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.
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