A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part VIII: The Route 322 south of NE 98th Street

Dear Diary,

This is probably the least-informed part of this page.  There's a lot I don't know about bus service on southern Lake City Way NE, except that there's never been all that much of it.

Buses started running on that part of that street in the late 1970s; there's no bus there in the 1977 map, but there is one, the route 307, in the 1979 map.  In September 2002, the 307 was replaced by Sound Transit route 522; this was regarded as a great improvement.  But in December 2009 (143-page PDF, page 129), the 522 had no stops between NE 125th Street and downtown Seattle; it now has one (14-page PDF), which happens to be in the area of interest, at NE 85th Street.  (During most of the 2010s, Sound Transit had the bright idea of keeping all its route maps in a GIS application that causes the Internet Archive to shrink in horror, so I have no idea when that stop appeared.)  At any rate, the northbound stop is #38235, and I'd be very surprised if the southbound one weren't #23595.

As for the stops here, Route 322 was created in October 2021.  The buses that had operated in that corridor in the 19 years between the 307 and the 322, besides the 522, were the route 306 and the route 312.  According to Sound Transit's map books, these were both suburban express buses operating only during rush hours, and probably commuter, one-directional, buses too.  I wouldn't ordinarily expect them to make stops along Lake City Way, but then, I grew up in places that treated the word "express" more seriously than Metro does.  (In Metro-speak, any bus that skips even a single stop it passes, more or less, is an "express", with exceptions for skip-stop patterns downtown.)  At any rate, these six stops exist now, and aren't supposed to exist come Saturday, but are supposed to exist again someday, unlike any of the stops I've discussed so far.  Because supposedly Metro is going to get serious about bus service on Lake City Way in the form of a new route with a two-digit number, the route 77, just as soon as Sound Transit takes the 522 away.

But for now, these stops are closing, and if I know anything about the future, it's that none of it is set in stone.

As before, the links in the lists of stops take you to one or more photos of the relevant stop stored at my Google Drive account.

Lake City Way NE

As I started hiking on Sunday, before I'd even reached any bus stops, I encountered a sticker that cheered me up, which may not quite have been its intent.

 

Northbound, two stops:

• Stop #38560, north of NE 95th Street.
• Stop #23594, just southeast of 16th Avenue NE.  It's between NE 80th and 82nd Streets.  This is the one I missed on my first hike Sunday, because it doesn't have a normal sign.
  
  It's also the one whose rider alert claims it'll be served by route 79 after the 322 goes north.  The 79 runs on NE 75th Street, more than five blocks away, and its new schedule shows no change in that.  So while there's a chance that the sign is telling the truth, and that chance is probably greater than the chance that my yet-to-be-conceived first child will be elected United States President this November, it isn't much greater, and I think I'm on safe ground expecting this stop to be closed soon.
  
  

Southbound, three stops:

• Stop #38230, just north of NE 95th Street.  I doubt the mural behind this stop was commissioned by Metro, but anyway, here's a photo of part of it:
  
  
  
• Stop #38236, northeast of NE 80th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  
• Stop #38237, just northeast of NE 75th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  

12th Avenue NE

Northbound, one stop:

• Stop #23593, north of NE 75th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  

A suggested stop

Six stops, plus whatever handful more further north, is not a lot.  This is not a very impressive route 77 we're looking forward to.  Remember, dear Diary, Lake City Way is diagonal, which means these five-block-apart stops are rather further apart than five blocks apart on more regular streets.

But let's for the moment run with five blocks apart anyway.  For those not keeping score at home, we now have the following:

Stops 23593 and 38237 near 75th.

Stops 23594 and 38236 near 80th.

Stops probably 23595 and certainly 38235 near 85th.

Stops 38560 and 38230 near 95th.

What's missing from this picture?

There are a lot of destination businesses along this part of Lake City Way, but they're of a particular kind ill-suited to bus service.  They are car repair shops, tire shops, car lots both new and used, gas stations ...  The whole vast paraphernalia of automobile service is welcome on southern Lake City Way.  There's a storage location, and although I use a different one myself, I think it's reasonable to count that as part of the automotive orientation of LCW.  There are also, of course, bars, restaurants, and the like, most of which I don't take seriously as destinations.

At the obvious hole in the stop map, there's a bar, The Shanty Tavern, in the northeast corner, a restaurant, Phayathai Cuisine, in the southwest corner, and it's easy to see why there isn't a bus stop there.

Except that it's also easy to see why there should be a bus stop there.  Phayathai Cuisine is one floor of a great big apartment building.  Across NE 90th Street, on the northwest corner, there's another, special, kind of apartment building, Emerald City Senior Living.  Which maintains a van for its residents, but presumably also gets visitors.  And, um, there's one other destination, which I strongly suspect is the real reason there's no bus stop there, at the southeast corner:  Pandora Night Club, also known as Pandora Adult Cabaret and a wide variety of similar names.  (I said, in the previous part, anent beaches, dear Diary, that we'd get back to the topic of nudity.  I wonder - just how widely do Metro buses re-route around Fremont on the day of the solstice parade?)

So yes, one glance at Pandora, and one knows that this intersection is a no-go zone for all right-thinking Seattleites; it is indeed easy to see why there isn't a bus stop there.  But hundreds of Seattleites, right-thinking or not, live at that intersection, and wouldn't it be courteous to offer them bus service?  Even if that made it excessively convenient for some sinners to go about their perfectly legal business?

Well, anyway, dear Diary, I'm now done with what I wanted to say about Metro's reductions of bus service this month, that are somehow being sold as increases in service in media better known than you and I are.  As I read the books listed in part IV, or any comments that appear once I tell some people that this page exists, I may find that I need to add a "Foolish Mortal" page correcting my mistakes about buses, but we can hope not.

In any event, we'll be back to parks and libraries pretty soon, but I have some movies to watch first.  So until then, dear Diary, happy days and happy nights.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part VII: The Route 28 north of NW 97th Street; also, beaches and buses

Dear Diary,

No, I didn't sleep enough.  How about you?

Anyway, though, this is the last big heave of this page.  I want to talk not only about the sad collection of stops closing in the far northwest, but also about beaches, and bus service thereto.

