Ballots for the November election have been sent to voters in King County. One item on the ballot for voters in Seattle is Proposition 1: Seattle Transit Measure. This renews and expands the Seattle Transit Measure that is set to expire in early 2027. The 0.3% sales tax is expected to generate $138 million per year that will fund 280,000 bus trips in Seattle each year for 10 years, 100,000 more bus trips than currently funded. It would also fund 22,000 free ORCA cards for low-income, elderly, and families with young children, maintain support for Seattle’s streetcar lines, fund spot improvements to keep buses moving, and help expedite permits and inspections for Link expansion projects in Seattle. Vote Yes to help fund transit in Seattle.
Since 2014, the Seattle Transit Measure has funded millions of bus trips in Seattle. Many of these trips are on weekends when most routes have less frequent service compared to weekdays. Route 36 is one such route that has received additional weekend trips. Between 2022 and 2026, the STM funded 22 additional trips on Saturdays and 42 additional trips on Sunday. In response, more people use Route 36 every weekend. Compared to 2022, Route 36 ridership on Saturday and Sunday has increased by 41% and 58%, respectively. Weekday ridership has increased 32%. This increased ridership represents more car-free trips and improved access to get to work, shops, and fun for people in Beacon Hill, Othello, and the International District.
The Route 36 success story is not an isolated one. Passengers on routes around Seatttle have benefited from additional service funded by the Seattle Transit Measure. Vote Yes to continue and expand the additional bus trips. Fill out your ballot soon and drop it off at one of the many ballot drop boxes in King County.
This is an open thread.
Shout out to the 36. Having it run every 10 minutes on the weekends is a revelation for me personally. I actually track all of my transit trips and even though I typically commute to work on the bus, I take more trips on the weekends. This is partially because I’m more keen to explore further afield on the weekends (thus needing more transfers), but having good frequency matters even more for those trips. Excited to vote yes on prop 1 to give more bus riders 36-like freedom.
Hosanna to 10-minute headway on weekend (and weekday) buses, especially those connecting to the 1- or 2- Line!
During the week, though, any route with full buses and 40-foot trollies (e.g. the 36) ought to first graduate to 60-foot artic trollies. That will result in less bunching, faster boarding, less bus congestion on 3rd, and fewer pass-ups, without using up more operators.
Why will it not affect the 62? We need more frequent buses on Stone Way
What I’ve noticed is that the 62 more often than not bunches up, especially northbound.
Yeah, the 62 needs infrastructure improvements in order to get better. Currently at peak hours. In practice, it runs about every 15 to 20 minutes by the time it reaches Roosevelt, despite a 10 minute schedule.
Route 62 could be improved:
– truncate at NE 74th Street; SDOT, Metro, and Seattle Parks cooperated to provide a turnaround loop but Metro has failed to use it;
– stop consolidation east of 20th Avenue NE;
– streamline in East Green Lake to serve NE 65th Street, Latona Avenue NE, and NE 56th Street (see former Meridian Streetcar pathway); this would remove it from several narrow (25-foot) streets where transit is slowed;
– remove the bus island on southbound Dexter Avenue North between Roy and Mercer streets; the south to west right turn lane is too short and the queue often backs up into the single general-purpose lane;
– extend to First Hill via Yesler Way, 8th/9th avenues, and East Jefferson Street (assuming SDOT approves a layover space and turnaround loop north of East Jefferson Street); this would add another major market and attract many riders.
Stone Way North has a lot going on; there is friction between bikes and transit on the three lane profile. See 24th Avenue NW (Route 40), Fremont-Phinney-Greenwood (Route 5); those major routes have the same friction. Stone Way was restriped during the Nickels terms; Fremont-Phinney-Greenwood was restriped in the 1990s.
According to Jarrett Walker, transit agencies have been in a long term crisis of always-escalating service delivery costs. Essentially, the pandemic has turbocharged what already a trend towards more ordering stuff online, leading to more demand for truck drivers to ship stuff. This, in turn, led to higher pay for drivers with CDLs to drive trucks, forcing transit agencies to raise pay to compete with them, if they want people to drive buses. In general, driving a truck is considered easier than driving a bus, since you don’t have to deal with passenger, so transit agencies need to offer more money than Amazon/UPS/FedEx if they want people to drive buses. At the same, the increased demand for trucking has also led to a shortage of mechanics since, again, Metro must compete with Amazon/FedEx/UPS to find people to maintain and repair its buses.
On top of all of the above, transit agencies everywhere are under pressure to increase security spending to offer passengers a perception of safety. And, of course, ever worsening traffic congestion means you have to operate more busses to run the same route at the same frequency.
