Holiday service announcements: Metro holiday service with Sound Transit, streetcars, and the King County water taxis. Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit, Everett Transit, Kitsap Transit, Monorail, Washington State Ferries announcements. Trailhead Direct (choose route from Routes menu; holiday section is in top right).
Below is a breakdown by day. If something is critical to you, double-check the agency’s announcement to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes.
Friday
Sound Transit
Link is on SUNDAY schedule with extended late-night service “2 Line until about 1:20am, 1 Line until about 1:12am”. Whether that means when the last run starts or finishes I don’t know. ST Express is on SUNDAY schedule. Sounder has NO SERVICE. The T Line is on WEEKDAY schedule.
Metro
Metro buses and Metro Flex are on SUNDAY schedule. Other services are on a WEEKDAY schedule: First Hill and South Lake Union streetcars, Vashon water taxi, West Seattle water taxi and its shuttles 773 and 775.
Other
Community Transit and Pierce Transit are on SUNDAY schedule; see their announcements for Zip and SHUTTLE hours. Everett Transit appears to be on weekday schedule.
Kitsap Transit is on WEEKDAY schedule “to help accommodate passengers attending summer soccer events in Seattle”, but routes 119, 219, and 238 have NO SERVICE.
The Seattle Center Monorail will operate 8 am – 11 pm. Washington State Ferries is on a WEEKDAY schedule. Trailhead Direct will operate.
Saturday (4th of July)
Sound Transit
Link is on SATURDAY schedule with extended late-night service:
- The last southbound trains depart from Lynnwood at 1:31 am (2 Line to Redmond) and 1:39 am (1 Line to Angle Lake). The last train to Federal Way must depart earlier if this is correct.
- The last northbound train departs Federal Way at 1:25 am (1 Line to Lynnwood), and departs Redmond at 1:27 am (2 Line to Lynnwood).
ST Express is on SATURDAY schedule. The T Line is on SUNDAY schedule. Sounder has NO SERVICE.
Metro
Metro buses, the streetcars, and the King County water taxis are on regular SATURDAY schedule.
The SLU streetcar will have extended late-night service for the fireworks at Lake Union Park. The last northbound streetcar departs Westlake at 9:45 pm. Streetcars will be suspended 10:15-10:45 pm for the fireworks. At 10:45, extra streetcars will be positioned to take people back to downtown. The last streetcar departs Lake Union Park at 11:15 pm.
Other
Community Transit and Pierce Transit are on regular SATURDAY schedule.
Everett Transit is on SUNDAY schedule and all routes are free (no fares!). Routes 3, 6, 7, 19, and 29 will be rerouted in downtown Everett until 1pm for the July Fourth Parade.
Everett has four events today. The parade starts at 11 am, with shuttle buses from Everett Station to the parade route. A festival is 3pm-10:45pm at Legion Memorial Park, with shuttle buses from Everett Community College. I attended the festival last year, and I’d recommend visiting the botanical garden in the park. Fireworks start at 10:15pm on the river. The fourth event is a $20 live music evening party at a waterfront hotel.
Kitsap Transit is on SATURDAY schedule for the same reason as above.
The Seattle Center Monorail and Washington State Ferries are on SATURDAY schedule. Trailhead Direct will operate.
Bainbridge Island has a parade at 1pm and a classic car show 9am-5pm, within walking distance of the ferry terminal. The Bainbridge Saturday shuttle will not operate July 4th.
Sunday
All is a normal SUNDAY schedule.
Sounder South and North have a baseball special run.
Monday
The last World Cup match in Seattle is at 5 pm. The usual extra match day transit will be running.
Update 7/3 9:30pm: RapidRide C and H and Metro route 21 will be rerouted to 4th Ave S between 2-4pm due to the closure of part of Alaskan Way for the US fans’ march to Seattle Stadium. The Waterfront Shuttle will move to 3rd Avenue south of Wall Street while the march is ongoing. This means there will be no bus service at the ferry terminal or aquarium or Alaskan & Jackson then.
Things to Do
If you’re looking for something else to do this weekend, you could take the Golden Gardens Direct shuttle to the beach, or the Waterfront Shuttle to the Seattle waterfront. I’m going to Kubota Garden on the 106.
This is an open thread.
I updated tonight’s Link late-night service with the latest ST information. It’s still not clear where trains will be available after midnight. I emailed ST and asked when the last trains will depart. The Metro weekend update listed them for Saturday but not for Friday.
Does anyone know what the “mechanical issue” was on Thursday afternoon? The reader boards were displaying seemingly accurate arrival times. Although at 2PM it was showing a 12 minute wait for an eastbound train at Judkins Park. The next eastbound train was listed as 6 minutes after that. A Warning/Announcement kept coming on over the speakers and the reader board saying that trains were delayed do to a prior mechanical issue, expect and plan for delays. Nothing else, not very helpful. This was a Match day but I don’t know if it happened before or after the start time of 1PM.
