The ORCA speedrun requires taking at least 12 buses, 5 trains, and 4 boats throughout Puget Sound.
At 9:59am last Friday, I boarded Everett Transit Route 29 at Everett Transit Mall Station. While the six other passengers on the bus were traveling to work, home, or somewhere else, for me this trip was the first segment of my region-wide ORCA speedrun. Transit speedrunning is the process of visiting every station in a transit system as fast as possible. In cities/regions with complex rail transit networks, such as San Francisco or New York, competitors look for new routes to beat the previous record. While the Link light rail system now has 3 lines across Puget Sound, the speedrun route is fairly straightforward. Our rail network is not complex enough to provide other potential routes that are faster. However, the broader ORCA network is quite complex.
One Regional Card for All (ORCA) powers transit fares for nine transit agencies across four counties in Washington. Visiting every stop in the ORCA network would take months, so the ORCA speedrun has a simpler goal: ride every mode of fixed-route transit offered by each agency in the ORCA pod, as fast as possible. This includes every type bus service, rail service, and ferry service from each of the nine agencies. For example, King County Metro offers three types of bus service: local, express, and RapidRide. Likewise, Kitsap Transit has both Fast Ferries and Foot Ferries. In total, there are 21 different modes across the nine agencies. Paratransit, dial-a-ride-transit, or other on-demand services are not included. City Beautiful and The Transit Bandit have completed similar speedruns using seven of the transit modes in Seattle.
My Route
Centered around downtown Seattle, ORCA is supported by agencies to the north, south, and west. For my speedrun, I started in the north (Everett) and planned to finish in the south (Tacoma). I shared updates in real-time on Bluesky and a full map of the run is available here.
Snohomish County
Snohomish County has two dedicated transit agencies: Everett Transit (ET) and Community Transit (CT). ET is one of the smaller agencies on the list, it just runs local bus service. CT, meanwhile, has local bus routes, Express bus routes and Swift routes.
My trip on Route 29 checked the Everett Transit box. I got off the bus at the South Everett Freeway Station and transferred to an inbound Community Transit Express Route 905. Route 905 returned to I-5 and traveled directly to Lynnwood Transit Center. As I would need to return back to Lynnwood TC to board Link to get to Seattle, this next segment required an out-and-back using both Swift and a local route. I boarded the next Orange Line bus towards Edmonds College and took it one stop to Hwy 99. Thankfully, the traffic signal at Hwy 99 & 196th St was in my favor so I could catch the Lynnwood-bound Route 166 across the street with seconds to spare.
