By Erica C. Barnett
It took electing a mayor who knows what it’s like to be on a bus that’s crawling through gridlock traffic to finally address a choke point on Metro’s Route 8 between downtown and Capitol Hill. The bus, which runs from Seattle Center to Mount Baker via Capitol Hill and Judkins Park, gets stuck in traffic as it heads east from Seattle Center toward I-5, where cars stack up for blocks waiting to enter the freeway.
On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale. The first phase, which will conclude later this month, will include a new south- and eastbound bus lane starting on Queen Anne Ave. and ending at 2nd Avenue, where the Seattle Department of Transportation will also add a bus “queue jump” lane to give buses priority.
Work will shut down for the World Cup in June and July and resume in August, when crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Dennybetween 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.
The new bus lanes will be funded with $4 million from the Seattle Transportation Levy. The Seattle Transit Measure, which funds additional Metro service (and will be up for renewal this year), will fund additional service hours on the 8.
About 8,000 people ride the 8 every day, and about 26,000 ride the routes that travel along Queen Anne Ave. and Denny way just north of downtown, which include the 1, 2, 8, 13, 24, 33, and the RapidRide D Line.
On Wednesday, Wilson was surrounded by members of the Transit Riders Union, which she co-founded and directed before becoming mayor, and the Fix the L8 coalition, which held a “race the L8” event last year in which people—including then-candidate Wilson— easily outpaced the snail-like bus while walking, dancing, unicycling, and hopscotching along the route.
Speaking at Wednesday’s announcement, Fix the L8 organizer Jason Li said he grew tired of hearing people say that Seattle can’t convert general-purpose lanes to bus lanes because we aren’t a big city with a thriving transit network like New York. “The thing is, the city has done this before, and it was a wild success,” Li Said. Just a couple of miles away, Madison Street used to be just like Denny—an arterial with two lanes in each direction that was chronically clogged with both local and I-5 traffic, and it had a slow and unreliable bus, just like route eight.” Think about what happens when you replace 5,000 cars with a fleet of 13 buses.”
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Wilson, the first mayor in recent memory who does not own a car, recalled joining up with other transit advocacy groups to form the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition to advocate for better mass transit in 2018. “I have to say, being stood up by your bus is honestly one of the most dispiriting experiences that you can have,” Wilson said.
“And I know every transit rider out there, here today and around the city, knows exactly what I mean. There’s just nothing that makes you feel [more] like you’re not valuable, like your time is not valuable. And it’s serious, right? You can lose a job because you’re half an hour late because your bus didn’t come. … This is our opportunity to start fixing this problem.”
As part of the Denny Way improvement exercise, SDOT came up with a list of nine additional congested corridors “where transit investment can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city overall.” These routes, detailed in an SDOT memo, could be priorities for future investments in transit.