In Defense of Metro’s Route 7

I don’t know whether or not Martin lives in that area or has been through that corridor by bus, so I can’t say if this is a product of not knowing the transit situation in that corridor or just a foolish leap of faith.

Either way, Martin’s biggest mistake is taking for granted that most people have no problem (or should have no problem) with walking several extra blocks to use transit. Sure, most of us able-bodied bus regulars who do this all the time would have little or no problem. The elderly would. Families with children would. people who could easily use their cars instead would. Hell, many people who otherwise could would anyway, simply because the change would provide no personal upside to their lives.

You eliminate the 7 and you may save a few bucks, but you’re going to cause so many other problems that will, for the most part, lead to lost ridership and negative community sentiment that the savings simply aren’t worth it.

I suppose I should have added E-W corridor service to Martin’s stated benefits.

How often does the county look at present estimated ridership vs population density in areas to rejigger routes?

Erica, this article sounds like the typical “don’t take my bus away” knee-jerk reaction that makes it difficult for Metro to reallocate bus service when conditions warrant it.

Martin’s proposal wasn’t designed just to “eliminate the 7″ and improve connections to downtown via Link. While the 7 would be eliminated under his proposal, along with the underutilized 42 and 38, he suggests reallocating service hours in such a way as to improve East/West connections in the valley. More routes would connect to Link stations further to the south that would improve commutes for those heading downtown but it would also increase destination options for those heading elsewhere, such as Beacon or Capitol Hills.

No such proposal will be perfect for everybody and there will inevitably be losers under such a reallocation. However, the intent behind Martin’s proposal is sound – East/West connections in the valley are lacking and routes are not designed in a way that allows easy transfers to Link for those who want to head downtown quickly.

Martin’s proposal is worth discussing. Simply defending the status quo doesn’t get us anywhere.

Erica, this article sounds like the typical “don’t take my bus away” knee-jerk reaction that makes it difficult for Metro to reallocate bus service when conditions warrant it.

Martin’s proposal wasn’t designed just to “eliminate the 7″ and improve connections to downtown via Link. While the 7 would be eliminated under his proposal, along with the underutilized 42 and 38, he suggests reallocating service hours in such a way as to improve East/West connections in the valley. More routes would connect to Link stations further to the south that would improve commutes for those heading downtown but it would also increase destination options for those heading elsewhere, such as Beacon or Capitol Hills.

No such proposal will be perfect for everybody and there will inevitably be losers under such a reallocation. However, the intent behind Martin’s proposal is sound – East/West connections in the valley are lacking and routes are not designed in a way that allows easy transfers to Link for those who want to head downtown quickly.

Martin’s proposal is worth discussing. Simply defending the status quo doesn’t get us anywhere.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, and know little about the 7. But Erica’s arguments seem a bit weak:
1. *Not everyone wants to go downtown.* Sure, but many do. Unless you argue that most don’t want to go downtown, this argument could use more substance. I’d generally think that frequency should match demand.
2. *Everyone knows transfers kill ridership* That’s why nobody rides the NYC subway – too many transfers. It’s dangerous generalizing about this topic. Transfers between infrequent service systems are a bad idea unless well synchronized. Transfers between frequent service can really make a transit system useful. Some of us even seek out transfers, transferring between 4 buses on a 3 mile ride when there’s a one-seat ride directly from work to home available.

I participated in two of the mayor’s youth and family initiative forums as a moderator of sorts, one of which involved youth from Seattle’s communities. The #7 came up at both forums.

The first person to mention the problems with the #7 route mentioned it in terms of not wanting to live in fear: to him, riding the #7 is a scary and frustrating experience that a teenager should not have to endure. One of the main concerns this young man expressed was that the bus drivers did not know how to respond to conflict on this long “work horse”, as Duke puts it, route. I have sympathy for that: my best friend’s sibling was part of the incident in the article below (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004046128_buscase01m.html). The second discussion was, as the Rainier Valley Mobility post mentioned, the transfer opportunity issues.

