Metro is exploring how to revise its bus routes to better serve the new Lynnwood Light Rail station. In the process it also took a look at a bus serving both the Northgate and University District stations and is proposing to eliminate the service through Wallingford. The map shows a dotted line, which is the #20 bus line that is to be eliminated. You can provide Metro with comments on their website through March 10. The page only talks about Lynnwood but this is where you can comment on the #20.
For many years the #26 Express ran down Latona Ave NE and then across on N/NE 40th over to Aurora Ave and straight into town. It served east Wallingford well. During the last bus route realignment for the opening of the new Link line to Northgate, a new route #20 was created out of the part of the route #16 that went north of Ravenna Blvd to North Seattle Community College and Northgate and was combined with the part of the #26 route north of NE 45th, but now it turns east to the University District station on NE 45th to the U District station. So east Wallingford south of NE 45th lost their bus service. Now Metro proposes to discontinue all the rest of the service through east Wallingford (north of NE 45th). If you will miss riding the bus, you will need to tell Metro you are not happy.
Once you click on the survey tab and tell Metro the zip code where you live, on the next page you need to check the box for route #20, but on the following page you need to check the box for route #61, which Metro says is replacing #20. Unfortunately, the replacement only applies to that new part of the #20 route out in Lake City. Nothing is being replaced in Wallingford. On the next page, below the map, click that you oppose the change. Then scroll down to where it asks if you Dislike the change and tell Metro in one of the open, fill in boxes why you are not happy.
This is yet one more example of how the realignment to serve the Link Light Rail has resulted in worse bus service. In the last realignment the bus routes #31 and #32 were moved off NE Campus Parkway and Stevens Circle in the University. That was where they picked up/let off most of their riders. Now they go north on 7th Ave NE and south on Roosevelt NE. Yes, staying on Stevens Circle would be difficult with their new alignments to Children’s Hospital and north but they could stay on NE Campus Parkway and run up and down 15th Ave NE, which would serve the dorms, would be much closer to the University and would be almost as close to the U District Station at NE 44th . It’s not clear there is any way to tell Metro that would be a more useful routing.
I think the issue is that for the stretch between the two light rail stations, the utility of this route is basically shuttling the low/mid density neighborhoods to light rail, while the stretch north of the Northgate Station is moving people to a bigger hub in Lake City. During peak hours, you’ll see on 45th a funny situation of big and empty 20 together with small and crowded 44. The reason 20 is big is for serving the stretch north of Northgate, not for the 5 people being dropped off narrow Latona.
So it makes sense they re-route that way, but they do need a sensible replacement that’d probably be running by fewer and smaller busses that till move people to the light rail stations. Not that everybody would then ride the light rail, but at least they can then have more options for transfer.
How far should I have to walk to get to the bus to get to the light rail? Five blocks, ten blocks? How many blocks between stops? how many hills? Are we covering where people live? What if I moved here to be on a bus line? What is the point of bus service? Of public transit? Light rail and a feeder system is not enough.
The problem is, who would move to Latona and 53th to be on a bus line? Wouldn’t people who want to be on bus lines not move there at first place? The point of bus service is to provide higher efficiency, and serving lower density areas is always on the low end of bus priorities. Bus routes serve Stone Way and 45th the best for good reasons. Those routes are more likely to be crowded therefore higher efficiency.
Yes, Metro’s informational site about the proposed change does point out that about twice as many people use the Northgate Lake City portion of the route as the U District Northgate portion. It’s therefore reasonable to split those two sections up so that each can be served by an appropriate number of buses. If the appropriate number for the Lake City portion is four buses per hour, wouldn’t that mean the part with half as many riders should get two buses per hour?
So you don’t take the bus?
Also looking at the map, I think it hurts those between 65th and 50th the most. North of 65th they got 45, and south of 50th they got 44. Both connects to light rail stations, which is likely the original designation for 20 riders in those places. 62 to the west is also still a reasonable alternative for some.