I visited most of these stops on Saturday morning, then went back Monday afternoon, having found that Open Street Map maps three stops I'd ignored.  One of those, however, turned out not to be closing, because it's also a stop on the route D.  I also had doubts that two other stops (which I hadn't ignored) were really closing, but that was because I was applying the wrong standard of evidence to the new schedule; I should've been using preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt.

See, the map shows a transfer point, no less, at NW 100th Place and 7th Avenue NW.

However, the schedule clarifies:  northbound trips end at that stop, stop #28680, where people can indeed transfer (to the route D).  But southbound trips, having turned at 3rd Ave NW and then at Holman Road NW, can't reach the stops across the street from the transfer point, and so they start instead at NW 97th Street:

This is apparently the way the route has worked ever since the extension north became a commuter-only route, which may be all the way back to when it started, for all I know.  (This extension is on the 1973 transit map but not the 1970 one.  The 28 reached NW 105th Street by the time of the 1965 map, but not further north.)  For some reason, none of my copies of the schedule map the Holman-route turn-around used by the non-commuter runs.  Now that every single run uses that turn-around, though, there's no excuse for not showing it.

As before, the links in the lists of stops go to my Google Drive, to folders there containing at least one photo of each stop listed.

Anyway.  The stops:

3rd Avenue NW

Northbound, three stops:

• Stop #28890, north of NW 143rd Street.
• Stop #28880, north of NW 140th Street.
• Stop #28870, north of NW 137th Street.

Southbound, three stops:

• Stop #27790, south of NW 145th Street.
• Stop #27810, just south of NW 140th Street.  A photo of a bus stop with none of the amenities I'm following:
  
  
  
  
• Stop #27820, just south of NW 137th Street.
   

NW 132nd Street

Northbound, one stop:

• Stop #28850, halfway between 4th Avenue NW and 3rd Avenue NW.
  

Southbound, one stop:

• Stop #27840, just west of 3rd Avenue NW.  This is one of the two closing stops on this route that I missed on Saturday.
  

8th Avenue NW

Northbound, two stops:

• Stop #28830, south of NW 132nd Street.
• Stop #28810, just north of NW 127th Street.
  

Southbound, two stops:

• Stop #27860, further south of NW 132nd Street.
• Stop #27880, south of NW 127th Street.
  

NW 125th Street

Northbound, two stops:

• Stop #28800, just east of 8th Avenue NW.
• Stop #28780, just east of Eldorado Lane NW.  This is the other stop that's actually closing that I missed on Saturday, probably because my attention was on a chat with a resident across the street.  While I was photographing it on Monday evening, the 28 bus actually pulled up and stopped.  I saw plenty of 20 buses while walking that route; few 73 buses Saturday evening, but several yesterday; but that was the only commuter bus I saw.  I wasn't on the 322's route at the right times, either Sunday or yesterday.
  

Southbound, one stop:

• Stop #27890, east of 8th Avenue NW.  At this stop, someone had recently installed a new cement pavement.  (Most, but not all, of the stops north of this one are unpaved, like stop #27810 above.)  Who paid for that apron, the home-owner, Metro, or someone else?  What will become of it now?  Does the home-owner get to use it for a grill, or for outdoor parties?
  

3rd Avenue NW

Northbound, five stops:

• Stop #28760, north of NW 120th Street.  This is the first, in this part, of four stops, both northbound and southbound, that have a rather bizarre appurtenance - I can't bring myself to call it an amenity.  Each of these stops has some fencing, of the same kind at each, clearly related to the stop, not the nearby residences.  I have no idea what it's for; it's hard to imagine crowd control ever being called for at the stops in question.
  
• Stop #28750, north of NW 117th Street.  117th is the northernmost route into Carkeek Park along public streets (as opposed to private back yards).
  
• Stop #28740, north of NW 115th Street.
• Stop #28720, north of NW 110th Street.  110th is the middle route into Carkeek Park along public streets.
  
• Stop #28700, north of NW 105th Street, and across the street from Viewlands Elementary School.  Also has fencing, not arranged in any plausible manner for student crowd control; just two panels, one leaning on the other.  This is the southernmost northbound stop closing.
  

Southbound, six stops:

• Stop #27910, some way south of NW 125th Street.  This is the northernmost of three southbound stops along this route that have benches.  While I was photographing this stop, a gentleman came out of the adjacent house and started discussing the closures with me.  He pointed out that it's fine for people on 3rd Avenue to walk over to Greenwood Avenue N, as the rider alert signs suggest, but that 8th Avenue NW is downhill from 3rd.  Were bus riders there supposed to walk five additional blocks uphill?  He said he'd written a letter.  I tend to think of commuter buses, buses that go only one direction in the morning, and only the opposite direction at night, as second-class bus service for a neighbourhood, but evidently there's a wide gulf between second-class and nothing at all, and people who live along commuter bus only streets are well aware of that gulf.
• Stop #27930, just north of NW 120th Street.
• Stop #27940, south of NW 117th Street.  Again, access (though difficult) to Carkeek Park.
• Stop #27950, just south of the line of NW 115th Street.  Has fencing.
  
• Stop #27970, just north of NW 110th Street.  Has a bench.  Again, difficult access to Carkeek Park.
• Stop #27990, just north of NW 105th Street.  Adjacent to Viewlands school.

NW 103rd Street

Southbound, one stop:

• Stop #28000, some ways west of 3rd Avenue NW.  Has both a bench and fencing:
  
  
  

NW 100th Place

Southbound, two stops:

• Stop #28010, just northeast of 7th Avenue NW.  On Saturday I was stunned and more than a little displeased to find that what I'd thought would be the first working stop is instead slated for closure.  Only when I reached 97th Street did I learn that the 28 is only hourly on weekends anyway.  I ended up walking all the way to NW 85th Street, going to a rummage sale along the way, and still made it just as the 28 did.  This stop is the nearest to the street access (6th Avenue NW) to the Eddie McAbee Entrance to Carkeek Park, which involves a whole lot more dirt trail than the NW 110th and 117th streets entrances mentioned above.  The stop across the street from this, which is not closing, is the remaining shred of an excuse Metro has for claiming that the 28 reaches Carkeek Park.  See not far below.
  
• Stop #28020, west and a little north of the intersection of 8th Avenue NW and NW 100th Street.
  

