Latest Comments

Expediency is utility. There is a limit to how much slowness people can tolerate.

Pantograph is great at adding routes, but still cannot update vehicles 8270-8289 into 6270-6289, causing an unknown vehicle bug on Rapid Ride routes.

Does anyone know anything about King County Metro route 251? ( that’s the proposed route between Woodinville and Redmond ? Has that been postponed again? I think all of King County Metro’s new routes for the fall service change are available to see on the Pantograph app. ( although if it’s a new route number it’s only showing One Direction of the route. Which is something that usually occurs until it’s updated again later on. ) But the 251 is missing from there . ( sidenote you can also see part of the new sound transit route 547, which is...

I just took Link to get from Lynnwood to Stadium. It wasn’t especially crowded north of Northgate. It would be a significant rearrangement, but you could probably run 2 car trains north of Northgate with no problem. If there were good turning spots you could make Northgate to Lynnwood the 5 line for now and run it with shorter trains.

Tom; I agree that downtown Vancouver is a great place for transit, and it’s not just the new housing. Downtown Vancouver isn’t well served by the planned line, however. Like most other MAX lines have, it sacrifices expediency over utility.

There is a lot of new housing in downtown Vancouver. It's not just parking lots.

blumdrew, you could get nearly the same network rationalization by sending the Fourth Plain and Highway 99 Vine Lines across the bridge to a new Yellow Line terminal at Hayden Island. No, it's not as good as an extension to the Library, but it's a big improvement over the 60. The Mill Plain line is just way too long to be extended.

Ross, without some sort of expansion of capacity, the existing bridge pair cannot be tolled either. Your staged idea has merit, but it's an open question if "seismic strengthening" would qualify as a "capacity expansion". I expect the FHWA would look at it as "State Of Good Repair Maintenance". So no tolls. So far as the southbound morning HOV, Oregon's refusal is based on the fact that none of Hayden Island, Marine Drive/MLK, nor Delta Park is i significant SOUTHBOUND traffic source. The bridge is essentially a very effective "ramp meter" for traffic from Washington, so there is no need...

Bothell/Woodinville Transit Center” is the name of the TC that they are putting in at the 522/405 interchange Yes. That is the name on the project site: https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/stride-s2-line

I can’t imagine CT would put it near-and-yet-too-far from S2 transfers. Riders will be able to transfer from ST to Swift Green at Canyon Park either way. If Swift Green ended at the Bothell/Woodinville Transit Center (AKA the 522/405 interchange) then there would be two transfer points.

Comparing the Swift Green map and the Stride S3 map, the S3/S2 hub is south of Beardslee Blvd station on 405. The North Creek Transit Center looks the same distance south, so it may be part of the station complex or adjacent to it on the east side even though it has a different name. The Stride stop shows a pair of station dots on either side of 405. The eastern one must be in the same place as the CT station or adjacent to it; I can't imagine CT would put it near-and-yet-too-far from S2 transfers.

Today’s transit effort, for your reading entertainment: • Original plan was Friday Harbor to Mt Vernon to catch Amtrak’s 9:45 am departure. This avoids having to sit in traffic on the mid-day buses. • The ferry I would need to do this got canceled due to mechanical issues, leaving me with an arrival in Anacortes at 9:30 am. • Amtrak’s 11:45 am connector bus is sold out today, so that leaves me with Skagit Transit 90x for going further south. There’s no way to get from Anacortes to Mt Vernon to get the 10:50 am departure, so that left me...

Yeah the layover next to the south garage at UW Bothell seems like the ideal location. With the 522 and 372 no longer laying over there, there should be plenty of space for CT. A stop should probably get added somewhere around the layover as well, as a connection (with a 5-10 minute walk) to Stride North. Location of the layover: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pnYTcGpXbBL5wQFG6

If I remember, he did ride the 550 sometimes, to ballgames and such. So he's probably riding Link sometimes. Even if he doesn't, he's still only 1 out of 25,000 Mercer Islanders. Somebody is getting on and off at Mercer Island, and by that I mean more than one person.