2 Line ridership continues to build. We’ll see next week how much has been tourist related; a good amount. But I think there is also an uptick in local use. I’ve started to notice more people in hospital attire. Hard to know if they are starting a shift or going home so direction they board doesn’t say much unless it’s at Wilburton which still has pathetic use… almost as bad as East of Nowhere Station. OTOH Mercer Island and S. Bellevue continue to grow. The P&Rs must be at or near capacity. But there will be another boost when bus routes get restructured this fall. FWIW Bel-Red has been completely parked out on match days and near capacity for Mariner games. Other than that there is always space to park but I think the overflow from MI and S. Belleview will start to change that pretty soon. Also, I’ve seen people get on at Spring District and exit to their cars at Bell-Red so it look like the big Tech Towers there are using Bel-Red as their employee parking. That will quickly overflow the lot capacity as the towers start to populate.
I don’t know but here is my perspective: I was riding into Westlake from Mercer Island to go watch the Senegal vs Belgium game at Pacific Place. I got kicked out at Judkins for some reason with the train going into the pocket track just west of the station. At that time for some reason the transit security started telling everyone that there were “shuttle busses” to CID and basically the whole platform walked down to the Rainer Ave bus stops. I felt like something was up and stayed on the platform and I discovered that train service was indeed normal and there was no shuttle bus. The entire experience felt very uncoordinated I mean even the staff didn’t know what was going on. I mean this just may be the standard ST experience but ST has to make communication so much better.
From what I can tell, the vast majority of 2 Line ridership is via park-and-ride. There are not many people riding the bus to the station.
I go to Overlake Hospital somewhat often, and I rarely see anyone else walking between the station and the hospital. I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Parking for visitors is rather cheap there – free for 90 minutes. Parking is free for employees. Almost half of the building space on the campus is actually parking garages. The hospital is just not going to be a ridership driver. So Wilburton ridership is not going anywhere until redevelopment of the surrounding area.
From what I can tell, the vast majority of 2 Line ridership is via park-and-ride.
Downtown Bellevue has the most ridership (and no park and ride). Downtown Redmond is the second most popular and it doesn’t have parking either. But I get your point. It is reasonable to assume that a lot of the ridership comes from people walking directly to their destination or driving to the station. There may not be that many people taking a bus as part of the trip. It is hard to tell with Downtown Bellevue since the transit center is used by other buses as well (along with people who just walk there). A lot of routes (like the 271) don’t end there. Thus you can’t tell if someone takes Link and then rides the bus a few blocks or if they got on the bus before then.
Wilburton is simpler, just because it has fewer buses. It is pretty much the RapidRide B and that’s it. Unfortunately, we don’t have stop data for the period that corresponds with Link going across the lake (not yet anyway). We may see a significant increase in ridership at the nearest stop. Or not.
I think that many Seattle residents work in Downtown Bellevue.
A lot of Eastside Park and Ride usage is also from Eastside employers beginning to implement paid parking essentially externalizing their parking to Sound Transit’s free garages.
poncho, you just described how a transit parking lot is supposed to work. A worker drives to, then parks in the transit parking lot or garage, then rides transit into work.
Poncho seems to be saying people are driving to a P&R within waking distance of work to avoid paying for parking in the employer’s garage. That’s the opposite of how P&Rs are supposed to work: they’re intended for you to drive to the P&R nearest your home and take transit for the longest possible portion of the trip.
Ok, well, the Marymoor garage isn’t within walking distance of an employer that charges employees to park. Same with BelRed. Nobody is parking at BelRed, then walking to their Spring District office. Microsoft doesn’t charge employees to park in company garages. South Bellevue isn’t within walking distance of anything. So who is driving to which eastside transit parking lot or garage, and walking to what place of work?
I don’t doubt people might park in a Link garage to escape paying to park at work, but I think they are also taking transit. Example, someone works in a downtown Bellevue office tower, the company garage is expensive, so they park at South Bellevue, and take Link the rest of the way.
The 271 kinda acts as a shuttle. I do think P&R garages should cost money, and they should build smaller P&R lots in neighborhoods instead. Maybe near those big box stores. Or churches can share their lots.
You can’t walk from Bel-Red to Spring District. That was part of the fantasy when they built out this infrastructure. From what I have seen, Spring District tech employers are using ST as a cheap alternative to providing employee parking.
With several of the nearby business are luxury car dealers with large parcels — along with nearby strides and a huge 405 interchange footprint nearby, Wilburton is just not going to attract riders beyond those going for medical reasons. Its best bus transit feature is that RapidRide B runs next to it — except there’s no stop there!
