By OLIVER CHEN
Living in Seattle, I’ve come to appreciate the humble bus. I find riding the bus much more pleasant than driving through the city (and certainly much better than circling for parking!). Sitting alongside my fellow Seattleites makes me feel like a participant in the ebb and flow of the city rather than sealed off from it.
Over time, I’ve gotten a sense for the rhythms of the routes that pass by my home: where people get on, where people get off, and when the bus fills up or empties out. Seeing that, I wondered if I could get that same view more broadly, across the entire city or even the entire region, rather than just the tiny slice visible from my front door.
King County Metro publishes a ridership dashboard as well as an annual system evaluation covering route-level performance. Those resources are great for tracking specific routes or for comparing ridership over time, but they don’t tell me where ridership is actually concentrated: where people are already riding transit, and where additional service might be most useful. In a city growing as fast as Seattle, getting transit right is a practical necessity; city streets simply cannot absorb the trips that Seattleites need to make.
Visualizing Ridership
To try to visualize the distribution of ridership across the region, I started by plotting a scatterplot of ridership on a per-stop basis. As expected, ridership is highest in downtown Seattle, especially on 3rd Ave, and in the U District. But it isn’t entirely fair to compare those stops to the rest of the region; those stops are served by hundreds of buses a day and will obviously get more riders than stops served by far fewer. On top of that, stop spacing can vary significantly between different routes. The 5, for example, stops every 2-3 blocks as it travels up Phinney Ridge, while the E running next door stops every 5-10 blocks on Aurora, meaning that the E concentrates ridership into fewer stops and looks much more prominent in the data.
To make a fairer comparison of ridership across the region, I added two additional views. The “Riders / Bus” metric shows ridership on a per-bus basis, so that stops served by many buses a day are no longer overrepresented compared to stops served by far fewer. The “Heatmap” view aggregates stop-level data into hex bins, so that routes with closer stop spacing are no longer underrepresented. For more fine-grained exploration, I also added filters to slice the data by time of day, service period, and specific routes.
Switching to the heatmap view and the riders per bus metric paints a different picture than simply looking at raw ridership per stop. Downtown and the U District are still prominent, but fast arterial routes like the A and E jump out in the data, and dense neighborhoods like Ballard and SLU become much more pronounced. SLU in particular stands out to me. Despite being notorious for car traffic and very late buses, it has some of the highest ridership per bus in the entire region.
The full, interactive map is embedded below and available here (opens in a new tab). Click on the map to learn more about the stops in that area. Are there corridors that rank higher or lower than you’d expect, or neighborhoods that seem underserved relative to their ridership or density?
Data and Methodology
Stop and route data comes from King County Metro’s public GTFS feed and the data Micheal Smith gathered via a public records request. The per-stop ridership dataset includes all Metro-operated service, meaning it includes some Sound Transit routes and does not include DART routes.
In the heatmap view, ridership per stop is distributed across nearby hex bins using a Gaussian falloff. When calculating riders per bus, stops with very few runs are down-weighted so that a handful of peak-only trips don’t overly influence the data.
The automatic passenger counter data (APC) is vast and useful. Mapping helps. The sample size is now much more complete than in the 1990s. One can ask different questions of the data; one should target the questions carefully depending on what you want to learn. One wants objectively; “fair” is an odd term. Some questions are answered by loads, some by boardings. Such maps can be used to target flow improvements (e.g., stop optimization, speed and reliability projects). The automatic vehicle locator (AVL) data is also key; it can measure the speed and reliability; it sample size is vast; it is used by schedulers to devise the schedules.
The chart claims that Bear Creek Park and Ride gets almost as much use as downtown Redmond, but that seems very hard to believe – there is nothing around there. It would be nice to see some route by route data as to where the ridership is coming from.
Hey asdf2, there’s a route-by-route breakdown available if you click on the map (click and hold on mobile).