It struck me as odd that a single bus would come up in both my full youth session and the session with 20 somethings planning families. I’m not sure I care about the motivations of Duke on his Rainier Valley Mobility post. Sensational or not, the changes made over the years to the #7 route have not made a large enough difference. If this starts people talking again about ways to improve this route, I’m in.

My original post was unclear that the 9 would have to acquire some local stops, though perhaps not as many as the 7 has today. What should be clear, however is that I am indeed considering non-downtown trips, which is the main point of improving the 9.

In a perfect world Metro would have an infinite budget and we could have the additions I suggest without cutting the 7. But in the current environment that’s a fantasy, and I think the benefits of a gridded system outweigh the costs.

As for the nighttime point, I explicitly address only midday routes for brevity. However, a key attribute of my plan is that every point on Rainier has a one-seat ride to both downtown and every other point in the corridor, so I’m not sure I even understand ECB’s point.

The lastly issue is that Genesee and Alaska are 2 blocks apart. Not to ignore the trouble with walking, but I think that’s reasonable.

The difference is that the NYC subway is fast and reliable with very short headways. In contrast, Metro’s bus headways are often 20-30 minutes (or more if buses are running late, as they often are in the south end), which is where the “penalty” comes in. Buses in traffic are inherently less reliable than grade-separated subways on a track.

But you’re not considering non-downtown trips on Rainier, which is what I was specifically talking about. And your post said there were currently “a ton of stops” along Rainier on the 9, which just isn’t true.

And your route actually doesn’t have a one-seat ride to every other point in the corridor. Let’s say it’s after 7:30 at night and I can’t take the 9 (leaving aside the shortage of stops). If I’m riding the 34 from anywhere north of Genessee, your plan requires me to transfer to the 39 to keep going south on Rainier. Then, if I want to continue south of Othello, I have to transfer again to the 36. That’s two transfers on a route that currently doesn’t require any.

But you’re not considering non-downtown trips on Rainier, which is what I was specifically talking about. And your post said there were currently “a ton of stops” along Rainier on the 9, which just isn’t true.

And your route actually doesn’t have a one-seat ride to every other point in the corridor. Let’s say it’s after 7:30 at night and I can’t take the 9 (leaving aside the shortage of stops). If I’m riding the 34 from anywhere north of Genessee, your plan requires me to transfer to the 39 to keep going south on Rainier. Then, if I want to continue south of Othello, I have to transfer again to the 36. That’s two transfers on a route that currently doesn’t require any.

“Metro’s bus headways are often 20-30 minutes” Wait a second – you don’t get to compare the negatives of one system to the positives of the other. They’re 20-30 minutes under the “one seat ride” system, but efficiency will free up resources, and you could end up with twice the frequency of service.

Consider a simple 30 minute headway route. Maybe the full route is an hour long, and there are two buses. Half the time the bus is driving to/from downtown, the other half the time it’s running around a neighborhood. If you instead connect that neighborhood route to a trunk line (say, Link), you now have 2 buses that are only focusing on that neighborhood route. That means you’ve just upped your frequency to 15 minutes – a range where people no longer have to watch the clock, but can just go out and wait for the bus. Yes, they’ll have to transfer, but the trunk route has a frequency that should make the wait shorter than the slow route downtown.

The result is better, more frequent service. You could also set it up so that you have more coverage. The point is, I can think of few cases where wasting resources on one-seat rides is a good idea.

I will concede that my original post failed to point out that the 9 would have to be at least partially localized. It matters to the people affected, and it’s either cost-neutral or at most a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, but it doesn’t make or break the plan to add this detail.

I must be vert unclear if you think there would be neither 7 nor 9 on Rainier at night. I don’t actually do anything but shift around midday hours in the post, but if you extend the logic you get all the hours currently dedicated to night runs on the 7 for use with the 9, 34, 39, and 36. Undoubtedly you wouldn’t maintain 15 minute headwaters on all these, but you can allocate 1-seat rides between these corridors wherever the ridership is. No need for scary late-night transfers.

Gomez, for the record I live in Columbia City and take the 7 or 9 3 or 4 times a week. I also served on the last SE Seattle Metro Sounding Board and saw lots of analysis and comments on the last round of changes.