Beaches and buses

Two days before I started you, dear Diary, and a month after the March 13, 2020 lockdowns, Cliff Mass wrote a blog post arguing that outdoor air was safer than indoor air, and, essentially, that it was classist and ableist to close the parks, as was happening in many parts of the US, including (for large parks) Seattle.  It's probable that that post contributed to my decision to start you.

On July 1, 2020, I wrote in you, dear Diary, about Golden Gardens and Carkeek Parks for the first time.  I cited Cliff Mass's post, and then wrote:

"It's piffle anyway.  Seattle is a progressive city, no more capable of classism or ableism than of racism.  Next thing you know, someone will claim the President behaved badly."

Nota bene, at the time the United States President was the esteemed Donald Trump, not the current incumbent.  Anyway, I went on to suggest that if the powers that be really wanted to put a spike in Prof. Mass's argument, they should put a bus up Seaview Avenue NW.

I then wrote to Prof. Mass, saying I'd disagreed with him, and giving him the URL.  Some time later, I discovered he'd killfiled me:  I could no longer either e-mail him or comment on his blog posts.

Whatever that says about his sense of humour (well, there's a reason I stopped writing you all that satirically, dear Diary), I think this is a good occasion to say it straight:

Yes, there actually should be a bus up Seaview Ave NW, and into Golden Gardens Park, as there was from 1977 through September 2012, although toward the end of that time Metro had so completely lost the plot that the route 46 was, guess what? a commuter bus, Mondays through Fridays only.

And there should be, not just a bus that gets a rider within a mile or two of hiking to Carkeek Park's beach, but one that actually goes up NW Carkeek Park Road.  The beach itself is only reachable by stairs, but they're planning to build a new beach access soon, and dollars to doughnuts that'll have an accessible path too.  But instead Metro is getting rid of the risibly poor substitute they provided, that never got within a mile of Carkeek Park Road.

And there should be a bus that goes not just all the way down NE 65th Street, but then up Lake Shore Drive NE in Magnuson Park, all the way to the beach.  Just as if Magnuson Park existed in the same physical reality as the rest of North Seattle.

The lack of beach access by bus, all across North Seattle, isn't precisely ableist:  as far as I know, disabled people can use Metro's Access vans to reach beaches.  (Except, so far and probably for a few more years, Carkeek Park's beach.)  But it is ageist and it is classist.  And it contributes to parking problems well documented in signage all along Seaview, and about which I wrote in "Escaping Carkeek Park".

I don't get it.  This is the agency that invented Trailhead Direct.  So they can work with parks.  What do they have against beaches?  Is it illegal fires?  Who's more likely to start illegal fires at Golden Gardens - arrogant young people who drove there in cars that can carry wood or coal and kindling, or impoverished old people grateful to get to go there at all by bus?  Is it the near-nudity?  We'll get back to that in the last part of this page, but I'd hope not.

It would be stupid of me to expect my words, your pages, dear Diary, to have any direct impact, but all we can do is keep trying.  In any event, we're almost done.  28 stops on the route 20; 14 stops on the route 73 on 15th Avenue NE; 29 stops on the route 28 - that's 71.  There are six stops left, three of which are only route 322 stops, three of which are also route 73 stops as route 73 is (for a few more days) currently configured.  Soon.  Happy minutes or hours until then.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part VI: The Route 73

Dear Diary,

Next in seniority to streetcar coverage of some of the route 20, in 1908, is bus coverage of most of the route 73, by 1965, among the areas losing bus stops.  (Blanchard's Street Railway Era in Seattle, page 114, says streetcar service along 15th Ave NE reached NE 80th St sometime between 1912 and 1925, but the route 73 currently has no bus stops that far south on 15th.)  Also, I want to talk a little more about the Northwest Puppet Center.  So let's start, shall we?

All of the route 73 stops being closed are either on 15th Ave NE, or are shared with the route 322, and are covered under that route instead.  So no need for street headings this time.

I followed this route Saturday evening, and then went back today because I'd found that I'd made two mistakes - missing one stop, and mis-identifying another stop on Open Street Map.  So I had to go back over half the distance.

Again, links in the lists below go to my Google Drive, to photos of each stop.

Northbound, seven stops:

• Stop #39210, just north of NE 115th Street.
• Stop #39190, just north of NE Northgate Way.  Not far south of this, on the same side of the street, is the mural of the cat that I showed you, dear Diary, in part I of this page.
  
• Stop #39170, just north of NE 103rd Street.
• Stop #39160, just south of NE 100th Street.
• Stop #39140, just north of NE 95th Street.
• Stop #39120, just north of NE 90th Street.  This is the closest northbound stop to the NW Puppet Center, which is two blocks north and across the street.
  
• Stop #39100, north of NE 85th Street, a block from Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, and across the street from Waldo Woods.
  

I was going to say that none of these have any amenities except pavement, but then noticed that my photo of stop #39100 appears to show the top of a trash can attached to the pole:

So I dunno.

Southbound, seven much more interesting stops:

• Stop #38950, north of NE 115th Street.  Has all the amenities.
• Stop #38970, just south of NE Northgate Way.  Has a shelter with art and a bench.  The art may or may not be the best art on these shelters, but anyway this photo is the best one I took of these shelters.
  
  
  
  
• Stop #38990, south of NE 104th Street.  Has a shelter and a trash can.
• Stop #39010, just south of NE 98th Street.  Has a shelter with art and a bench:
• Stop #39030, just south of NE 94th Street.  Has all the amenities.  This is the nearest stop in this direction to the Puppet Center, which is a block to the south.
  
• Stop #39050, south of NE 89th Street.  Has a shelter.
• Stop #39070, south of NE 82nd Street.  Has a shelter with a bench and a trash can.  Maple Leaf Reservoir Park is a block west, although the route 65 stop at NE 85th Street is closer to the park.
  

I noticed today that some shelters I saw as not having art actually have it facing the street, away from the sidewalk.  The way I see it, that location makes the art available to drivers (including bus drivers) and passengers (including bus passengers), but not with any safety to pedestrians (including people waiting for the bus).  So I'm not sure it's a real amenity of a bus stop in the sense I'm using that word.

Anyway, Northwest Puppet Center!  I'd already looked up its bare-bones Web page, and noticed that that page describes as current an exhibit that, the same page says, closed in May.  So I got curious:  was it out of operation?  And today I went up the steps to the entrance.  Where I was gobsmacked to find, of all things, a small playground.