On Redmond: Looking at the stops individually can be a little deceiving. Redmond TC has five separate stops, serving 1,158 riders a day, compared to a single stop at Bear Creek serving 398. Also, the default dataset is Fall 2025, which doesn’t include data from after Line 2 opened
With graphics like this, the high capacity metro lines practically draw themselves.
But do the dots tell where high capacity transit lines should go? Because in the past, the comment section has often argued that Link should be built along corridors where it’s easiest and/or cheapest place to put it, which often aren’t high density corridors.
Because in the past, the comment section has often argued that Link should be built along corridors where it’s easiest and/or cheapest place to put it, which often aren’t high density corridors.
I think it is the opposite. My guess is most people have said that we should focus our efforts on high density areas instead of freeway stations even though the latter saves money. There are trade-offs of course but that has been people generally support.
You got this one wrong, Sam. Ross is right; nearly everyone who’s a “veteran” here is for punching through the dense spots and leaving the “suburban tails” for buses.
“Because in the past, the comment section has often argued that Link should be built along corridors where it’s easiest and/or cheapest place to put it, which often aren’t high density corridors.”
No, actually you and Ross are wrong. Almost every time a commenter has argued for running Link on trails (Former Commenter suggestions: Eastrail/Cross Kirkland Corridor, East Lake Sammamish Trail, Redmond Central Connector, Interurban Trail, etc.), it’s because that would be the easiest or cheapest place to put Link, not the best place, regardless of cost, to put it. Some commenters also favored a Federal Way Link Extension freeway alignment over a Pac Hwy alignment, partly because it would be easier and cheaper.
It’s a long list of commenters favoring easy/cheap over best.
Now … this comment isn’t meant to be replied to. When a wise man imparts wisdom, just sit back and soak it up.
Wrong. Most of this blog favored the Pacific Highway alignment in the south, and the Aurora Avenue alignment in the north. Most of this blog favored the Eastrail alignment because it would have been better, not for other reasons.
This comment is not meant to be replied to, insofar as I believe it’s at the maximum reply depth.
William, you think the mostly low density Eastrail corridor, going north from Wilburton, is the best of all possible (tunneled and/or elevated) alignments? If the trail didn’t exist, that’s the exact corridor where’d you’d run Link, because that’s the best of all possible corridors going north?
@Sam, to start with, ideally, I wouldn’t run Link north from downtown Bellevue at all.
But if I had a mandate to do that somewhere… the ideal would be to serve Downtown Kirkland, Google Kirkland, Northwest University, and then either Wilberton Hospitals or the Bellevue Way apartments. The Eastrail alignment gets three out of those five, so it’s pretty good. It’s low-density for a lot of the length, but then everything is between Bellevue and Kirkland.
The only way to get better would be if we’re running on 108th (which means either building elevated pylons in the turn lane or expanding the street right-of-way), and I don’t remember anyone suggesting that at all. The real alternatives were Eastrail or I-405, and there Eastrail wins hands-down.
“It’s a long list of commenters favoring easy/cheap over best.”
EASTRAIL (with a starter line) and the Interurban Trail (north segment) were the better alternatives.
Starting with an easily implemented commuter rail alternative on the ERC, that corridor was the cheaper alternative, and could be incrementally upgraded as demand increased.
I remember some of the STB staff arguing with actual railroaders who understood construction costs and what it would take to implement that startup service.
As far as the Interurban alignment north, I recognized immediately (from being involved in the c/b analysis for the initial I-405 FEIS) what they were doing – Avoiding the Political NIMBY Politics
Read the documents and compare.
Existing rail corridors (ERC and Interurban north) were the superior choices.
Jim
On Interurban, it could still be used in a future extension north of Ballard, or up Aurora. The north corridor is dense enough to at least Lynnwood to be able to support another line.
Former Commenter suggestions: Eastrail/Cross Kirkland Corridor, East Lake Sammamish Trail, Redmond Central Connector, Interurban Trail, etc.
