A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

I normally introduce you as being about "public amenities".  Although my main focus is running water for homeless people, and parks and libraries both supply running water to homeless people, I've written in you about parks that don't supply running water - in fact, am documenting my current water fountain hikes with pages titled after such parks.  Well, buses don't supply running water either, and although a bus helped enormously when I desperately needed running water Saturday morning, that would've been a much trickier negotiation indeed if I'd been pushing a cart, as I did in my last years of homelessness to date.  But buses are public amenities.  And considering that two of your first pages, currently enjoying a surprising surge in popularity, are subtitled "Things We've Lost", I don't think talking about things we're about to lose, specifically a whole lot of bus stops, is all that out of place here.

Another thing to consider:  dear Diary, you probably aren't familiar with much of the terminology this series will draw on.  Please do what I assume you've already done with other terminology I've written in you, and look it up in English Wikipedia and other such sites that I assume you're on good terms with.  I don't think any humans who might read your pages will find any unfamiliar words; I'm sorry, though, to have to assign you what amounts to homework so you can understand what you're telling those people.

Yet another thing to consider:  I've been working on this series for weeks, and one of the first things I learned is that the upcoming cuts to bus service in North Seattle are the biggest since bus service here began.  It's not a trivial story, and I've been surprised that nobody else is talking about it, content to settle for the razzle-dazzle of new light rail stops instead.  But today I decided to do some comparisons, and found that West Seattle, of all places (it's nowhere near present light rail), has seen similar cuts in the past decade.  (Key route numbers:  35, 37.)  It looks like North Seattle is simply late to the bus-stop demolition party, and maybe that's why nobody thinks it's worth talking about.

Let's start with that:  routes and bus stops.

Bus routes and bus stops

Perhaps the first time I noticed Erica C. Barnett, now of PubliCola, as a writer, was a story she wrote for The Stranger in 2009, complaining that King County Metro, which runs the local buses around here, was privileging emotional appeals over data, more or less.  I think my life story is actually an excellent illustration of problems with technocracy, but I'm still enough a man of my generation to find great emotional appeal in ideas like "data-driven".  So one thing in particular stuck with me about that story, her hostility to "squeaky wheel"s.  So I don't want to be one here.

The thing is, though, that I'd already internalised, from living where I now do, a core difference between bus routes and bus stops.  Let's say that a travel route in general is defined by where it stops, in what order.  Buses' routes are relatively inflexible as travel routes go - certainly less flexible than my hikes, for example.  But actually, this can vary.  King County Metro currently operates two services, Dial-A-Ride Transit (DART), and an app-based taxi service (Flex), both of which offer more flexibility than Metro's standard buses.  Still, the buses of concern to me in my daily life are pretty inflexible.

So it's possible for me to turn that definition around:  Bus routes are defined by which bus stops they visit, in which order.  Bus stops are the points of departure and of arrival, the starts and destinations, and routes are simply ways to connect them.  Bus stops don't have their own romance, but Bus Stop is a romance, albeit one now troubling, while Busman's Honeymoon is a murder mystery.  Railfans are right about this much:  there's no such thing as a busfan.  But bus stops, as gates of entry to transit systems whose limits are only hazily known to most of their users, have a minimal degree of mystery that partly makes up for their prosaic components and even more prosaic usual uses.

Concretely, I started this, more or less, with history, because I've already lived here long enough to know some of that history.  And it turns out that routes are much more flexible than bus stops, as one might expect, since the physicality of bus stops is much more, um, concrete, than that of bus routes.  The route currently numbered 5, the Greenwood bus, has borne that number since the early 1940s, but the route itself is decades older, built for streetcars in 1906 to 1909.  On the other hand, the route I live near has only had its number for three years, a shorter time than I've lived near it, but there have been stops near where I now live for at least ninety years.  This kind of thing isn't at all atypical.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days mostly photographing bus stops that will soon vanish.  They deserve that much.

However, the next part is about the routes being deleted or cut, because they're how I found out where to look for those bus stops.  Happy minutes, I hope, until I can write that part in you, dear Diary.