Now, Maple Leaf Hill is seriously under-parked, and certainly under-playgrounded in particular, but I didn't see any kids there.  Anyway, I looked at the door, where a sign announces a new exhibit in October:

So this left me curious.  Is this a private house that's also a museum?  Or is it really a public place where, for example, parents could bring small children to the playground?  A significant element is the "Carter Family Puppet Theater"; do the Carter family live there?

Not according to the King County Assessor.  But there's also an e-mail address on the bare-bones Web page, so careful parents can check for themselves.

The page's only other link is to the "World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts".  Sadly, this site doesn't return the favour:

You'll have noticed, dear Diary, that I've changed all the parts' titles.  Not until I was reasonably sure I had a complete list could I really count the stops closing, but I think the number now used is the final number.  The count of 77 excludes stop #17170 on the route 20, which appears likely to be acquired by the route 62, and stop #28680 on the route 28, which is already in use by the route D.  That count includes stop #23594 on the route 322, whose rider alert sign claims future service by the route 79, and stop #17570 on the route 20, whose rider alert sign claims future service by the route 45; neither of those buses currently serve or even pass those stops, and their promised schedules show no route changes enabling them to start doing so.

The stops will no longer be served by any buses as of September 14, which is this Saturday.  I have no idea how many people Metro devotes to stop demolition, so I can't begin to guess how long it'll take them to remove the physical stop elements.  However, most rider alert signs whose bottoms I photographed bear a note saying "Remove 10/1/24".  This implies that at least the poles the signs are mostly attached to will stay around that long, and perhaps other physical elements as well.

One of my purposes in writing this page was to notify people of these stop closures in time that anyone who might have an emotional attachment of some kind to a particular stop - most obviously, who might have experienced a proposal there - could have a chance to visit it again.  Obviously the closer we get to September 14, let alone if I fail to get those parts written until later than that, the less likely that is.  But then, I'm not seeing much reason to think they could find out about the closures from you anyway, dear Diary, so few people seem to be reading this page.  Ah well.

Before I remembered the removal date, I still hoped to get part VII, about the route 28, written in you tonight, dear Diary, and part VIII, about the route 322, is relatively short, so maybe that too.  But there are other things I spend my time on, so now that I have remembered it, I'll do those things instead.  A good night, dear Diary; we'll probably meet again tomorrow.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part V: The Route 20

Dear Diary,

FINALLY!  Some of the photos that are the point of this page.

Near as I can tell, the seventy-nine bus stops in question have anywhere from zero to five amenities.  My photographs treat these amenities somewhat differently.

• Pavement.  In general, I was photographing upward, so my photos don't show at all whether the bus stop has noticeable paving.  However, this amenity is a requisite for the next, so any stop that has that also has this.
• Shelter.  I did take pains to photograph shelters.  This amenity is a requisite for the next.
  
• Art.  I didn't see any murals that seemed intended for the bus stops, or anything like that, but many Metro bus shelters include photos under the auspices of the Photographic Center Northwest, and that includes some shelters likely to be re-located soon.  I took pains to include excerpts in my photos.  Neither this nor the next two are requisites for any of the others.
  
• Trash cans.  I'm pretty sure I encountered none at the route 28 stops I visited first, but the only route for which I specifically took pains to photograph evidence of trash cans was the route 20, whose stops I visited last.  This may seem an odd sort of amenity, but I'm quite sure it's actually a significant expense of any route that includes it.
  
• Benches.  I took pains to photograph these.  All but one are metal, of the kind usual in Metro shelters.

Open Street Map shows bus stops, and identifies some by cross streets, but if it has stop numbers or other metadata, I can't find them.  I remember, some time since I got housed in March 2021, finding a bus stop map at King County Metro's website, but I can't find it again now, and don't know whether it had metadata either.

I took no notes while hiking, trusting a) that I wouldn't miss anything so big and obvious as a bus stop and b) that I'd be able to correlate my photos with Open Street Map.  The latter confidence was well-placed, partly because the "rider alert" signs attached to most of these stops turn out to be fairly rich in geographical detail.

The links usually point to my Google Drive's folder of the photo(s).

N 80th Street

N 80th Street, 1st Ave NE, and Woodlawn Ave NE were parts of the route 16 by October 1943.

One northbound stop:

• Stop # 17610, just east of the alley between Corliss Avenue N and Sunnyside Avenue N.

One southbound stop:

• Stop #17100, just west of Corliss Avenue N.  Has a shelter (hence paving), art, a bench, and a trash can.  Obviously worth showing you one of the photos, dear Diary:
  
   

1st Avenue NE

Two northbound stops:

• Stop #17600, just south of NE 80th Street.  Although I've waited at this stop for the route 20 several times, I managed to miss the stop while hiking north, and had to photograph it while going back south.
• Stop #17590, just north of NE 77th Street.
  

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #17110, just south of NE 80th Street.
• Stop #17120, just south of NE 77th Street.

Woodlawn Avenue NE

Two northbound stops:

• Stop #17570, just southeast of the alley between 2nd Ave NE and Latona Ave NE.  This is the library stop, north of Green Lake.  At this stop, whether by mistake or as a bad joke, the sign claims readers should sit tight, because the route 45 will detour from East Green Lake Drive N just for them.  At stop #17140, across the street from this one, the sign forecasts the stop's closure; I don't see how both can be right.
  
  
• Stop #17560, just south of the alley between NE 72nd Street and NE 71st Street.  This stop, unusually for a northbound stop anywhere in North Seattle, has a bench, and further unusually for any bus stop, the bench is wooden rather than metal.  I wonder whose actual property this bench is, and what will become of it when the stop is removed.  Someone was sitting on it when I was photographing, so the photo is oblique.
  
  
  

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #17140, somewhat southeast of Latona Ave NE.  Has all the amenities:
  
  
  
• Stop #17160, halfway between NE 71st Street and NE Ravenna Boulevard.  Has a bench adjacent to City of Seattle trash cans.

The next southbound stop, stop #17170 announced as 5th Ave NE but actually closer to 4th Ave NE, south of Green Lake, appears to need no requiem.  The sign says the route 62 is adopting it, and since the route 62 actually passes that spot along Woodlawn, there's no reason to doubt that.  That stop has pavement, a shelter, and a trash can.

