After listening to comments protesting the long-planned elimination of the barely-used Route 42, which duplicates the light rail line in Southeast Seattle, yesterday, the King County Council voted on a new Metro plan that reallocates service from underused routes to routes that are overcrowded and need more service. (The council did not, as KOMO TV reported, “slash” service due to “budget woes”; according to Metro spokeswoman Rochelle Ogershok, they simply reallocated 100,000 service hours while keeping total Metro spending the same).
Among the routes that are being cut (focusing on Seattle routes for space, but you can read the whole list here):
• Rush-hour service on the route 25, which serves Laurelhurst (including Children’s Hospital), will be reduced from one bus every half-hour to a bus an hour.
• The route 38, which runs between Beacon Hill and Mount Baker, will be eliminated because it’s redundant with light rail.
• The contentious 42, which residents have fought to save despite the fact that few of them actually use it, will be eliminated because of low ridership and the fact that it duplicates light rail, the Route 7, the Route 8, and the Route 39.
• The route 79 from downtown to Lake City will be eliminated because it is duplicated by a half-dozen other routes.
• The route 99, which replaced the George Benson waterfront streetcar, will only run during peak hours (6 to 9 in the morning and 3 to 6 in the afternoon) in seasons other than the summer, when tourism peaks. Combined with the coming elimination of the ride-free area, this change will eliminate the only remaining free bus route in the city.
Additionally, Metro is adding service along a number of routes:
Routes 1, 8, 9, 41, 44, 128, 169, 218, 372, 36, and 73 will all get more frequent service due to overcrowding and trips that “do not meet [Metro's service guidelines] and have too many passengers standing for too long.
And Metro will increase service on dozens of other routes (too many to list here) where service is unreliable and buses frequently don’t show up on time.
This round of Metro changes goes into effect in June. It will be followed by another round of cuts and schedule upgrades in September.