Even former commenter and Mercer Island resident, DT, once said that the route 550 could run once a minute, and he still wouldn't ride it. Btw, I'm thinking of unbanning DT, and allowing him to comment again. I'll think about it some more over the weekend, and let you all know of my decision on Monday.

"Bothell/Woodinville Transit Center” is the name of the TC that they are putting in at the 522/405 interchange?" From the map it looks like the North Creek Transit Center is a different one east of 405. The station on 405 and presumably the multimodal hub is called Beardslee Blvd station on the map. I thought it would be called something like Bothell/Woodinville Transit Center too, but there's no station called that on the map. So this seems to be a second transit center east of the Stride one. Maybe CT has so many buses they can't layover anywhere else, but...

There may also be riders in Sam's neighborhood that Sam doesn't see. I'm sorry to break it to you, Sam, but you're not onmiscient. At least, almost but not completely omniscient. I bet you don't have 24-hour surveillance at all the bus stops in your area so that you can count everybody who gets on.

The issue is decisions on the margins. For people who are close to 50/50 on either taking the bus or not taking it, frequency can be the thing that tips them one way or the other. The more people ride it, the more it will motivate other people to ride it. Your neighborhood may be one of the very low ridership areas like Medina, and even 5-minute service may not be enough to attract them at all. To some extent, they moved to Medina because they intended to have a non-transit-riding lifestyle. And Medina and south Kirkland is more expensive...

@Sam There's certainly diminishing returns depending on the neighborhood but every single route that has seen frequency improvements has also seen a corresponding increase in ridership. Recent examples in the most recent service change include the 225 and 240.

This was on Wednesday around 4:30/5; it seemed like total gridlock downtown when I left work. I saw buses on Pantograph that were 30+ minutes late. I saw two #62s on Blanchard right next to each other that didn't move the entire time I was walking from 6th to 3rd. Definitely not the operators fault. I thought maybe there was a big crash on I5 or something but didn't see anything in the news. And no, operators do not run late to milk overtime. I imagine that they have some mandated minimum breaks and that sometimes late incoming buses then...

MAX to Vancouver is very valuable from a transit network perspective, but only if it interfaces well with CTRAN's network. The Mill Plain (or Evergreen? Can't recall the name off hand) station is far superior to the Waterfront Station on that front. The current transfer to the CTRAN 60 at Delta Park if you're coming from anywhere other than downtown Portland and have good timing with a 105 is pretty miserable. Good feeder buses can make up for poor placement or land use - the 82nd MAX stop has awful land use and is miserable to be at, but gets...

Unlike in other areas where I’ve ridden buses, many Metro operators seem to take leaving at scheduled times seriously. Sometimes they seem to leave late per OBA but it’s rare. I even witness them holding at intermediate points if they’re too early. It’s true that late buses tend to pick up more riders. With every stop having a longer wait, more riders accumulate. It’s been a pretty well understood behavior. It’s a factor in the genesis from things like fare cards and bus stop Orca readers to speed boarding to a signal priority system only triggering if a bus is...

Buses that run late will get more passengers, not less. And the more passengers it gets, the later it will get. Lateness snowballs into even more lateness. And there is no incentive for the driver to run late. If he has a 15 minute break at his terminal, and runs on time, he gets a 15 minute break. But, if he runs 10 minutes late, he only gets a 5 minute break. It's in the driver's own self-interest to try to be on-time.

I don't think anyone in my neighborhood, which is mostly multifamily residential, who doesn't use public transit, would mention frequency as the reason they don't use it. Our route 250, and even every route in our regional transit system, could run every 5 minutes, and I don't think it would attract one more rider from my neighborhood. I think they view using public transit as a hassle that no amount of increased frequency can solve.

Another advantage of buses coming extremely late (10 mins or longer) is that there will be fewer riders, and therefore there are a lot of cases they can blow past stops or even end their trip early.