Yep, this is it exactly. South of Northgate, the 20 is just a coverage route, and is one of the lowest performers in the Metro system. While we have used the south part of the 20 on occasion, it’s clear that even at peak it’s a very sparsely used route, and with the shortage of drivers, those hours would be better spent on improving other corridors. I’m selfishly still longing for the days of all-week 10-minute service on the 44…
The biggest problem is that the proposed route 61 will only go to Greenwood rather than all the way into Ballard. We have few enough cross-town transit options that it seems silly to reduce the utility of the new route in this way, but hopefully Metro is already planning to extend it at least to 24th.
It is poorly used now because it is focused on taking riders to the U District Light Rail station. Before it was axed the 26X was often standing room only rush hours after it passed Stone Way. It actually took people where they wanted to go.
The busy stretches of 26X and 26 are still very well served by busses, just in different names. Stone Way and Fremont condo dwellers are still very well served for their continued support of the bus system.
The issue isn’t about if the busses are taking people where they want to go. The issue is low density areas are depending on if some busses happen to pass their neighborhoods connecting high density areas.
The issue absolutely IS about taking people where they want to go. The 26X got you from Wallingford to the Seattle Center/Amazonia in 15 minutes and 25 minutes to the downtown stadiums. The 20 goes to neither.
I don’t know what you think the “busy stretches” of the 26X were. The beauty of the 26X is it picked up people all along its route. It served the entire neighborhood. And it was often too full to stop by the time it hit Stone Way.
62 does the same thing 26X/26 did for Wallingford, other than being a bit to the West. The true difference is that the northern stretch of 26/26X are now replaced by route 45 to light rail, which would actually gives people in that stretch more reliable service than 26/26X.
Again, the problem is the same as what we are describing for Latona between 50th and 65th: the density is too low to have easy sensible solutions. People living there have been relying on being on the connection between other hubs. 26/26X connected Green Lake condos, Stone Way condos, Dexter condos, and with Green Lake people rerouted to Roosevelt station the Latona low density area lost its main “help”.
Who are the “we” that are doing the “describing?” Your comments strike me as Metro corporate analysis, using data points from behind a laptop without any real life experience. Do you ride the bus or just look at the maps?
Ask anyone who lives in the “Latona low density area” what it meant to lose the 26. Real people took the bus to real places. In fact Latona Ave was designed for public transit over 100 years ago. Now the mile stretch between Stone and Brooklyn is essentially a north/south public transit dead zone.
And saying the 62 “does the same thing” as the 26 is laughable.
Two in my family take 26/62/20/44 etc routinely, and yes, we walk 10 min more to take 62 instead of 26 to get to South Lake Union. 26 was actually within 3 min walk to both my house and my office. So I say 62 does the same thing as 26 with my personal riding experience. I am just more used to think about things in a more generic terms instead of just about myself, therefore it may sound “corporate” to you.
Designed for public transit over 100 years ago sounds more like highlighting how it’s out of date, instead of a reason to keep public transit on it. Wallingford is full of garages and drive ways that was designed for parking decades ago, and are too small to fit modern cars. The design of Latona in the stretches south of 50 are definitely not designed for modern bus, and the bus turns on either 65th, 50th, and 45th ( and 42th and 40th for 26) are all horrible and demonstrate how it’s not good for modern bus.
20 actually got stuck on 45th whenever somebody parked next to the coffee shop.
“20 actually got stuck on 45th whenever somebody parked next to the coffee shop.”
That’s why it’s a no stopping zone. To use cars parked illegally as an example of a street “not designed for modern bus” is not a good argument.
I don’t need that example to say it’s not designed for modern bus. It just isn’t. It’s typical for things designed 100 years ago to not work well today.
Still, I don’t see why you think a narrow street that can be easily blocked by somebody unloading stuff or temporarily park at the side of the road or anything like that as something suitable and requiring to have a bus to pass through. I do not believe anybody who design bus lane in the past few decades would have designed the street to be like Latona, with the constant turning every 10 blocks and narrow corridors in many places. The crossing of Latona with 65th and 50th and 45th and 42th and 40th are definitely not designed with busses in mind.
