[Ed. This article featured a video that has since become unavailable. Here’s a video link in case it comes back. Commentators who saw the video, could you help summarize the content as you remember it in the comments?]

A bus restructure idea for rural Pacific County in the southwest corner of Washington State, home of the Long Beach penninsula. (The Transit Bandit) Thanks to commentator “big-b” for finding this video.

Would anyone like to do an article on another Washington county outside Pugetopolis? What is the current transit network like? How well does it serve residents and visitors? What service is missing? Would a revenue-neutral restructure help? Would a small expansion like one or a few more buses allow a large improvement to the network? This could evolve into a series about several counties if somebody or some people want to write it. We’ve had articles about Spokane, Ellensburg, the Tri-Cities, etc, when we’ve had somebody with ties to those counties or the agency announced a major change.

38 Replies to “Movie: Pacific County”

  1. It would be nice if Island Transit and Skagit Transit had better-timed connections with the 90X and Amtrak Cascades over in Mount Vernon. I’ve looked into using them before, but the excessively long waits in Mt. Vernon make it too impractical. One would think this would be something very easy to adjust.

    It would be very nice to be able to use Skagit Transit as a last-mile connection for events like the Tulip Festival. But, as things currently stand, the only usable way to do the trip without a car is to bring a bike, but Seattle->Mt. Vernon services have extremely limited bike capacity, relative to the number of people that attend the event.

    1. If Skagit Transit wants ridership, splice the two inter-county routes together, keep the stops in Skagit County, and watch ridership between Everett and Bellingham spike upward.

  2. Unfortunately the video says it’s been set to Private!

    I have a few thoughts on Island Transit as well as the I-5 trunk toward Bellingham; perhaps I can write them up sometime.

  3. Summary of the video’s content. This is incomplete and may contain inaccuracies because I remember only parts of it. Please add any details you can…

    Some background by me: Pacific County is in the southwest corner of the state between Aberdeen, Washington, and Astoria, Oregon. The largest city is Raymond (pop. 3,081) Long Beach, Ilwaco, and South Bend each range between 1,000 and 1,700 people. Tokeland as 150 people. Pacific Transit has 7 bus routes, identified by color and fare-free. There are no published network maps so you have to know the geography already; e.g., where “Raymond to South Bend” is. The first restructure was announced three days after it started, so passengers were waiting at bus stops that no longer had bus service.

    The video said Pacific Transit (PacT) went through two bus restructures that left passengers worse of than before and caused a 40% ridership decrease. So The Transit Bandit (an outside transit planner of some sort, with no ties to the county) decided as a hobby to write a better restructure.

    The problems they corrected included no transit between the northern and southern halves of the county, no transit to some populated areas that used to have it, no transit from some areas to any retail stores (again, they used to have it), no timed transfers, inconsistent frequency, and unusually short spans on some routes (some routes ended at 3pm before a 9-5 job finished, or didn’t run on weekends).

    TTB’s restructure implemented timed transfers, restored a transit connection between Aberdeen and Astoria and across the entire county, consolidated routes to a few straighter routes, made frequency more consistent, enabled people to get to retail shops again, and filled in Saturday and Sunday service and extended service into the evening. The tradeoff is frequency is lower in some corridors. It has always been low since this is a very rural area, so frequency ranges between 1-4 hours in most cases.

    1. Thanks for the summary!

      I might be misunderstanding you; Pacific Transit does currently have service between the north and south ends of the county – the route guide you linked includes one South Bend to Ilwaco route. It’s very skeletal, but their whole network is very skeletal.

      1. TTB said there was no way to get between the northern half and the southern half of the county on transit after the restructure. They may have just been referring to the first restructure, and the second restructure restored some kind of service. They may also be taking about a three-hour transfer wait between the routes, which makes a north-to-south trip infeasible.

      2. The first restructure eliminated everything between South Bend and Naselle.

        They brought it back in the second restructure.

    2. I didn’t see the video, but as someone who uses Pacific County Transit on a daily basis, the transit restructures done by the transit bandit have all left riders worse off than before the guy touched it.
      Right now, it takes longer to go 5 miles between South Bend and Raymond than it takes to get from Raymond to Aberdeen. There is supposedly another restructure to the schedule this month, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it actually happening.

      1. The Transit Bandit didn’t do the restructure. The video covered the problems instituted by the general manager, which caused a loss in ridership. He wanted to take a detailed look due to that huge ridership loss.

      2. Pacific Transit did two restructures, so that’s what you’re experiencing. The Transit Bandit wrote an unofficial restructure and sent it to Pacific Transit as a suggestion, but they have not adopted it.