For all that, it was NOT my intent to imply that everyone would just have to walk to an express stop, and there are enough comments to that effect that I obviously did a crappy job of communicating that.

Martin is suggesting reallocating 7s to beef up frequency of the 9 to every 15 minutes. Presumably those same buses would be available in the evening, even if the current 9 buses aren’t available. So you’d still have 9s coming every 30 minutes in the evening. So you wouldn’t have to transfer. And every 30 minutes at night is reasonable for local service. For people moving into or out of the corridor from other areas (downtown, Capitol Hill), they could take whichever of the 34, 36, and 39 gets them to their final destination.

Sometimes the obvious is what MOST needs stating.

The last thing we should do is cut the “trunk-line” buses like the 7.

The Valley is already hard enough to live in without a car (and lots of people can’t afford them and/or can’t drive them). The 7 offers a basic, reliable backbone of transportation up and down Rainier. Light rail is great, but is mostly a commuter/student/tourist transit system at the moment.

If we’re going to cut service, let’s cut it on the Eastside, where most people drive any way.

Martin’s main concern is to try to force more people to ride Central Link light rail, which is experiencing ridership way below ST’s projections, which is proving Central Link light rail to be a disastrously expensive mistake. He doesn’t care about the people who ride the #7 bus — Martin just wants to force more people onto Link light rail.

Like rail is only good if it reaches into the suburbs. Otherwise the bus is a superior cheaper service that breakdowns don’t affect as badly.

One thing that amazes me about Northwest transit planners is that they always fail to install readable clocks in the places where people stand. In Berlin there was a clock at every arterial stop.

The 7 should just have a constant police presence on it.

I can get from the U dist to downtown in 15 minutes from many locations in rush hour. Light rail will never do that unless you live right on top of it.

It will be a 7 minute ride downtown.

After you drive downtown, how long does it take you to park?

It’s interesting how much our human minds jump to whatever we are emotionally connected to. For Grover and some others it’s a long-standing aversion to Central Link. For ECB it’s a connection to the 7. The way I read Martin’s original post was “Gee, I wish there could be more East-West service in Rainer Valley. Hey, how about we repurpose some largely redundant North-South hours for East-West?” I bet we could even have a reasonable conversation about it without even mentioning route numbers. Does it even matter if the 7 was adjusted and the 9 cut or vice versa?

Light rail is useless in the suburbs, except for creating more sprawl.

Where the “penalty” comes in – and a factor you’re completely ignoring – is where drivers get to use the bathroom and take rest breaks.

NO FORM OF TRANSPORTATION is as reliable as people want them to be. Airplanes, trains, even tennis shoes experience breakdowns and delays. Deal with it, and stop your fucking whining.

In America, most people own watches.

There’s a train running on time joke in there that Godwin is keeping me from making.

“Martin’s main concern is to try to force more people to ride Central Link light rail”

You are missing the point entirely. The proposal increases East/West connection choices as well as connections to Link for longer distance North/South trips. Allowing passengers a reasonably short bus ride to the nearest Link station will allow them the choice to use Link to go to the Airport, Downtown, the UW, or Capitol hill much faster than existing or proposed bus services.

More choices, faster trips, and still the choice of a longer one-seat ride if that’s what you want. Not sure how Martin is trying to *force* people to use Link.

“More choices” would have left the 194 express bus operating between downtown and the airport, which was 10 minutes faster than Link light rail. Link light rail is SLOWER than the 194 express, not faster.

“More choices” would have left all the buses running down MLK for people who preferred those buses to Link light rail.

“Choices” have been eliminated along the Link light rail route to leave Link as the only “choice” to get where people want to go.

The motivation of Martin Duke is to force more people to ride LInk light rail, and boost its dismal ridership numbers. Link light rail is a financial disaster for our area, and light rail supporters are almost desperate to try to get more people to ride the little trains, even if it makes their trips worse than they were before Link began operating.

Light rail is useless everywhere — it does nothing that buses can’t do, but costs vastly more than buses.

In a world with no Tim Eyman and unlimited resources that may have worked out. However, in the world that you and I live in, you need to do the best that you can with the available resources. Martin’s proposal is a good start.

