A few months ago, I was waiting for a Route 7 bus and was frustrated by the far too common bus bunching along Rainier Ave. When the bus arrived at my stop, it was followed immediately by two other Route 7 buses. I spent some time thinking about simple changes King County Metro (KCM) could implement to reduce bunching in Rainier Valley. One idea seemed to make sense: turn some northbound buses around at the Mount Baker Transit Center. To further back up my idea, I requested stop-level ridership data (boardings, de-boardings, and bus passenger load) by time of day for Route 7 and numerous other routes from King County. While the actual ridership patterns invalidated my turn-back idea, plotting the data showed some interesting stories hidden in the numbers.
Fortunately, I can share this detailed ridership data with the Seattle Transit Blog community. Through a series of posts, I’ll share the results for various routes in the KCM network. Like the data shared in Bruce Nourish’s excellentseriesofposts on 2010 ridership patterns, these numbers are gathered by the Automated Passenger Counters (APCs) present on almost all KCM buses. Metro reports these totals per service change, with each service change lasting approximately three months. Although there is potential for error with APC data, the large number of trips over the course of a service change absorbs the impact of one-off errors or missing values. To smooth out potential outliers and errors, I calculated an annual average across three service change periods spanning March 2023 to March 2024: March 18, 2023 to June 10, 2023; June 10, 2023 to September 2, 2023; and September 2, 2023 to March 30, 2024.
I’ll get to Route 7 soon, but let’s start the series with the results from Route 70, soon to be converted into RapidRide J. The plot below shows average weekday ridership by stop in each direction, color-coded by time of day.
The SLU Streetcar rolls toward Westlake, sharing stops with RapidRide C and Route 40. Photo by SDOT.
It’s quite common in Seattle to see bikes and transit compete for the samelimitedstreet space. Once in a while though, we have the opportunity to improve both transit and cycling at the same time. This is one of those times.
South Lake Union Streetcar
The South Lake Union Streetcar opened in 2007. Unlike most modern streetcars, it was not built because of increased transit demand along the corridor; it was meant to help redevelop the neighborhood. Local historians can argue whether it was key to the neighborhood being redeveloped or largely irrelevant. It is hard to argue that it matters much now as it carries about 500 people a day. It is owned by the City of Seattle but operated by King County Metro, and recently it was out of commission for a few weeks. Rather than run substitute service, Metro did nothing. This is telling — the streetcar contributes so little to transit mobility that neither the City nor Metro thought it was necessary to provide a substitute. We can do better.
When the ST3 measure was approved by voters in 2016, Sound Transit had only some rough ideas about how to deliver the promised transit improvements. Cost estimates were done based on comparable projects. Now that the plans are getting more specific and Sound Transit can do bottoms-up estimates, it turns out that the projects are more complicated, and cost is quite a bit higher. That’s certainly the case for the West Seattle extension, but I expect similar increases to happen for the Ballard/downtown section. While I was recently traveling to Munich, I was wondering whether the region could learn some from their transit system.
Munich has an extensive S-Bahn regional rail network operated by DB (Deutsche Bahn). All lines converge in the city’s center through a single tunnel. For the 1972 Olympics MVG (Muenchner Verkehrs Gesellschaft), the city’s transit agency, decided to build a separate U-Bahn subway network which by now covers all major parts of city, either underground or elevated. It uses third rail power to allow for smaller tunnel diameter and reduced cost.
While the U-Bahn kept expanding within the city, the S-Bahn kept reaching more suburbs. When the S-Bahn’s daily ridership passed 800,000, DB decided a second parallel tunnel was necessary. Such undertaking turned out to be quite a challenge; the cost and timeline has kept slipping. Currently the tunnel is slated to open in 2037. In the meantime, the transit agency is making further improvements to their signaling system to allow even more trains to travel through the existing tunnel.
Sound Transit had chosen light rail technology to allow for affordable at-grade tracks. While this may be important for long stretches in the suburbs, for urban applications Sound Transit has avoided at-grade tracks to avoid interference with other modes. So maybe Sound Transit should consider a more appropriate technology for its urban lines akin to U-Bahn technology — such as Ballard/SLU — and keep it separate from the existing light rail. That would also allow for an automated line with shorter more frequent trains, and therefore smaller stations such as the Skytrain in Vancouver (or Honolulu, Montreal, Copenhagen, etc).
Washington-based disability advocate Anna Zivarts notes in her excellent book When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependence: nearly 30% of Americans do not have a driver’s license. This statistic includes everyone our car-oriented transportation system leaves behind, including children, the elderly, the disabled, and others who must rely on “alternative” transportation options in our cities.
The Week Without Driving offers a challenge to those who jump behind the wheel without a second thought: what if you couldn’t simply drive everywhere you needed or wanted to go? This is the reality for nearly 100 million people in our country.
Starting in 2021, the Disability Mobility Initiative began organizing elected officials and other decision-makers in Washington to a Week Without Driving in order to highlight the weaknesses (and, in some cases, strengths) of our transportation system. In 2023, The Disability Mobility Initiative partnered with America Walks to take Week Without Driving national.Â
Reducing systematic car dependency has longbeena priority of the Blog, and it’s great to see a campaign like this gain national influence.
Pundits claim West Seattle had been added to the ST3 plan by politicians envious that Ballard gets a light rail connection. It seemed easy to draw another line on the map, but now that Sound Transit published the final Environmental Impact Statement for the West Seattle Link Extension (WSLE) it has become evident that it is far more complex than anticipated. While the ST3 measure promised to bring 37,000 riders for $1.5 billion ($2.4B in 2024 dollars) by 2030, now the price tag has tripled to $7.1 billion (in 2024 dollars), and completion is delayed to 2032, and the ridership forecast for 2042 (after WSLE is connected to the current downtown tunnel) is only 27,000 new riders systemwide.
The delays and cost explosions are directly related to the apparently-unexpected complexity of building the extension as drawn in 2016. The route needs to roller-coaster up over the Duwamish and Pigeon Point, down into the Delridge Valley, and then back up to the Alaska Junction. To ensure southward expansion in the distant future, the station at Alaska Junction was rotated to be north-south, requiring more property takings. To avoid disturbing the Duwamish superfund site, the new bridge needs to stay away from the river shore. The SODO soil is prone to liquefaction in an earthquake, so the elevated guideway pilings have to be extra deeper than normal. The Pigeon Point slope is unstable and requires large retaining walls. The initial setup for tunneling is expensive, even if the tunnel is relatively short.
Sound Transit staff told the Board the more expensive Preferred Alternative would require third party funding, but now they’re assuming Seattle, King County, and Sound Transit will somehow find the funding, which is implausible given the large shortfall. If the Board decides to proceed with the current plan, they may choose the same approach as they did during the pandemic finance crunch (“realignment”): delay delivery until they collect enough cash from tax payers to avoid breaking the debt ceiling.Â
