellevue. I would ride the bus more often if that were the case.
“Levy to move Kirkland” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, would never pass š
For region historically that has adopted a more freeway-focus transportation investment approach, the only way to put levy through referendum is to propose transportation improvement has one whole package that includes road, transit as well as bike-ped. That’s how Charlotte and Nashville get their transit agenda through referendum.
Yeah mostly a transit desert in SE King County and NE King County. Practically unusable then people blame them for low ridership. Of course nobody will ride routes that are useless, infrequent, and slow… Suburban ridership used to do really well back when there was actually decent service pre-pandemic.
I’m lucky to live near a decent bus route, but the service is still subpar and inefficient aside from a peak only express route that is on the cusp of being deleted probably in the Stride realignment.