Yeah, sure. It is a comment section. You will find a wide range of ideas. So what? Just because someone suggested something at some point (and was told politely by several people that their idea wasn’t worth the money) doesn’t mean it represents a widespread consensus by the people who regularly comment here.
In contrast it is pretty much universally accepted that the best section of Link is between downtown and the U-District. Not cheap. Not easy. But quite valuable. Just about everyone is glad they didn’t run it by the freeway or along Eastlake.
People also generally agree that it is a shame there aren’t more stations along the way, such as at First Hill. In other words, it is a shame they didn’t spend more money on this section. They complain about stations in North Seattle and Shoreline — not because they are too far north but because they are by the freeway.
Likewise, when asked to suggest the next thing we should build, a lot of people would now suggest Ballard Link even though it is not especially cheap or easy. Very few would suggest what you listed. Oh, and just to be clear, there was strong support on this blog for buses on the Cross Kirkland Corridor — not trains.
Of course I’m talking generalities here. It is quite reasonable to run rail on a corridor that already exists. That is what Sounder is. But you will find that just about everyone here supports South Sounder but finds North Sounder to be a waste of money. That’s because there is no absolute here. There are places where gondolas makes sense, ferries make sense and even monorails make sense. But if you think there is a simple approach to every situation (like the one you suggested) then you just don’t understand transit.
There are always trade-offs with every alignment. But in general folks here favor alignments that get more riders even if they are more expensive. They think it is a shame that the line to the south went down MLK instead of Rainier. They would have also buried the line (cut and cover) which would have made it easier to automate (and allow for faster and more frequent trains).
But of course there are sections where you could take advantage of old right-of-way. For example, assume that Link really did serve Aurora. It crossed under the freeway north of Roosevelt and after serving North Seattle College had an underground station at Aurora & Northgate Way (105th). At that point the train can go north on Aurora and eventually become elevated. Or it could cut over to the Interurban and run elevated there. Either way works. Even if using Aurora is a little bit better it makes sense to use the Interurban if it a lot cheaper. The problem with most of the proposals is that either they just don’t work (e. g. Burke Gilman between Ballard and the UW), are much better with buses (Cross-Kirkland Corridor) or have so few potential riders they aren’t worth the hassle (East Lake Sammamish Trail).
“Oh, and just to be clear, there was strong support on this blog for buses on the Cross Kirkland Corridor — not trains.”
That’s true, since advocates for rail solutions are generally dismissed as “foamers”, regardless of what the data shows.
And trust me, it’s been a constant battle (before I retired) to correct the public’s misguided “common sense” accounting oversight.
(Now that I’m retired, (and have major hearing loss,) I don’t readily engage in those conversations. However, my friends know better than to complain about traffic when they’re with me 🤣)
Using the Cross Kirkland Corridor for any type of HCT was always going to be a lost cause because of the greenwashing NIMBY groups like SOT
As far as I’m concerned, Kirkland and WSDOT are ripping off Sound Transit for an extra $100m+ to build the glorious interchange at 85th.
BRT has the same ridership problem as any freeway-adjacent HCT.
Nobody wants to live next to the freeway!
Sam, you’re slandering us, Dude. We know what we wrote, but you’re fun to have here and make real contributions sometimes, between the snark, so we’ll just overlook it.
But you’re just ridiculously wrong on this.
This.
Neither the freeway nor the CKC directly serves downtown Kirkland, though the CKC is within reasonable walking distance. But the CKC quickly goes haywire north of there,, just skirting Totem Lake then heading due east to Nowhersville north of Redmond . It would be a Fustercluck of wandering three-seat rides.
It might make sense for a Snohomish to Bellevue commuter service in 2080, if anyone is alive then.
As someone who lived immediately next to I90 for 5 years, living next to a freeway is underrated.
I would happily live a short walk to a bus stop with a high frequency, fast, and reliable connection to a major job center. Rose Hill will be a desirable place to live.