We’ve had far too many of these discussions for them to be interesting, but I’ll include a summary for those new to the conversation:

Buses have a high labor cost, due to their small capacity per vehicle. This is fine for certain densities, but once you have a high volume of people on a single corridor, larger vehicles become more cost effective. Seperately, in order to provide reliable and fast transit you need seperated paths. Building new seperated paths for buses matches and can exceed that of building new seperated paths for rail.

Generally the “buses are better” arguments either are describing low volume routes, aren’t based in fact, or are brought up to fight rail projects. The best answer is generally a mix of both, depending on the capacity needs of the route.

Not anymore. These days people have cell phones.

The sprawl is already there. You can either service the burbs or ignore them, but servicing the suburbs is not going to create sprawl any more than building a Walgreens on the edge of Redmond will.

And people in Germany can’t afford them which is why the stops have clocks, right?

A clock at a stop synchornized with the system’s clock is still a useful and somewhat accountable barometer

I support Link because I think it’ll delay us building more roads. But don’t kid yourself. The distance people move from their jobs to cheap exurban housing is limited only by commute time. The faster and easier we make it to commute from the far suburbs, the more we induce sprawl. This is true if we’re talking about roads, buses, or rail.

The only way I’d be convinced we aren’t adding to sprawl is if we stopped building park-and-rides at stations. This would limit ridership to the immediate area and those that can bus or bike to the station. With park-and-rides, people drive from the exurbs and park – great for traffic reduction, not great for keeping down sprawl.

In a world of limited resources, wasting $2.6 billion on one little light rail route to replace a few bus routes is an incredibly stupid waste of money.

Link light rail is far more expensive to operate than Metro buses. No comparison. “Labor costs” are just a tiny part of the total operating cost of Link light rail.

There is no need for a “mix” of buses and light rail, when buses can do everything that light rail can do at a fraction of the cost.

“There is no need for a “mix” of buses and light rail, when buses can do everything that light rail can do at a fraction of the cost.”

Possibly, although folks like you who like to say buses can do everything cheaper always forget the quality difference between Link vs. Buses and the fact that Link travels mostly on dedicated right of way. Were we living in this mythical unlimited resource parallel universe, Link would be on completely dedicated ROW.

You can argue that the quality in ride and reliability isn’t worth it – I’ll argue that it will be, especially once North Link opens up.

Time will tell.

“”Labor costs” are just a tiny part of the total operating cost of Link light rail. ”

Yet a very large part of the total operating cost of King County Metro.

So, if ST ever expands their light rail to 4-car trains, instead of 2-car trains, that will have very little effect on the operating cost of Link light rail, leaving the operating cost of Link light rail way above that of Metro buses.

There is no comparision between operating cost of Link light rail and Metro buses — Link operating costs per vehicle hour are around 2 to 3 times that of Metro buses.

And the capital cost of Link light rail is many, many times more than that of Metro buses.

The overall cost of Link light rail is just insanely expensive, compared to buses.

The first problem is that not everyone wants to go downtown

This phrase demands responses in so many ways.

First off, it acknowledges the Prime Fantasy of all Seattle budgeting and planning — that the next century will follow a reversion to a 19th century model of a centralized “city” with a hub and spoke system…contrary to every trend of the last 70 years!

Second, it calls this a “problem”.

Why a problem? Because reality doesn’t jive with their plans! (Where have we seen this before…oh, yeah, almost everywhere that Lib planning is involved).

How about starting from the premise that Puget Sound transportation is a multinodal, multiphasic system that cannot be addressed with simplistic designs, like a single linear “train”.

I’d like to see METRO move more towards a demand-based system, but one has to keep political realities in mind. Eastside taxpayers pay a lot more in sales taxes for bus service than SE Seattle consumers. If commuters in the Eastside feel that aren’t getting anything for their sales tax dollars, many will withdraw support, jeopardizing METRO’s finances.

Choice has to be balanced with opportunity costs. There were reasonable arguments for opposing Central Link, but once it exists, it makes little sense to run a bus that primarily serves the same passengers as Central Link, and does so in a more uncomfortable manner. And which was not 10 minutes faster, either, unless you have a source to cite for that. It certainly wasn’t faster for anyone living in SE Seattle.