Perhaps the area will be transformed someday. But its ridership is not looking so pretty today.
It may never be.
There’s a Whole Foods too. Everybody needs groceries every week.
Al. S, it sounds you aren’t aware of the upzoning and development potential of the Wilburton station area. The two neighboring car lots and freeway are meaningless in the scheme of things.
When you said “Perhaps the area will be transformed someday. But its ridership is not looking so pretty today,” you were correct. But, when you added “It may never be,” it tells me you aren’t aware of the transformation that’s going to happen in the years to come. The station will eventually have good ridership, but probably 10+ years from now.
https://i0.wp.com/seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Alternative_2_Wilburton.png?ssl=1
@ Sam:
Certainly there is a lot more taller buildings shown here! That should add riders!
However, many of these building locations will be closer to other stations than to Wilburton. And the Lake Bellevue area is not upzoned. The buildings closest to Wilburton Station are also not planned to be as tall as ones further away.
It will be interesting to see whether this plan gets built or if the parking in these buildings has high parking charges (the adjacent sites today have free parking).
If a buildings becomes multi-story storage locker building, it won’t add many more riders, for example. So building mass alone does not automatically generate a high volume of transit trips.
Wilburton was a terrible name and and even worse implementation of what could/should have been a good location. RR-B is right there…. except it isn’t. The hike to get to the bus is ridiculous. This was an obvious flaw that could have been fixed early in the design but nobody cared (at least nobody that had influence, like the Bellevue City Council).
I have never understood why when a holiday is on a weekend do some people get a weekday off. Makes zero sense to me. Especially when most people are working and need access.
Because people deserve days off sometimes? Crazy work argument.
I agree, that’s why we have weekends and holidays. However, when you run a transit service that is needed for people who don’t have the day off, like most people working, then the schedule should be normal.
That is an argument for having transit just ignore the weekends as well. For the most part I agree with that approach. With a handful of exceptions (express peak service, which is increasingly rare in our system) it would make sense to just run the buses consistently every day of the year. It does mean paying more overtime (which means it could cost more) but it would make transit much simpler and easier to understand.
But if you are going to have a weekend schedule it makes sense to include federal holidays as well (like this one, which is being observed today) since so many people have the day off.
Metro used to have all holidays on Sunday schedule. That made sense for major holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July where the vast bulk of the population has it off, but it created problems for minor holidays like MLK day that only government/schools/banks have off and private employers haven’t been as willing to add a holiday for. There were so many complaints about it taking inordinately long for so many people to get to work that Metro finally began running weekday schedule for them. At first I think that was subsidized by the Seattle Transit Measure but eventually it became widespread and spread to more agencies.
Another thing has happened more recently: Sunday frequency has been gradually filled in so there’s not as much difference between weekday and Sunday. On many routes weekday service was 15 or 30 minutes but Sunday service was 30 or 60 minutes or occasionally didn’t exist. The 106 was 30 minutes Sundays but is now 15 minutes. The 168 was 60 minutes Sundays but is now 30 minutes. The 165 had no Sunday service, and is now at 30 minutes, but in the fall the 164 will have 15 minutes. The 164 and 168 upgrades were two goals of the South Link restructure and an equity investment.
The reason people have a weekday off when a holiday happens to land on a weekend, is their employment agreements are based on a fixed number of holidays per year. When you get less vacation days per year than in most industrialized countries, and many people get no vacation days at all, getting all the holidays regardless of weekend fluctuations is a precious benefit and an important recruitment/retention tactic.
Has the recent surge in gasoline prices been a factor in Link ridership growth? ST seems to want to say that the growth about the crosslake connection — but I think gas prices have also been a major factor.
I think the recent surge in gas price has made people more aware of the true cost of driving. If you own a car the marginal cost isn’t that great when gas goes from $4 to $5 but it sure as heck raises awareness. If a household can go from 2 cars to 1 car using transit then that is a HUGE saving. The other factor is riding a train is just way more cool than taking a bus.
Thoughts on Seattle’s “construction pause” and whether it has generally been worth doing? I haven’t been everywhere in the city on game days, but I’ve traveled on Eastlake a lot and temporarily closing down construction there and re-configuring the road for a month has looked pretty pointless, with seemingly average to below average traffic lately.
Updated Monday with the C, H, 21, and Waterfront Shuttle reroutes when part of Alaskan Way is closed for a US fans’ march to Seattle Stadium.
I saw a Route 13 outside of Harborview tonight while waiting for the 60. Looks like it’s being paired with the 3 on occasion. Is this new? Or a weekend only thing? Never seen it before – thought the 13 was always paired with the 2
This is a great paradigm. But it doesn’t work for Link. It could be extended to work for commuter ridership in the future along with feeder routes.