That’s true, since advocates for rail solutions are generally dismissed as “foamers”, regardless of what the data shows.
The “data” supported buses. The expert hired by the City of Kirkland to figure out how best to use the CKC determined that BRT made a lot more sense. But Sound Transit wanted trains. So Kirkland got screwed. They got the stupid train to South Kirkland Park and Ride. In the short term some riders will be able to transfer to a bus they claim is BRT but is not much more than a freeway express bus. Even just an express from Downtown Kirkland to Downtown Bellevue (using the existing interchange) would have been better. But overall it is a huge waste because they focused on “cheap” freeway corridors.
Oh, and here is an old blog post: https://seattletransitblog.com/2015/05/06/brisk-making-it-fast-frequent-and-reliable-alt-2/. Here is a more detailed look at the project as assembled by the City of Kirkland: https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/public-works/transportation/plans-and-studies/ckc-bus-rapid-transit-brt-study-2016.pdf. There are just a lot more fast one and two seat rides than what ST will be building.
Living next to a freeway is great if you don’t need fresh air.
“It might make sense for a Snohomish to Bellevue commuter service in 2080, if anyone is alive then.”
Ah, Yes…
That’s the way all the walkable metropolitan areas were built.
Build suburban sprawl,
Establish a “downtown”,
Access via this progression:
1) 2 lane road >
2) 4 lane stroad (with center turn lane)>
3) 6 lane Beauty Stroad >
Bus service progressing from local to local with Express bus service.
Then build a rail line!
While you’re at it, make sure to appease the whiners in their SOVs by adding more freeway capacity at the same time.
Just don’t make me pay for the road projects from north Snohomish via the gas tax. Especially the Hewitt Ave trestle rebuild.
They want expensive infrastructure, then they can pay for it.
Right, Nathan. I lived in an apartment, not a tent. If I wanted fresh air, I’d go out my front door and head to one of the many great parks nearby. If I was on foot, sure it would be a bit noisy until I was able to turn on to side street, but I was happy to make that trade off for a location with a great view, good space, and easy access to my work. If I had 10 million dollars, I’d probably move to Medina or Mercer Island and live on the water, and if I had a billion dollars I’d live on a island, but tragically I don’t and therefore was very happy with my home in Issaquah.
My point is freeways are not dead zones. Northgate & Eastgate/Factoria & Totem Lake and so forth can all be good, walkable neighborhoods full of people who actually want to live there. Much like the suburbs mostly are full of people who like living in the suburbs, and sure they’d live in Magnolia if they could afford it but they don’t all secretly want to live in Cap Hill.
@ Ross Bleakney
“The ‘data’ supported buses. The expert hired by the City of Kirkland to figure out how best to use the CKC determined that BRT made a lot more sense. But Sound Transit wanted trains. So Kirkland got screwed. They got the stupid train to SouthKirkland Park and Ride. “
You’re making my point for me.
My contention is BRT and the ERC Commuter Rail options were never compared in the C/B analysis, solely due to the ERC option being kicked off the table by Renton.
It’s how they gamed the system.
(Same as the idea that no one is dying from a given aliment if you don’t track the numbers.)
BRT vs. Light Rail come up with different numbers.
People are not necessarily traveling between popular stops. Majority of trips probably have one end at those popular stops.
Two observations:
It shows where more local transit service is demanded (Metro). Where transit with stops over a mile or two apart, other factors can determine how useful the service is. It’s not like there’s a solid demand on the I-90 corridor between Seattle and Bellevue but Link seems to be attracting tens of thousands of riders on it every day, for example.
Higher demand is a byproduct of very frequent service. If a rider has a low frequency route and a higher frequency route that go to the same place and take the same effort to reach, they’ll mostly walk to the high frequency route stop. Over time, the higher frequency attracts more riders as businesses and housing seekers find the higher frequency useful. Using the toggle per bus actually appears to me to show that Metro is more balanced about service available across Seattle than the toggle per day does.