NE Ravenna Boulevard

These fiddly bits of the route were actually part of the 26 route, not the 16, from at latest 1949 onward.

One northbound stop:

• Stop #26210, just northeast of Woodlawn Ave NE.  I always thought this was the schedule's little joke, never noticed an actual stop there when riding north, never noticed anyone board or exit there.  (I'm really not the most observant of people, dear Diary.)  So I was quite surprised Sunday, to find it really exists.

4th Avenue NE

One southbound stop:

• Stop #26220, just northeast of NE 65th Street.  This is an actual unpaved stop, somewhat unusual for this route.
  

2nd Avenue NE

One northbound stop:

• Stop #27160, north of Woodlawn Avenue NE.
  

Latona Avenue NE

Part of the route 20's path on Latona is the oldest part of the route.  Latona from NE 56th Street to NE 65th Street was first used for streetcars in 1908, according to Blanchard's Street Railway Era in Seattle, page 65.  The rest of Latona (and Thackeray, below) was in use for buses by January 1941.

The older northern part is apparently the likeliest of these parts of the route to be revived, although that isn't very likely at all.  As recently as 2020, Metro was apparently willing to return to the Meridian streetcar route (2-page PDF).  The problem is, the Seattle Department of Transportation believes the current pavement of NE 56th Street isn't hard enough to stand up to frequent buses, and considers hardening that pavement a low priority, which appears to me to be bureaucratic polite-speak for "Never".

Anyway, eight northbound stops:

• Stop #27150, just south of NE 65th Street.
• Stop #27140, just north of the line of NE 62nd Street.
• Stop #27130, just north of NE 60th Street.
• Stop #27120, just north of NE 58th Street.
• Stop #27100, just north of NE 54th Street.
• Stop #27090, just north of NE 52nd Street.
• Stop #27052, just south of NE 50th Street.  Has a trash can.
  
• Stop #27051, north of NE 45th Street.  When I was working in Ballard, in the spring of 2023, this was usually where I waited in the evening for the route 20 until it came or I gave up and walked.  Mildly unusually for a northbound stop, it has all the amenities except a bench.  So I had all kinds of fun trying to fish the schedule out of my satchel without setting the satchel down, because the pavement was rain-wet.  At least the art was diverting.
  
  
  
  
  

Five southbound stops:

• Stop #26230, south of NE 64th St.  This is where my hourlong waits for the route 26 happened.
  
• Stop #26240, north of NE 60th St.
• Stop #26250, just south of NE 59th St.
• Stop #26270, south of NE 55th St.  This is the stop for, according to Open Street Map, McDonald International Elementary School.  So it's the only one of these with amenities:  shelter, bench, art.
  
  
  
• Stop #26290, south of NE 51st St.

Thackeray Place NE

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #26301, just south of NE 50th Street.
• Stop #26302, just north of NE 45th Street.
   

And that's it, dear Diary.  That's the legacy of the route 20, and of the route 26 before it.  Kinda sad, isn't that?

I have to go find three 28 stops, one 73 stop, and figure out why my results on Lake City Way differed so from Open Street Map, before I can write the remaining parts of this page in you, dear Diary.  I hope to finish that today, but won't be surprised if it takes until tomorrow.  Happy hours, day and night, until then.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part IV: Sources

Dear Diary,

My main sources for this page are the photos I've taken while hiking, the photos I took of transit maps, and the bus schedules I haven't discarded since getting housed.  However, I've also used some other sources.

Bus schedules

The best way to get these, I think, is to go to Metro's customer service office at 2nd and Jackson.  Almost everywhere else they're distributed, they're geographically focused.  Unfortunately, I didn't find out about that office until September 2021, so the oldest set of schedules I have, has gaps.

Transit maps

I've put all these photos into my Google Drive account, and the links point to them.

• 1896 map: 
  
  
  
  
• 1915 map
• April 1933 map
• January 1941 map, January 1942 booklet describing the routes, October 1943 map, February 1944 map, May 1945 map, 1949 map, maps downloaded from 1941-1944 annual reports
• 1952 map, 1954 map, 1956 map, June 1958 map (1st of 9 main sources)
• 1965 map (2nd)
  
• 1970 map, November 1973 map (3rd), November 1974 map, June 1975 map, January 1977 map, June 1979 map
• June 1980 map  (4th), May 1983 map, 1988 map (5th), September 1989 map
• June 1990 map, September 1991 map, September 1992 map, 1993 map, and the rest of these are September:  1994 map, 1995 map (6th), 1997 map, 1998 map, 1999 map 
• February 2000 map, and the rest of these are September:  2001 map, 2002 map (7th), 2003 map, 2004 map, 2005 map, 2006 map, 2007 map
• October 2010 map with information about routes, October 2012 map (downloaded from Internet Archive), February 2014 map with information about routes, September 2016 map (downloaded from Internet Archive) (8th)
• September 2023 map (downloaded at the time) (9th of 9 main sources)

I certainly haven't looked carefully at all of these maps.

The ones in bold face came from the University of Washington's Suzzallo Library's map area, call numbers G4283.K3P22 and G4284.S4P22.  Most of the rest came from the Seattle Central Library's Seattle Room, which has considerably more of them than are catalogued (and also has many of the boldfaced ones I photographed at Suzzallo).

I didn't photograph any maps that I recognised as being by private companies or citizens, such as Rand McNally (believe it or not).  Some of those are at each library, and fill in some of the earlier gaps.

Sources for recent times

• English Wikipedia sv "List of King County Metro bus routes", article started in 2009.
• The Regional Transit Map Books produced by Sound Transit before it decided printing was beneath its dignity.  I didn't photograph all of those the Seattle Room has.
• King County Metro, from February 1999 to September 2016, kept its archives of detailed service change announcements in a convenient table of links, before they discovered the joys of obfuscating things.  The Internet Archive preserves that trove of information.
  
• The Seattle Transit Blog, to the extent that anything there is findable.
  

Books

•  The Street Railway Era in Seattle:  A Chronicle of Six Decades by Leslie Blanchard, Forty Fort, Pennsylvania:  Harold E. Cox, c1968.
• Routes:  An Interpretive History of Public Transportation in Metropolitan Seattle by Walt Crowley, commissioned by Metro Transit on the Occasion of its 20th Anniversary 1993, Prepared by Crowley Associates, Inc.  The manuscript, held by the Seattle Room, is reputedly vastly more detailed.
• Transit:  The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region by Jim Kershner and the Staff of HistoryLink, Seattle, WA:  HistoryLink / Documentary Media, c2019.