If you kept the 194 running, that’s less money to run the 71-74 series buses to the U-District, or the workhorse 48, or the 7, etc.

I’d like to see you make the case to King County that the 194 should keep running because under absolutely ideal conditions it might be a 20% shorter trip for you if a 194 left downtown at the same time as a Link train and there was no traffic on I-5 and no logjam getting on or off the bus. But actually, there probably wouldn’t be a logjam, because the vast majority of airport passengers have switched voluntarily to Link because it makes the trip pleasant instead of utterly stressful and uncomfortable.

Choice has to be balanced with opportunity costs. There were reasonable arguments for opposing Central Link, but once it exists, it makes little sense to run a bus that primarily serves the same passengers as Central Link, and does so in a more uncomfortable manner. And which was not 10 minutes faster, either, unless you have a source to cite for that. It certainly wasn’t faster for anyone living in SE Seattle.

If you kept the 194 running, that’s less money to run the 71-74 series buses to the U-District, or the workhorse 48, or the 7, etc.

I’d like to see you make the case to King County that the 194 should keep running because under absolutely ideal conditions it might be a 20% shorter trip for you if a 194 left downtown at the same time as a Link train and there was no traffic on I-5 and no logjam getting on or off the bus. But actually, there probably wouldn’t be a logjam, because the vast majority of airport passengers have switched voluntarily to Link because it makes the trip pleasant instead of utterly stressful and uncomfortable.

Do you have a Time Machine? Because otherwise, your point is kind of moot now.

But if you do, why don’t you fire up the DeLorean, fuel the flux capacitor, and then first go back and stop the War in Iraq, the passage of Medicare Part D, the 2000 Bush Tax Cuts, the housing bubble-fueling low interest rates of the 2000s, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Missile Defense spending and other boondoggles of epic proportions first.

Do you have a Time Machine? Because otherwise, your point is kind of moot now.

But if you do, why don’t you fire up the DeLorean, fuel the flux capacitor, and then first go back and stop the War in Iraq, the passage of Medicare Part D, the 2000 Bush Tax Cuts, the housing bubble-fueling low interest rates of the 2000s, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Missile Defense spending and other boondoggles of epic proportions first.

all over the world train and subway transit lines are usually accompanied by huge volumes of bus service above ground. Lexington Avenue; Georgia Avenue etc. ad nauseum. Usually they synergize to produce even MORE transit use and density.

I’d suggest that bus hours be shifted to where busses could carry more riders per hour no matter where those routes are, taking bus hours from routes that carry fewer riders per hour. Today we have bus routes in Seattle and outer burbs carrying 25 riders per hour; we have routes carryingt 80 or 90 or 100 per hour where the busses are full and there is huge latent demand; metro provides the data ever year but every year there is no effort to simply put more busses on the routes with greater demand, which would produce more rides out of the same bus hours. Example: one route in seattle, the bus sits stationary for 45 minutes every hour, all day, then has a 15 minute run. Another route, it’s every ten minutes but there are people left standing on the road in the rain cause all busses are FULL. It seems to take a county council vote to make route changes limiting change to once or twice a year and requiring the approval of the councilmembers who represent the burbs….any part of the bus system likely could be improved following a reasonable discussion….not just the MLK area……but the underlying problem is ossification and clinging to old route structres just because. Just because anytime you want a change the 23 people an hour on the inefficient route scream against it’s being eliminated while the 100 people an hour the same bus hour could carry on another route are latent and don’t scream and basically can’t be organized. It’s not a matter of seattle versus burbs either there are low rider routes everywhere. IOW thewhole route structure is simply a historial holdover. One simple change would be to just start point to point service to downtown or key junctions from other key junctions (super express) e.g. you can surely fill up a bus at 125th and aurora at 8 am with people going all the way downtown, if you did that the bus finishes faster and is available to carry even MORE than 100 riders per hour. There are likely many other good ideas for change. But if you have to appoint a task force to study it all for a year then approve it all thru a county council basically you’re never going to have the best system, instead you will have it spreading bus hours across the county like peanut butter and allkinds of demands to “Serve Enumclaw” or Alki when the same bus hours could be ten times more productive on MLK or Aurora or from MS to Bellevue transit center……

all over the world train and subway transit lines are usually accompanied by huge volumes of bus service above ground. Lexington Avenue; Georgia Avenue etc. ad nauseum. Usually they synergize to produce even MORE transit use and density.