And, on top of this, population growth is usually at the exurban fringes, so keeping up with it requires running more routes like the 269, which means less service available to the core city, whose population is largely frozen in place, due to zoning restrictions.
Because of all this, we’re in an era of needing to continually increase taxes simply to maintain levels of service. Which sucks, but the alternative is for service to gradually get worse and worse over time, until the system becomes useless.
One potential bright spot: if private sector trucking jobs start to automate before buses do, it could lead to more drivers looking for work, and reduced labor costs for the transit agency. But, that’s not happening yet.
“population growth is usually at the exurban fringes”
Not when Seattle grew much more than the rest of the county over the past several years. This year it’s starting to reverse, with the most growth in Bellevue I think. All this is due to the zoning caps in different cities, since developer would build more if they were allowed to in the largest cities and neighborhoods. The exurban fringe (Issaquah) has been less, as has south King County.
Historically the fringe did grow more. In the 1970s Seattle had almost all of King County’s population, and part of King County (the ring at Bothell, Redmond, Issaquah, Kent, Des Moines) had almost all the tri-county’s population. Now Seattle has only 34% of King County’s population, or 19% of the tri-county’s population.
This is why Seattle gets outvoted in regional transit and housing issues, and why Seattle had to latch on to Sound Transit and subarea equity to get a subway in the city.
Exurban growth now beyond Issaquah, Kent, Parkland, Bothell, and Everett is mostly houses. Those are low density so they can’t increase the population much. We’re not about to have a new Lynnwood spawned beyond Everett or Kent.
Growth slowed quite a bit from ’25 to ’26, but Bellevue (+300/+0.18%) is doing worse than Seattle (+6,800/+0.83%). King County grew by 13,000 (0.55%). Kirkland (+1,010/+1.03%), Redmond (+940/+1.14%), Shoreline (+970/+1.52%), Tukwila (+330/+1.44%), and Woodinville (+290/+2.06%) are the only suburbs in King County with both a higher growth rate than Seattle and more than 200 total people added. But Seattle has taken more than half of King County’s growth. Further afield, Tacoma, University Place, Arlington, Lake Stevens, Lynnwood, Marysville, Snohomish, and Stanwood have grown at faster rates than Seattle, but Seattle added more people in absolute terms than Snohomish County (6,800 vs. 5,900) and a little less than Pierce (6,800 vs. 7,100).
Growth in the exurbs is pretty minuscule these days. Enumclaw added 40 people (0.3%), North Bend added 110 (1.3%), and Snoqualmie added zero. Orting added 40 (0.4%), Gig Harbor added 30 (0.23%). Some places get headlines for percentage growth from incurious Seattle Times reporters (Carnation, Black Diamond), but growth is always uneven in the exurbs and more tied to specific developments than anything else.
Data from OFM: https://ofm.wa.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/public/dataresearch/pop/april1/ofm_april1_population_final.pdf
I’d add to this analysis that, for whatever reasons, the pandemic resulted in a lot of older truck drivers deciding to retire which acutely affected the driver shortage. And, besides base pay there are the working conditions for new transit drivers. Until you have seniority you have little control over what route(s) you’ll be assigned to which means you may have to travel to the opposite end of the county to work out of one bus base only to be jerked around to a different one next shake-up. Add to that it’s often hard to even get a 40 hour work week when you have no seniority and you will be stuck with the worse routes in terms of rider behavior and likely having to work a split shift plus weekends.
Metro’s need for mechanics is made more difficult by having so many different styles of vehicles. And nobody comes out of trade school with the knowledge of how to work on electric trolley buses, streetcars or artics. Then you layer hybrid and all electric buses on top of the cake.
Yes, but its worth saying that costs outpacing revenues is not something unique to transit agencies. It’s a broader public sector issue, generally made worse in WA by the specifics of our taxation scheme. Having property tax receipts be decoupled from land values has meant that county road funds are going bust right left and center. It means issues with police and fire department budgets, which lead to things like the 0.1% public safety sales tax too. Sales tax has been our catch-all bucket for things state-wide, but we will eventually reach an intolerable level of sales taxes too.
For transit, the overreliance on sales taxes also makes transit service provision sensitive to economic trends, though this is not unique to sales tax reliance (see: TriMet’s major cuts due to sluggish payroll tax recovery in the metro area post Covid). Broader public finance reforms are necessary for all levels of government, and it’s disappointing how bad of a job the state leg has done. I mean I’m not gonna vote to repeal the Millionaire’s tax (obviously), but they managed to only shore up the state budget at the expense of local governments — and transit agencies in particular. Metro faces something like a $100M per year reduction in revenue due to the sales tax exemptions. The state really should have just lowered the state tax sales tax rate. But now I’m just ranting.