  4. Since this is an open thread, I just read in the Urbanist that Metro is moving towards all-door boarding systemwide, not just on Rapid Ride buses. Orca readers will be available near the back door to allow people who entering there to pay the fare.

    I think this is worth its own STB article. It’s vastly overdue, but also begs the question of what exactly RapidRide is, when the most important elements of it can and should be easily applied to any route. I guess the answer is “a way to leverage federal money to pay for bus purchases”.

    1. There has been some discussion of it among the editors and maybe in the comments. To me, Metro has had readers at all doors for several months on almost all the routes I encounter, and I have been entering the back door and tapping there to avoid the bus leaving before I can run to the front door, which they sometimes do. Sometimes drivers open the back door for entrees; other times they don’t. So I think the primary change will be opening them all the time.

      Some others have said that several Metro buses still don’t have readers at the rear doors. They’re wondering if Metro will just open the back doors anyway and let people ride free, or will force people to enter the front door in spite of the announcement. It’s strange announce systemwide all-door boarding when some buses aren’t ready for it yet, so I don’t know why Metro is doing this. It seems to be to deal with World Cup crowds and give visitors a positive impression that Metro isn’t limited to 20th-century front-door-only boarding.

      Others have said ST Express buses don’t have rear-door readers as much. They also don’t have a middle door as much, which makes me go out the front rather than walking a long way to the back (which is especially hard when the bus is moving and there are no handholds in the articulation section), so I don’t see whether there are rear-door readers or not. And even though some ST Express routes are operated by Metro, they have different policies, so I don’t see Metro’s switch as affecting ST Express. ST Express stopped offering or accepting paper transfers years ago, while Metro still has them.

      There will be an article on the March service change. The article will be on Saturday; the service change the following Saturday. Somebody may write an article on the boarding change, but so far there isn’t one.

    2. > RapidRide

      i mean most prominently it’s add the bus/BAT lanes and also adding the transit signal priority

      1. The signal priority is a joke. The cities don’t allow Metro to use it.

      2. I haven’t heard about Seattle or Bellevue disallowing the activation of tsp for the kcm buses

    3. I think the biggest benefits to RapidRide are the guaranteed all-day headways and the political clout. All-day 15m service to 10 PM is very rare outside of RapidRide, and routes like the 160 are unlikely to be able to eminent domain or event paint BAT lanes without the branding.

      1. There are some non-RapidRide routes that do have both the frequency and bus lanes typically expected of RapidRide. The 7, 40, and 44 being 3 examples off the top of my head. Of course, these routes are all within Seattle.

      2. RapidRide status is the only strong guarantee that it will have minimum 15-minute headways until 10pm every day. I think the only time that has been violated is on the F during the covid recession.

        With other routes it’s arbitrarily on-and-off whenever there’s a recession or driver shortage or Metro or the Seattle Transit Measure decide to reallocate service hours. The 7, 40, and 44 have it now but there’s no guarantee it will remain long-term. The 5, 8, and 10 weren’t full-time frequent, then they were, then they weren’t again.

    4. RapidRide has off-board payment at its major stops. And now, you can tap your debit or credit card, or your smart phone, at any ORCA reader.

      If nothing else, RapidRide has provided proof-of-concept for off-board payment, all-door ingress and egress, on-board fare enforcement, three-door design, larger stop spacing, and headway monitoring by a control center.

      If rolling out Community-Transit-style webpage options like showing all stops, and real-time arrival, are too big for Metro to implement all at once, RapidRide is a great place to demo yet another proof-of-concept. And also more-frequent night owl service.

    5. > I guess the answer is “a way to leverage federal money to pay for bus purchases”.

      I’d say less to buy buses and more to fund street rebuilds and enable difficult utility upgrades.

    6. RapidRide has more frequent service, fewer stops, and more standing room.

      All the other benefits – signal priority, exclusive lanes, and offboard fare collection – are very inconsistently available.

      1. All the other benefits – signal priority, exclusive lanes, and offboard fare collection – are very inconsistently available.

        Almost every aspect of RapidRide is inconsistently available on other routes. Some buses are frequent. Some buses have similar stop spacing. RapidRide uses the same buses as many other routes. The only thing that is truly unique is the livery.

      1. There is no word for people entering, so I settled on entriees. Entries are items in a database, or I guess you could say acts of entering, but I wanted to focus on the people entering.

      2. Wouldn’t “entrants” work? An unusual use of the word (as it is generally used to describe people entering a contest or something similar) but I think it still works. And yes, I cheated and asked Google.