My impression is that all these authors prefer trains to buses, but I'm still wading through Blanchard's, so I could be wrong about the other two.

And now on to the Route 20 stops, dear Diary.

 

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part III: Maps and comments

Dear Diary,

Here I am again, a little sooner than expected, with maps.  And also opinion.

Some history and maps

I said in the first part that North Seattle has not previously had so many bus stop demolitions at once.  How can I know this?

I can't, really, but I can make a pretty good guess, and it's by comparing maps.  I have cell phone photos of the North Seattle parts of dozens of transit maps, and out of those, I picked the following to compare in detail, using the eleven regions mentioned elsewhere recently as a heuristic:  1958, 1965, 1973, 1980, 1988, 1995, 2002, 2016 and 2023.  In general, I looked for changes either of the form of a longish street appearing or disappearing, or a longish street getting or losing a gap.

On that basis, from 1958 to 2000, four times, significant blocks of streets lost transit in North Seattle.  Twice in the 2010s, two blocks of streets lost transit.  Now four are doing so at once.  I don't like this upward trend.

The first cut was of one of the briefest-lived of these routes.  In the 1980 and 1983 bus maps, the route 316 was shown as following 1st Ave NE from Northgate to the city limits.  I don't have any maps between 1983 and 1988, so don't know how many years that route actually lasted, but anyway, here's the map.

The second cut is of an oddity of all maps I have from 1983 to 1991.  From the 1940s on, there's been an east-west route following what is now N 45th St.  But during the 1980s, there was another following N and NE 50th St.  It went from Stone Way N to 20th Ave NE, and it was usually numbered 46.

The third and fourth are only one year apart.  The route 25, one of the old ones, had from 1965 or earlier to 1997 a turn-around that led it up 37th Ave NE in Lake City to the city limits.  Then the 25 went away, and so did 37th Ave NE as a bus route:

The route 6, another old one, was the Aurora Ave N bus, but only up to Green Lake, which it wrapped around, coming out on Stone Way N, and staying there all the way to N 40th St.  It died in 1998.

After that, the quiet before the storm.

In 1973 appeared what I called for long ago, a bus up Seaview Ave NW.  It only reached Shilshole Marina.  In 1977 it was extended up to Golden Gardens Park, but with a note on the map itself reading "Summer only".  The note was dropped by 1979.  English Wikipedia documents that before this route (also numbered 46, most of the time) died, it was a commuter bus only, when it should, by then, have been a summer fun bus only.  No wonder it died, between 2010 and 2012.

Also between 2010 and 2012, something much more trivial, except that it was an east-west route across Maple Leaf Hill.  There've always been buses between 25th Ave NE and Lake City Way NE, but from 1999 to 2010 there were also buses between Banner Way NE and Lake City Way NE, so with one transfer one could save a lot of energy ascending or descending the hill.  But then the bus routes on the hill changed, and that went away.

Four years later, in 2016, two older routes were gone.  When the route 48 was split, that route stopped going up 15th Ave NE from NE 45th to NE 65th streets, as it had done since 1999.

A loop in Laurelhurst had been served by buses since 1941, if not earlier, but was removed in March 2016.

So it's not as though bus stops had never been removed before in North Seattle.  But please, dear Diary, compare even the biggest of those above, Seaview and the Laurelhurst loop, with what's coming up:

I assume much more drastic things have happened elsewhere since the light rail opened up, but assuming that's true, I'm baffled that North Seattle was spared for so long.  If anyone who reads this can tell me why, I'll be interested to hear.

Ridership numbers:  A case study

Early in my work on this page, I contacted what I was told was the PR e-mail address for Metro, and reached a guy named Al Sanders.  I asked him for the kind of historical info I've wound up piecing together myself, but also took for granted that he had a press kit all worked up, full of ridership numbers to show that wiping out a dozen North Seattle bus routes, and four long stretches of bus stops, was really the best of all possible things to do.

Well, he never actually got back to me with the history, but he was plainly more confused by my openness to the ridership numbers, which he said would be a lot of work for him.  I figured they'd probably vouch for Metro's case, and so he'd have them handy to feed to reporters.  Naïve of me, I expect.

Thing is, I learnt years ago that ridership numbers can be manipulated, and so aren't trustworthy.

When I moved into my present abode, the 26 was still running.  Or anyway limping.  It promised me two destinations of interest to me, the North Transfer Station and downtown.  But after I'd twice waited over an hour for a bus - at the time they were supposed to be half an hour apart - I gave up.  I usually walked to the transfer station; the route 62, a few blocks away, stops near there too, but I resented being manipulated into increasing the ridership of the less convenient bus.  The 62, of course, was utterly reliable at this time.  I could hardly help inferring that that was because, every time a 62 driver was absent, a 26 driver filled in.  (They may have volunteered.  The 26 route had several of the preposterous turns that make the 20 route more exciting than one really wants a bus to be.  But I still resented being manipulated.)

My first job since becoming housed was at the south end of downtown, and obviously best reached by light rail.  But my second, this is now winter 2023, was more convenient to reach by bus.  And so I learnt that the 20 was more frequent than the 26 had been, but was no more reliable.  More precisely, it was usually on time morning rush hours, but prone to disappearing entirely in the evenings.  Obviously Metro was still treating the Latona bus as a source of labour on other, more important, routes.

While I was working at this job there were rumblings that the 20 could be deleted, and of a survey that everyone should fill out.  I was working 60 hours per week and couldn't be bothered.  I'm pretty sure the survey I actually did fill out, months later, was a different one.  It had the effrontery to ask me, as its only question, what I thought the best feature of the replacement route 61 would be.  My answer?  "When the 20 is gone, Metro will still have a whipping boy bus route, because it'll have the 61."

In September 2023, the updated schedules were advertised as representing Metro adapting to the situation rather than making promises it couldn't keep.  And, in fact, I've found the 20 more reliable, though not actually reliable, this past summer, when it's connected four places I care about - my house, UW, North Seattle College, and Northgate.  But of course Metro had already decided, before September 2023, that the route was doomed.

