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.