Noting University Village really standing out almost on par with a major transit hub… three medium dots clustered together.
See Route 372 on 25th Avenue NE (soon to be Route 72) and routes 31, 32, 65-67, and 75-45 (soon to be the goofy Route 77) on NE 45th Street. One can catch the latter group at the same stop with minimized wait. That is not the case in the U District as the routes are scattered on four different pathways after the service changes of 2016, 2021, and 2024.
It is not close to the U-District but few areas are. I think the point is that the U-Village has as much ridership as Lake City, Roosevelt or Northgate*. I would never have guessed that.
*There are a number of ways you can use the map, as Oliver pointed out. While it is interesting to focus on a particular bus stop I think if you are comparing areas it makes sense to set a radius and pick a few spots. For example I picked 400 meters and started clicking to get the most ridership in a particular area (try and get the most circles, especially the biggest circles). It is pretty easy to get around 3,000 in U-Village but I only get around 2,000 in Lake City. With Northgate I can get a little bit more than 3,00 but only when I stretch it out to beyond the station area. Even then it isn’t much more than 3,000. No matter how you slice it, the U-Village has a lot of riders (way more than I expected).
Ross, the walkshed for the “U-Village” stops includes the dorm forest southwest of the intersection of 45th and 25th. Lots of dormies don’t have cars, so if they want to leave campus going north, south or east, they’d walk down there to catch it.
Because we have many areas with steep terrain that can make walking two or three blocks exhausting locally, some very short trips are made on a bus here that would be walk trips if the distance was flat.
If Downtown and First Hill were both flat, I would expect fewer transit riders. The same it true for the UW area as there are some significant grades to sometimes climb when walking.
I’ve been on large college campuses around the country. I attended one. Most are fairly flat and most students don’t think much about walking a quarter to half mile. But when a hill climb is involved, a bus option looks appealing — especially when the student or employee has an unlimited ride bus pass.
This is such a cool map. It gives the reader an overview but it also has the ability to drill down in various ways. I can focus on a stop or a neighborhood. Quite impressive. Well done.
Yes it’s very informative! I particularly like the effect of the heat map and the ridership divided by the number of buses.
It’s not everything as it doesn’t show how crowded each bus may be. Just because boardings on a segment are lower doesn’t mean that a bus is empty. But overall it paints a good picture of where service is.
I’ve always felt like we’ve had tiers in terms of transit destinations. Downtown Seattle is first tier. Downtown Bellevue and the U-District is second tier, etc. But looking at the map it is clear that Downtown Bellevue is well below the U-District in terms of transit ridership.
Having lived in the U District, the vast majority of ridership there is students taking the bus a couple of stops from their apartment to campus. These students all live within a 20-ish minute walk from their classes on campus anyway, but because the buses are free for students, they use them. I would argue that the data is overstating the value of U District.
A lot of employers provide free ORCA cards as well. I don’t think that overstates the value of major business areas like Downtown Seattle, Downtown Bellevue or the area surrounding Microsoft.
To be fair, there are probably plenty of people moving around through the large, sprawling “U” area (that includes the U-District, U-Village and the campus itself). But it still doesn’t account for the “vast majority” of ridership. Take the 372 for example. It isn’t paired with another route so it is easier to follow. There are definitely riders that take it from the middle of campus towards Campus Parkway and the U-District. But the “vast majority”? Not even close. That is a relatively tiny portion of those that get off the bus in the UW/U-District (less than 20%). Even if you include the U-Village area it is less than half. Oh, and a lot of those riders are probably just trying to get to Link (or some other bus). It is clear that most people are simply taking a trip to the greater U-District (which includes the campus, residential and commercial areas) as opposed to within the sprawling area.
The argument is not that the valued is overstated because the ORCS card is free, but rather that if the buses suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the mode shifts to walking, not driving. That is distinctly different than the other downtowns.