So yes, I asked for ridership numbers.  I was never out to be the squeaky wheel, which is why I've waited so very late to write about this, and I figured reporting them here would make it clear that Metro had no alternative.  And in fact, in researching this series, I've reluctantly concluded that in some meaningful sense, Metro really did have no alternative.  The people at the Seattle Transit Blog point out that coverage and ridership actually conflict.  Every time a bus is run down Seaview, that's one less bus available for, say, the route 5.  In the real world, transit agencies have to focus on both, but in our particular real space and time right now, Metro has spent years trying to maintain coverage while it waits to see what the new normal will really be like, and now has to return to retrenching in the interests of ridership.

I just wish Metro hadn't considered it necessary, in order to do that, to tell me that my house isn't a destination it finds worth serving.  I think a proper response to that is to try, as best I can, to celebrate the bus stops it's about to destroy.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part II: The routes

Dear Diary,

This part is still really more or less introductory, so let's get right to it, shall we?  I said in the last part that my focus in this page is on bus stops, but this part concentrates the things I really have to say about bus routes instead.

North Seattle routes or parts of routes to be deleted

According to this page, as of, um, today.  (That URL will almost certainly contain different contents starting not later than March 2025, and I have no idea where these contents will be from that point on, but the Internet Archive is probably the best bet.)

The ones that'll get their own parts, because they have stops getting closed, are asterisked*.

Route 16

The current route 16, slated for deletion, is not very old; the previous one only went away eight years ago, after all.  This one is an express version of the route 5, and it's a kind of bus that serves only a single purpose, a commuter bus.  That is, all the trips in the morning are in one direction, and all the trips in the evening are in the other direction, so the only purpose that can be accomplished with it is to go somewhere from some particular area and come back again to that area rather later.  Anyway, I know of no bus stops specific to it, and haven't gone there to look for any.  I might not have found them anyway, because it's been "suspended" for the past year, and it looks like suspended routes' bus stops might get demolished too (see route 304 below).

*Route 20

This is the route I live near, and I have more to say about it below, but the route 20 is, as I said, just three years old.

The old routes 16 and 26 were inheritances from the Seattle Transit System, a municipal bus service that operated 1941-1973.  Nearly all of the STS bus routes in North Seattle were more or less north-south commuter buses; STS bus maps actually reserved space to explain exactly where downtown each route stopped.  In the part of North Seattle between Green Lake and what's now I-5, the 16 took Meridian Ave N, the 26 Latona Ave NE.  Previously, the local streetcar had split the difference:  it took Meridian north to N/NE 56th St, then moved over to Latona.

As I said, the 16 died in March 2016.  It was replaced by two buses.  The 62 took over most of its route, but instead of continuing north from NE 65th Street, instead became also the NE 65th Street bus.  So the northernmost part of the 16 route, to North Seattle College and Northgate, got grafted onto the 26 (which had previously ended near Green Lake), until in 2021 Metro decided to kill the 26 too.

At this point I have to introduce yet another old route, the 41, on which it turns out English Wikipedia has a detailed article.  The 41, which started in 1970, was an express between Northgate and downtown, and then a local between Northgate and Lake City.  With the opening of light rail to Northgate in 2021, Metro decided there was no further need for the 41 express, but it had to continue running a shuttle between Lake City and Northgate, and since that isn't much of a route all by itself, what they've been doing ever since is trying to find a worthwhile continuation of it.

The actual 41 route through Lake City was taken by the new route 75.  But the 20 was apparently further compensation to Lake City for the 41's loss.  It takes a different local route from Lake City to Northgate, then the 26 route from Northgate to NE 45th St, and heads from there to UW.  What I've observed is that it's reasonably busy with UW students up to about 55th, but pretty deserted the rest of the way to Northgate.  (Now that I'm a North Seattle College student, I know one reason why that is:  North Seattle College is now overwhelmingly online.)  Below I suggest some other reasons the 20 might be unpopular, but anyway, I never felt confident that the route would succeed.  And now it hasn't.  In the ongoing reduction of usefulness Lake City residents are getting in the counter-balances to their shuttle, the new route 61 will go from the Lake City Fred Meyer to the Greenwood Fred Meyer.

As a result, twenty-eight bus stops are due for demolition, on 1st Ave NE, Woodlawn Ave NE and Latona Ave NE.

*Route 28 north of somewhere around NW 95th St

No, no, dear Diary, please re-assure any reader who's panicking, the route 28 is not being deleted!!  Only its northward extension, into that part of the city that's merely belonged to Seattle for seventy years.  Only that.  And that extension, as far back as I've been able to trace it, has been commuter-only; when I hiked it Saturday morning, I was already too late to catch the last bus, having arrived at 9:30 a.m.  (Of course, it doesn't run on Saturdays anyway, but let's not quibble.)

The 28 was another of the inheritances from Seattle Transit System.  It's actually the second-strongest surviving inheritance in North Seattle, still running a reasonably full schedule on weekdays (but only hourly on weekends, as I learnt to my sorrow).  It was extended to NW 145th St sometime not long before 1973.

Problem is, because of obstacles like Carkeek Park, the extension runs mostly on 3rd Ave NW, not 8th Ave NW like the main route 28.  And that puts it way too close, as I think Metro sees things, to the strongest inheritance in North Seattle, the route 5.  So the extension is getting the axe.

I think this is where the largest single group of bus stops due for demolition is, thirty-one, but I only got photos of twenty-eight, so I have to go back.  I hope to tell you tonight, dear Diary, about the route 20 stops, but can't yet about these.  These stops are mostly on 3rd Ave NW, of course, but also on NW 132nd St, 8th Ave NW, NW 125th St, and a few more streets at the extension's southern end.  (How many, I'm not sure.  The new schedule disagrees with the facts on the ground.)

Route 64

Not terribly long ago, dear Diary, there was a profusion of buses running through NE with numbers in the 60s and 70s.  I always thought they were mostly University of Washington-directed.  But in the oldest route 64 schedule I have, from mid-2021, it instead ran from a corner of Jackson Park, on NE 145th St, down 30th and 35th Aves NE through Lake City and Wedgwood, then made way too many stops for a supposed express on NE 65th St, and caught I-5 to South Lake Union and First Hill.  Oh, and it was a commuter bus, though with lots of runs.  For some reason the coming of light rail, or more likely the waning of COVID-19, led it to lose its northernmost stops.  Then it started getting fewer and fewer runs, and now there won't be any more.  But none of its stops in North Seattle, as far as I know, are unique to it.