      3. “Entries” and “Exits”. How hard is that? “Boardings” and “Alightings” are the professional words for these activities. Then there is the bastardized “Deboardings”. Please don’t use that.

  5. Hey I watched this video yesterday or the day before! Why has it gone private? Did they catch some heat for calling out some people, their track records and the avalanche of poor decisions?

    I thought it was pretty wild how they rolled it out with 0 public input initially – to deliver a system that cost MORE and connected to LESS places. So many systematic failures in that restructure…

    1. I don’t know TTB and I can’t contact them without putting a comment in an unrelated video. I’m guessing it may be for libel reasons if PacT objected to something in the video, or a technical issue, or they didn’t expect it to get so widely linked. It doesn’t seem different from TTB’s other videos that I think we’ve featured before, except it’s being more opinionated about an agency.

  6. I find it rather self-defeating for the guy who has some good ideas for improving Pacific Transit to embargo the most important and widely read non-industry insider transit website in the the state and probably the country.

    Does he want his ideas implemented or is it just strutting?

    1. A) Don’t be so self important. STB is not widely read outside of probably even Seattle proper. There are plenty of websites more influential than STB: see LA Streetsblog, NY Streetsblog, The Urbanist (that’s a website that is transit focused btw), and others.
      B) That’s not how youtube works, the video isn’t present on the channel. It’s not an STB thing at all.

      1. Streetsblog is absolute newbie trash. Each site has a single editor who writes all the posts, and there are almost no comments. It’s useful for “news” about transit, but as a blog it’s a total failure except for Chicago.

        So far as The Urbanist, yes it has a much wider readership, but it’s not a blog at all. They don’t even have a comments section.

        There is absolutely no other transit or transit-adjacent blog that has comment threads more than two or three long, except Caltrain-Blogspot, which has long threads of a hundred comments, and there are some quality posters, but they take a month and a half to accumulate that hundred instead of overnight here.

        People read this blog. And ESPECIALLY in Washington State, if you want to reach people who might have a bit of power to advance your bright idea, it needs to be posted here.

      2. Both of you cool it with the insults and dismissiveness.

        STB created Seattle’s transit-news concept in the 2000s did most of the scoops throughout the 2010s. That inspired the Seattle Times, the Urbanist, and Publicola to do more transit reporting, and they have more resources to pay reporters and get the scoops, and they’re the ones that are the most widely read and most influence the politicians now. We’ve gone back to what we do best, applying transit best practices as we see it, and reporting on things the others miss or ignore. And we maintain “the comment section”, which is probably the largest community of transit commentariat in the state, and is generally fact-filled and insightful and positive.

        Other transit blogs and streets news sites exist in other cities and nationally. I don’t know much about them and I’ve never read them much, because I can only follow so many websites regularly. Even Human Transit and Pededstrian Observations I forget to check for months at a time, even though I used to read them every day and I significantly respect them.

        Of the other transit/street-related blogs and sites I’ve seen, none of them are “bad”, just like hardly any of the YouTube transit videos I’ve seen are “bad”: they’re all a sincere effort to document/explain/advocate transit phenomena as they see them.

        Blogs originated in “weblogs”, which were like journal diaries brought online. The owners wrote about whatever was on their mind that day. There were no comments: those evolved over time. Many of them specialized into thoughts on one topic field. So that’s a blog.

        We have an unusually good comments section. I don’t really care if other sites have extensive comments or not, as long as I don’t have to wade through a sea of negativity and nonsense to get to the few gems.

        Many of the Seattle-area politicians and agency leaders and staff read STB, because they tell us, and they occasionally write a comment. So they know what we’re saying, at least the articles. But that doesn’t translate into our preferences being enacted. Very few of ours are, probably because we often go against the prevailing mindset of the politicians, or what’s politically advantageous to them, or what the loudest other activists and public groups want. We feel we have a public duty to say it anyway, even if it rarely influences what the powers that be decide.

  7. I think that we in King County should not worry about Pacific County transit. They know what is best for their County.

    1. The point of worrying is that there are lessons to be learn that could apply with any county. Like not making major service changes without notifying riders in advance. Leaving people just stuck waiting for a bus that was never going to come was completely inexcusable. KCM, for all its faults, is at least pretty good about not doing that.

    2. Ridership decreased 40% and passengers are complaining about the changes it on Facebook. Those are Pacific County residents.

  8. Interested in an article about transit in Walla Walla County? I don’t have any connection to the local agency, but I choose to ride the bus occasionally.

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