The 372 regularly has 1/2 of its seats full departing the first stop at 47th/12th, of which 90% of the passengers get off before E Stevens/Pend Orielle. On campus, except during early mornings, the bus often becomes standing room only on campus, and empties out to have over half the seats empty by 25th/Blakeley. I don’t know where you got the 20% figure but it certainly doesn’t really line up with my experience commuting on that bus for several years.
if the buses suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the mode shifts to walking, not driving. That is distinctly different than the other downtowns.
We don’t know that. Look at downtown. Lots of people take buses from one end to the other. There was a “free ride zone” to encourage that back in the day. Now a lot of those riders just use their monthly pass for the same reason.
The 372 regularly has 1/2 of its seats full departing the first stop at 47th/12th, of which 90% of the passengers get off before E Stevens/Pend Orielle.
That is simply not true. Just look at the data*: https://seattletransitridership.com/. Now consider an outbound bus. Several things are clear:
1) The first ten stops all have over 100 riders.
2) Three stops have over 300 riders including the outbound stop at Stevens and Pend Oreille.
3) The stops east of U-Village (25th & 47th) account for a considerable amount of ridership. Well over 2,000.
4) But they account for only about 500 alightings. The vast majority of those that got on the bus stayed at least until the U-Village.
5) Once you get to the U-Village you do get a considerable number of alightings. At 25th & 47th half the riders (so far) have completed their trip. But the other half are still on the bus.
6) It isn’t until 25th & Blakely that you have less than half.
7) The U-District is also a major transfer point. It is quite possible that a lot of riders making these seemingly “short” trips are actually transferring to Link or another bus. U-Village to Eastlake, Ballard, Wallingford, Fremont or downtown likely account for some of that ridership.
So yeah. If they got rid of buses then maybe a typical trip like this would be done on foot. Or maybe people would just buy a car. That isn’t a short trip. Think how many people drive to First Hill because they don’t want to walk — or even transfer — from Capitol Hill Station. That walk is shorter.
There is simply no evidence to support your “vast majority” claim. But it is true that a high portion of the trips are less than five miles. So what? Given the development in the area, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Once you head north from the U-District you lose density (until you get close to Lake City where ridership picks up again). So yeah, density and proximity are important when it comes to ridership. Definitely.
*I have the original spreadsheets that were used to display the graphs. We plan on adding those to the website. I can share that so you can do the calculations yourself (although the values I listed can also be eyeballed).
Actually downtown Bellevue is closer by ridership to Ballard it seems…
Maybe, but it still seems like it is solidly in third place. I can pick a spot with a 100 meter radius and get over 3,500 riders in Bellevue. It is tough to get over 2,500 in Seattle even with a 200 meter radius. I can easily to it in downtown and the U-District. But the only other place I’ve manage to find is Little Saigon (which is very close to downtown and could be considered part of it). Oh, and Downtown Bellevue doesn’t include Link ridership (which many of the “fourth tier” places lack).
I think one of the more striking things about Downtown Bellevue is how little ridership there is other than very close to the transit center. There is a some (in places like Bellevue Way and NE 8th) but not like greater downtown and the U-District. I would consider it a general weakness with the transit network given the skyscrapers north and east of the transit center.
I’m surprised you needed a map to tell you this. It has always been clear to me that the U District has more ridership than Downtown Bellevue.
UW has 35k employees and 50k students. Every student and employee gets a free transit pass. Downtown Bellevue has around 50k employees, but most of them drive to work.
I mean… I’ve taken a lot of buses to both locations, and the U District-bound buses are way more frequent and crowded.
I could have calculated it myself using all of the data from the bus routes but that is tedious. I could go by anecdotal data but that is often wrong. It also changes. This provides a different perspective based on the facts.
Very helpful to understand the metro ridership in King County!
When we can expect to see lightrail ridership as well?