*Route 73

The route 73 is yet another one that was re-routed in September 2021; I'm beginning to detect a pattern here.  It used to run arrow-straight on 15th Ave NE from Ravenna Park to Jackson Park.  But when the Roosevelt light rail station opened, it was diverted to meet that.  So now it enters and leaves 15th via Lake City Way NE, close to NE 75th St.

But that's only half the story.  Most of the 73's runs were actually runs of route 373, a bus between Aurora Village and UW.  And the 373 was deleted in October 2021, when other service from Aurora Village was added.

Well, having walked the part of 15th Ave NE that the remainder of route 73 has covered since then, I think I can understand why that remaining route is being deleted.  There are lots of restaurants and bars, but I'm pretty sure people thinking of destination restaurants, for example, don't promptly think of 15th Ave NE.  I only found two clear destinations of interest to people other than those destinations' residents, and one of those is an artwork, not the kind of thing one visits all that often:

The other is the NW Puppet Center, which might bear more frequent visits.

Still, it's kind of a shame.  The STS didn't run buses on a bunch of really important roads, like Roosevelt Way NE, Aurora Ave N, or Leary Way NW, or ran them only on part of the length; the fact that major routes occupy all those streets in full now is to King County Metro's real, and mostly recent, credit.  So STS did run its route 7 on 15th Ave NE; in other words, another of the decades-old survivors, albeit under a different number, is biting the dust this year.

Seventeen route 73 stops are being closed, but two of those are also route 322 stops, so there are fifteen I'm going to cover under route 73.  And I only got photos of fourteen, so again, later, dear Diary.

Route 301

There's been a route 301 in Shoreline for at least twenty years, but I don't have as much information about Shoreline buses as I do about North Seattle ones; sorry, dear Diary.  In mid-2021 it was a commuter bus that ran from Aurora Village to enter I-5 at N 175th St.  But then it was re-configured to go to Northgate rather than downtown, which made it just barely a North Seattle bus.  It was one of four buses doing more or less similar things.  That's something King County Metro did a whole lot of, from the 1980s to the decade of the 2000s, but has been dialing back on, and I guess they decided that the arrival of light rail in Shoreline was the time to simplify this particular complex.  Actually, though, route 301 was suspended a year ago.

Route 302

The current route 302 was created in September 2021 like the current route 20, and they're also alike in having been found wanting.  It's a commuter bus that runs from Richmond Beach via NW Richmond Beach Road, 3rd Ave NW and N 200th St to Aurora Village, then down Meridian to I-5 at N 175th St.  Only a stop at Northgate makes it at all North Seattle.  Then it goes to First Hill.  Six months later the route 303 was created, which follows the same route but only starting from Aurora Village, and that's the one that's won the competition, and is being rewarded with a bunch of stops in downtown Seattle as well.

Route 304

This is another older Shoreline route.  In early 2021 it was a commuter bus, but had the longest local route, from Richmond Beach via Dayton Ave N to N 145th St.  It shares the same printed schedule with route 301, and was likewise suspended a year ago.  Which gave Metro the chance to do what I found when I walked N 145th St on Saturday very early:  A whole bunch of stops proclaiming that they were "new" stops.  Now, several of these stops appear in the old route 304 map as transfer points, which obviously means they were stops then.  Essentially, King County Metro is trying to even its score by counting the re-opening of stops it closed last year as brand new stops.  The shelter at Greenwood Ave N sure doesn't look brand-new; on the other hand, when I visited, its sign pole had been cut off at the ground.  ANYWAY, point is, King County Metro is, in fact, taking the best part of route 304 for North Seattle, that it covered half of 145th St, and making that part of the job of a new route 333.  So this deleted route, from North Seattle's perspective, is being fully replaced.

Route 320

This commuter bus that took Lake City Way NE across the city limits to Northgate was, like the 302, created in September 2021, and like the 301 and 304, suspended in September 2023.  And now it's gone.

*Route 322 south of Northgate

This is another Lake City Way NE commuter bus.  It's surviving, but where it used to go to the Roosevelt station, now it's going to the Northgate one.  As a result, six bus stops (two of which are shared with the 73) are being abandoned; I only currently have photos of four, so even this small group is delayed.  Sound Transit route 522 currently also serves LCW, and all day at that, but has only two stops (one on each side, not counted in my six) in the affected area, which is from NE 75th St to NE Ravenna Ave, where the 372 enters LCW.

The plan is that a new route 77 will be the wonderful LCW bus that the 65, 40, and E are on other busy streets.  But it's on hold, because Sound Transit is running the 522, even with few stops.  This is analogous to why Fritz Hedges Waterway Park doesn't have restrooms:  the University of Washington has promised to build some, some year this century.  Sound Transit has said it'll re-route the 522 from Roosevelt station to 130th St station once that station opens, in a year or two, and then Metro intends to dust off the 77 plans and see what it can do.  (Source, which may not say exactly what I have.)

Route 330

This route goes from Lake City mostly through Shoreline to Shoreline Community College.  It runs all day, but only once per hour for the most part.  It isn't in the 2002 transit map but is in the 2003 one, which means it was created too long ago for coverage in some of my sources.  Nor do I know the reason it's being deleted, and I think that deletion is especially peculiar because Sound Transit is ballyhooing its devotion to creating east-west routes in this whole change.

None of route 330's stops in North Seattle are unique to it.

Route 347

This is another paired route like the 301/304 and 302/303 (and for that matter, long ago, the 26/28).  The 347 and 348 both start from Northgate and go north.  They do a complicated dance as far as the Crest Cinema and the Shoreline branch of the King County Library System, but after that the 347 goes north and the 348 goes west.  Unfortunately for the 347's longevity, where it has gone north to is the Mountlake Terrace Transit Center, where there's now a brand-spanking-new light rail station, so good-bye 347.  Both routes follow the same path in North Seattle (in fact, up 15th Ave NE, providing the northern terminus of the 73's bus stop demolitions), so the 347's deletion doesn't add any stop demolitions of its own.

Whew, it's getting late, dear Diary, and I have a lot of work to do to get the next part written.  Until we meet again, happy hours.