Yes the 26X was packed at rush hour. The rest of the day it wasn’t much more well-used than the current 20.
A good transit system is more than just a way to help downtown office workers save money on parking. It will support trips across the whole city, across the whole day. Link connections can help serve this goal because buses can run more frequently through our neighborhoods when they don’t have to go all the way downtown anymore. This hasn’t been too apparent in practice so far because the Link opening coincided with a massive pandemic-related cut to Metro service.
I’ll be the first to agree the Latona corridor isn’t dense enough to support the current level of service (four buses per hour on weekdays). To say it deserves zero service seems to be pushing the pendulum too far in the other direction.
I think a minibus that loops Roosevelt -> 40th -> Latona -> 65th may work.
There’s already Route 79 that goes from Roosevelt to U District via Sand Point twice an hour on weekdays. Tacking on Latona to make it more of a loop would add relatively little distance to the route.
The 26 was only packed for peak-of-peak, and really only until it reached 65th, and those trips are the most expensive to operate because they only run one direction, so there’s a lot of deadheading (not to mention split shifts). COVID “flattened the curve” for transit ridership, and ridership off-peak is much more prevalent. The 26 would most likely perform even more poorly now that peak ridership is lower, and that’s basically what we’re seeing with the 20.
It would be far better for Metro to take the hours from the 20 and invest them in routes that get high all-day/all-week ridership (40, 44, 45, 62), or into new E/W routes like the 61 that can take advantage of the frequency and scale of Link.
The 20 was designed for failure, methadone for our addiction to the 26.
Not totally useless, but a mere shell of its predecessor.
The thrill was gone.
“What’s the point?” we finally decided. And went cold turkey.
I gotta agree. It doesn’t run enough, almost on purpose, and the added distance between the stops makes it quite the challenge. Nevertheless, I take it because it goes where I need to go and I will be damned if I will let it go. People put THANK YOU signs on the 26 stops that were being closed on the last week. It was one of the oldest continuous routes in the city (I rode it up to Green Lake from Renton 26/42 as a teenager in the 70s.
We had three bus lines through this neighborhood (the 6 on Stone Way/Green Lake, the 16 (now mostly the 62) and the 26. I’m grateful I am ambulatory enough that I can make the hike, but I am sad that Metro thinks it’s more important to feed light rail (which is not ADA friendly) than cover the territory people live in. This new map is missing a lot of service, just like where I grew up in the south end.
To view how well the coverage is, what’s needed is a map that shows density. There are good reasons why rural bus services are horrible. If we look at the bus service by using the physical map of a city/county/state/country, it’d surely look way worse than by looking at population coverage.
Last Friday I was at the Latona (65th and Latona) for the jazz jam (30 + years now) and observed the #20 buses going north and south on Latona and then east and west on 65th. I counted the riders as the buses went by and in about 2 hours, there were a total of 10 passengers.
If I was the resource manager for Metro, I would conclude that this is a very poor use for a very expensive vehicle and well-paid driver.
Would that be the same resource manager that killed the 26 and designed this terrible “replacement” route?
20 is the replacement for 26 only in this specific stretch. Other busier places served by 26 in the past are still doing fine with other replacements. As stated earlier by others, the problem is with this stretch therefore no easy solutions. I know because both my work and my home are a block or two from the old 26, and another family member commutes to South Lake Union. We don’t feel worse off without 26, just a minor change in walking distance. Without 20 it’d also going to be a similar story. Surely it’s harder for some, but look at the map you’ll realize it’s really impacting limited amount of single-family/low density blocks instead of everybody around the routes.
If I want to be selfish, I’d say I like 20 way better than 26 actually, since 16 replaced some of my 26 needs, while 20 is a more reliable bus to U-District than 44 due to its lower ridership therefore more reliable schedule.