Hi Yifan, I don’t currently have plans to add Link data to the map. That data is available on Sound Transit’s ridership page:
https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership
Just a friendly note that the ST data is only boardings and not alightings. So the Link boardings referred above should be generally doubled to show complete station actihity.
The default for the map just shows boarding data as well. But you have the option of looking at alightings as well (along with filtering by other data which makes the difference more interesting).
Is anyone playing with the time of day data? The results for the AM peak alighting don’t look logical to me but maybe I’m not understanding the toggles.
Thank you Oliver for creating this map! It is a great way to compare ridership in Capitol Hill before and after the RapidRide G restructure. As a few routes swapped corridors, comparing per-route ridership didn’t make sense. From the map we can see that some stops along John/Thomas and Union lost a few riders each. Meanwhile the stops on Madison increased by hundreds of riders. This suggests RR G has replaced many driving/walking/biking trips and even induced some trips.
Really enjoying this map. I’ll say upfront where I’m coming from: my interest is density, not transit for its own sake — but the two are so entangled that you can’t really talk about one without the other. Transit is a tool that serves density and is served by it, and I think this map, read a certain way, is actually a density map wearing a ridership costume.
Here’s what I mean. A corridor crossing a boardings-per-revenue-hour threshold doesn’t just justify RapidRide or rail on paper — better frequency and reliability change who’s showing up on the sidewalk at 8am, which changes what gets built to serve them. The coffee shop that gets 40 people between 7:30 and 8:30 stays a coffee shop. The one that gets 1,000 becomes a coffee shop, a lunch spot, and a dry cleaner, because now there’s a market for all three. Ridership isn’t just a transit metric, it’s an early symptom of density arriving.
But ridership is a lagging symptom — it’s the very last rung on a ladder that starts much earlier. Land zoned for density along a busy corridor that hasn’t been built out yet is latent transit demand before a single unit exists: the buildings aren’t there yet, so the riders aren’t there yet, so this map can’t see it, but the capacity is already entitled, which means it’s a matter of when, not if. Then comes construction, then occupancy, then finally the ridership this map is built to show.
Except the ladder isn’t automatic, and I’ve got the cautionary case in the other direction on my own patch. Lake City Way: full frequency, land entitled for real density for years, and it still runs at something like one rider per bus on average. The service is there, the zoning is there, and the riders aren’t, because the buildings the zoning allows mostly aren’t there either — the entitlement hasn’t converted into construction. So “zoned but unbuilt” isn’t automatically latent transit demand; it’s latent demand only once something starts actually getting built on it, and a lot of entitled land just sits, decade after decade, never making that conversion. Ridership, land value, and zoning are all reading different points on a chain that can stall at any link.
Worth naming a separate blind spot in relying on ridership alone to sequence the next round of transit investment: it’s the classic WWII survivorship problem (the planes that came back with bullet holes told you where a hit was survivable, not where to add armor; the planes that took a hit somewhere else never made it home to be counted). Ridership can only measure demand on the network as currently built — a corridor with bad headways looks exactly like low demand, because the bus barely comes, not because nobody wants to go there. That’s a different failure than Lake City Way. LCW shows a corridor where the demand genuinely isn’t there yet; the survivorship case shows demand that’s real but the network hides it. Ridership data alone can’t tell you which one you’re looking at.
What I actually track is the land-value side of this — walksheds around Link stations against King County Assessor data, looking at where zoned capacity and land value are already signaling density that hasn’t shown up as buildings, or ridership, yet. If useful: https://otherwise-books.com/tools/transitshed/transitshed-map.html
Mostly wanted to say: this ridership map and the density side are the same story at different points in the timeline — zoning signals it, land value prices it, development builds it, and ridership is the last thing to confirm it actually happened, if it happens at all.
The data show boardings of each route. It’s going to show more boardings where people are transferring from another Metro route or Link train. So a higher boarding total may just be showing transferring riders rather than riders walking to a stop from where they started or ended their trip. .