Exurban growth is a subsiding trend nationally. In our region, natural and political constraints (hillsides; public ownership) make it particularly difficult moving forward.
Seattle’s population growth even in percentage terms has been much greater than many suburbs.
OFM says that over half of new housing units are in 2 or more unit buildings.
https://ofm.wa.gov/news-publications/washingtons-population-continues-to-grow/
There are places like Arlington and Black Diamond growing in percentage terms, but Seattle has been the star.
OMF roughly estimates 80K new residents for just Seattle, 155K new residents for all of King County (75K for King County outside of Seattle), and 410K for the entire state. Other growth data is 52K more residents in all of Snohomish and 47K more residents for all of Pierce (both of these counties have higher total populations than the city of Seattle). So Seattle has about 20% of the Metro area’s total population but about 30% of the population growth since 2020.
https://ofm.wa.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/public/dataresearch/pop/april1/ofm_april1_population_final.pdf
“Exurban growth is a subsiding trend nationally.” Citation needed.
You’re right to ask for clarification. The US as a whole saw its population grow at about 1.0% annually since about 1975 to 2020. Since then it’s grown at about 0.5% ballpark. With that much of a drop, growth everywhere has subsided nationally.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/#google_vignette
Defining exurban is also a convoluted challenge. Is it edge development inside metro areas or growth outside of metro areas?
There would have to be a large rural gap for it to be outside a metro area.
There’s also a larger definition of metro area that’s everything that revolves around the central city. Pugetopolis includes the Olympic Penninsula and goes far north by that definition, because they have no other large city to supply them or provide services, and some people commute from there to Seattle; they don’t commute to Portland or Vancouver BC.
Is this article the opinion/endorsement by Michael Smith, or by the Board or Editorial Board of STB?
The endorsement is by the editorial board, although you’re right to point out it shouldn’t be buried in one person’s article where it can cause confusion. We’ll be more careful of that in the future. Michael asked the other editors whether it was OK include vote yes. The others responded that that was the blog’s intention (urging people to vote yes) and we thought that had been clear from earlier articles. Nobody realized the net result would be a blog endorsement buried in one person’s article, whereas usually we put endorsements in a separate article signed by the STB Ediorial Board.
I managed to be riding north on route 60 at the wrong time of day Friday afternoon.
I was surprised when the bus filled up at the stop a couple blocks south of Cleveland High. Apparently, students have figured out that in order to get on a bus going north, they must first walk south. And then, at a series of stops at Cleveland, then every stop all the way to Beacon Hill Station, including two more schools, most riders could not get on.
I don’t know how many 60/107 buses are experiencing pass-ups that time of day. But it seems to me the City ought to follow Metro’s guidelines on reducing overcrowding, not just looking at ridership.
In the case of 60/107, there could even be short runs added that start at Cleveland High. Calling them 107 trips would allow them to circle back from Beacon Hill Station to Cleveland until the pass-up period is over. If there are extra artics available, that would be the most cost-effective patch, but just for that peak period.
If Mayor Wilson were to show up at Cleveland High just after final bell, and watch the ballooning crowds waiting for buses, she would instantly recognize both the route-specific problems and route-specific solutions.
In the case of route 36, it runs mostly 40-foot trollies. Before adding trips to be more frequent than the 1 Line, it makes more sense to move more artic trollies onto that route, than to further congest 3rd Ave with more 40-foot buses.
That goes for any route with daily pass-ups. Lengthen the buses before adding more trips. (Though in the case of 60/107, there are problems with artics navigating the path, and it would be overkill for ridership most of the day, hence the suggestion of having a few short-run 107 artics lining up outside Cleveland, and possibly the other schools.
Interesting, my first reaction is that would be a poor use of limited transit funds, because there’s overhead costs in a minimum-length shift longer than the surge period, and amortizing deadheading from the base and back, and it’s hard to recruit drivers for short odd-hour shifts so you have to pay more.
But looking back at the situation, it’s the school district’s fault. It’s saving a lot of money by not running school buses. So it could put a fraction of that money into surge runs on Beacon Hill. That way it wouldn’t come out of Metro’s or the STM’s service hours, which are needed for other things, and are making the existing extra runs on the 36, 60, and 107 possible.
The Georgetown deviation of Route 107 should be deleted; see service guideline five.