I’d suggest that bus hours be shifted to where busses could carry more riders per hour no matter where those routes are, taking bus hours from routes that carry fewer riders per hour. Today we have bus routes in Seattle and outer burbs carrying 25 riders per hour; we have routes carryingt 80 or 90 or 100 per hour where the busses are full and there is huge latent demand; metro provides the data ever year but every year there is no effort to simply put more busses on the routes with greater demand, which would produce more rides out of the same bus hours. Example: one route in seattle, the bus sits stationary for 45 minutes every hour, all day, then has a 15 minute run. Another route, it’s every ten minutes but there are people left standing on the road in the rain cause all busses are FULL. It seems to take a county council vote to make route changes limiting change to once or twice a year and requiring the approval of the councilmembers who represent the burbs….any part of the bus system likely could be improved following a reasonable discussion….not just the MLK area……but the underlying problem is ossification and clinging to old route structres just because. Just because anytime you want a change the 23 people an hour on the inefficient route scream against it’s being eliminated while the 100 people an hour the same bus hour could carry on another route are latent and don’t scream and basically can’t be organized. It’s not a matter of seattle versus burbs either there are low rider routes everywhere. IOW thewhole route structure is simply a historial holdover. One simple change would be to just start point to point service to downtown or key junctions from other key junctions (super express) e.g. you can surely fill up a bus at 125th and aurora at 8 am with people going all the way downtown, if you did that the bus finishes faster and is available to carry even MORE than 100 riders per hour. There are likely many other good ideas for change. But if you have to appoint a task force to study it all for a year then approve it all thru a county council basically you’re never going to have the best system, instead you will have it spreading bus hours across the county like peanut butter and allkinds of demands to “Serve Enumclaw” or Alki when the same bus hours could be ten times more productive on MLK or Aurora or from MS to Bellevue transit center……

Velo and Matt,

You’d be brave men(?) for engaging, but Grover is incapable of understanding that there is not one technology or mode of travel that is superior for every situation. For Grover, bicycles are always inferior to cars, and buses are always superior to trains.

He’s also not able to understand that the operating costs per passenger for a system in its first year or ridership are not set in stone for eternity. He doesn’t seem to get that as ridership grows exponentially over the next 10 years, the operating costs per passenger will drop dramatically, and be lower than bus operating costs, as they have done in Portland.

Nope, he has made his judgment about the utility of rail transit based on the first year of a hundred-plus year investment, and he’s sticking to it.

I love the light rail, but I have to report that Seattle gave up on one of the main benefits of having a separated track here in the SE, where the train both impedes, and is impeded by car traffic. Huge mistake not to elevate this section of the tracks, a mistake I’m pretty sure will not be repeated as rail expands into the wealthier neigbhorhoods of the city who will, indeed, get grade separation.

And the truth comes out.

I completely agree, but at least it was a start. I imagine in a few decades we’ll go back and elevate the line, maybe add a few more stations. Especially when we look at extending the line south.

Right, because the long commutes to Seattle from Federal Way and Everett are totally stopping people from living out there and commuting to Seattle for work.

Exurban sprawl predates Seattle’s attempts at rail transit by decades. To deny their existence in transit planning and pretend you’ll slow or stop sprawl if you don’t service those areas doesn’t help anyone.

Grover/Norman: Don’t you ever get tired of initiating and having the exact same argument over and over for months and years on end? How boring.

I’ll take your side of the argument to the extreme, and you tell me what will happen. Let’s build a high speed, high capacity rail line from I-5 near Everett to downtown Seattle with no stops. The trip will take 10 minutes. And we’ll add a 20 story, four block wide parking structure and design it to get in & out in a car in 5 minutes.

How long under this scenario would it take until everything green near Ross Lake (5 min away) is gone? I say 5 years.