Yes, absolutely. I was thinking this as well. It is hard to find big ridership clusters that aren’t potential transfer points. We are left speculating as to how many riders started at a particular bus stop or transferred there.
Transfer data is really the last big piece we lack. It would also be nice to have actual trip data (e. g. how many people board at a particular stop and alight at a different one) but that seems less important to me than transfer data.
“It is hard to find big ridership clusters that aren’t potential transfer points.”
That happens everywhere in the world. The highest-ridership stations are the largest transfer hubs. Because people are going from everywhere to everywhere so they have to transfer. Bus to subway, bus to bus, subway to intercity transit. The transfer hubs often coincide with neighborhood centers because that’s where the pedestrian concentrations are and demand for four-direction service.
This is a nice map. Good work.
Really interesting way to make ridership data easier to understand. Maps show something a headline number cannot: where transit is working well, where demand is growing, and where people may still be underserved. That kind of clear, accessible data should make service-planning conversations much more useful.
This is a fantastic tool!
Really puts west seattle link into perspective. The Delridge station location has pretty low bus ridership. Avalon station has been skipped, but this data suggests it would be better than Delridge – why not terminate Delridge buses on Avalon? The Junction station is a bit better, but still not great. Wish we could see more data on Sound Transit’s ridership assumptions and compare them with actual data like this.
The Delridge Station won’t get that much walk-up ridership. But the assumption is that Delridge riders will be forced to transfer there (if they are heading towards downtown). Otherwise that would leave Metro with two tough choices. The RapidRide H could just follow its current route, now several blocks away from the station. That would reduce the ridership on this line even more (which is striking given the low projected ridership). Or they can send the bus over to Avalon, further delaying the Delridge riders. This would lead to lower overall transit ridership.
In any event, West Seattle Link was never designed with ridership in mind. Nor was it designed to save those riders a lot of time. Nor was it designed to improve the overall transit network. West Seattle Link was based on broad geographic terms: West Seattle is big so therefore it should have light rail, no matter the cost. That is why you will often hear people talk about West Seattle as it if is a small, dense neighborhood, not a huge, sprawling part of Seattle. They will cite the overall population as if everyone in the peninsula will benefit from this (let alone a much cheaper alternative). The idea is absurd but the vast majority of those in America simply have no clue what works and and what doesn’t when it comes to transit.
One of the other arguments you will hear often is that it will eventually lead to further improvements in the peninsula, i. e. it is a starter line. That argument is silly. Why should we spend a fortune on a starter line when there are other, far more productive lines that could be built in the short or long term? For example an automated line from Interbay to Westlake isn’t much but it is still a much better value than West Seattle Link to Westlake. It can also be easily extended to get a lot more riders by going to Ballard and/or First Hill. Then you have lines like Ballard to UW which is clearly a better value than a West Seattle extension would be even if you’ve already built West Seattle Link (and it is a big sunk cost). Building West Seattle Link should only happen when it is clearly the best value and that won’t happen until lots of other things are built (if that ever happens). We are simply building things in the wrong order and as a result it is quite likely we will never build the things we should have built.
“West Seattle Link was based on broad geographic terms: West Seattle is big so therefore it should have light rail, no matter the cost.”
Yeah that’s it in a nutshell. To me, it’s a bunch of car drivers with clout thinking that a light rail extension is like a freeway extension or widening. Heck it even follows a freeway!
“it is a starter line”
Where is the Microsoft of West Seattle with tens of thousands of workers? Where is the downtown Bellevue or downtown Redmond? Where is the other five miles of track and stations that would bring more riders to the starter line in the first phase?
Will people really ride Link 2 stations/3 miles to a SODO transfer and wait 8-10 minutes in a middle-of-nowhere concrete jungle? Isn’t that overhead a large percent of a trip, making it less competitive to taking the C, H, or 21? Will so many people be going to the U-District or further north where the overhead is a smaller percent that it in itself is a justification for the starter line?