How long until everything green beween highway 9 and 92 (15 min away)? Maybe another 5?

How about the big green patches N a W of Arlington Heights (30 min)? Add a decade, and it’ll look like a whole new place.

People absolutely choose a home based on their maximum tolerable commute. It’s common enough that it has a phrase: “drive until you qualify”, meaning for a mortgage. Land further from an employment center is cheaper, because few people want to commute that far. But this is where sprawl happens – where developers hope that somebody will drive a bit further. Removing 10 minutes from someone’s commute may be all it takes to convince them to not move closer to their job.

Your stated scenario is implausible and the point still stands.

Don’t like implausable scenarios? Fine – scale it back to an express bus that takes 30 minutes. The point still stands, it’ll just take a bit longer to cut the trees around Ross Lake.

Is your argument really that commute times don’t affect housing decisions? That seems implausable.

Light rail from downtown to the u district will never out perform a bus.
Light rail out to microsoft will but will enough people use it. Looks at the express traffic from the udist to downtown and vice versa and it is an easy conclusion.

Aren’t they scaling light rail runs back to less capacity? high volume of people on a single corridor is like San Jose to San Francisco or Everett to Seattle. Not downtown to Northgate. The rule is that withing 5-10 miles of the core buses are better, going further then that the trains are better. Seattle is too much nimby to be smart about transit.

A couple of points:

1) Light rail between downtown and the U-District will handily outperform buses, even under ideal conditions. Riders will be able to travel between U-District and Capitol Hill in 4 minutes, and 3 minutes between Capitol Hill and downtown. That’s a total of 7 minutes, in either direction, regardless of weather or traffic, with capacity of 500-800 riders per 4-car train, per direction.

2) You seem to be confusing commuter rail (like Sounder) with metro rapid transit. Trains like Sounder primarily connect cities to other cities. Trains like Link primarily provide service within cities, or very close suburbs (like Bellevue, Mercer Island, Tukwila).

3) As a general rule, intracity buses make more sense on routes in areas with lower density and lower ridership. Metro rail transit (especially with grade separation, like U-Link and North Link) makes more sense in dense, core metro areas where traffic is bad, density is high, and rider volumes are large. This allows for lower operating costs and more predictable and speedy transit within a city.

Cutting some service to the 7 was intended to increase east-west bus service in the valley, and provide better connections to light rail, not to save some money (all those buses would be put on other routes in the valley and on Rainier AVE)

Which is why every developed and developing country in the world is investing in rail right now? Give me a brake.

Light rail is an arterial transit system (which is necessary) and in order to better utilize that system, we shift bus service into connector routes. Running the 194 to duplicate service with Link is a waste of money.

You can call Martin’s plan forcing people to take Link (except that everyone still has a chance at a one seat ride in that plan) but in the mean time, frequency on the 34, 39, and is increase substantially. I’d call that better service, not forcing someone to use light rail.

The burbs were all created by government subsidized highways over the last 50 years. Thats it. They’re bankrupting the country, and we can’t continue to subsidize them through massive highway projects.

People are moving back into city all over this country. When building rail, we have to build for the next century, and all indicators tell us that next century will be far more urban than this one.

frankly i’d rather have them cut down more trees in Ross Lake or Franklin or places I’ve never been then have more trees cut down here in Seattle and risk our neighborhoods to crappy infill and more traffic.

Is this a joke? And i don’t mean a joke like ha, ha. I mean a joke like, “Are you nuts?”! Route 7 has to be one of the most heavily used routes in this rapidly declining system. The #7 is used heavily by seniors, recent immigrants, young people, and people w/disabilites. It is also used by commuters like myself who transfer downtown and then have to wait for long periods in the hope that the bus (aka, sardine can) to which they are transferring will arrive before they have to return to work the next day.
At this point it is becoming painfully evident that the shiny new light rail is a dud in terms of solving any transportation problems. Instead of the focus on accommodating the light rail and futile attempts to increase ridership, how about writing it off as an overly-expensive lesson learned and get back to moving people in a realistic way from point A to point B. And this time remember that not everybody who rides the bus is a bike-toting, native-born, able-bodied 25 year old who works downtown.