Until we have grade-separated light priority bus systems city wide and more bus service options and expanded bus and rail services, this is life. This literally is a problem we need to throw money at.

Charles: And no one in power is really doing anything to improve the situation.

Well, Sound Transit 2 is under construction. And Sound Transit 3 is in the planning stage. So the powers that be are doing something to improve the situation, albeit all too slowly.

And this gets back to "What Seattle Should Really Do to Make Public Transportation Work." Build more fixed-rail mass transit that is truly grade-separated, at bare minimum, through downtown. The change we should be focusing on is (A) speeding up the timeline and (B) getting the next expansion plan right and getting it to a vote.

We can go back some years and hear folks say, "Hey, apps like OneBusAway and putting wait times at downtown stops are just the improvements we need to make public transportation work." But the reality is, while these are improvements, they're still just incremental improvements, and they're still incremental improvements to the same inherently limited technology that is buses.*

ORCA cards for all isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's no game changer that's going to make public transportation work for our city. I suspect Charles himself knows that and he doesn't quite buy into his own post.

* And I'm someone who believes buses have their place, and who welcomes any efforts toward making our bus system more like bus-rapid transit, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of the real winner, a rail buildout.

@1 Why would a bus need light priority if it's grade separated ? Grade separated means it should only be dealing with other buses/transit.

What @2 said. But buses are never and will never be fast (unless you build separated busways for them, and I don't think there's going to be a busway down Rainier anytime soon). If there's enough traffic to make a bus route useful, there will be enough traffic from other vehicles to make the bus slow. Buses are INHERENTLY slow in this way.

Also, I don't think it's true that traffic is getting worse. People are already driving less in this city than they were just a decade ago.

I really wish Charles would acknoledge that there are

A. Folks who live outside of Seattle due to housing costs that aren't served by mass transit.

B. Industrial shipping traffic. What about all of that?

You cannot solve the traffic issues of Seattle by ignoring the rest of King, Snohomish and Pierce counties.

@1 unless we have money to build overpasses or underpasses for EVERY cross street you'll need light priority. Grade separation is (in my mind to start) dedicated core lanes on the major core arterial routes. Stuff like, going around the clock from NW:

15th NW
Holman
Aurora
Northgate
Lake City Way
45th N
Stone Way
Eastlake
Broadway
Madison
etc
If it's a major bus drag, basically.

@6, increased use of mass transit makes access by suburban drivers and freight both easier, not harder. Every bus is 40 cars off the street. Transit is, in fact, the most cost-effective and rational way to add road capacity, even for people who never ride a bus or train.

@6 He should also acknowledge the giant transportation funding sinkhole known as Bertha. Nothing major is going to pass the electorate while that boondoggle is still an open sore.

They should sell things like Seahawks Orca cards (or similar) that subsidize the cost for the normal ones.

@4, From looking at the traffic from the bus on the West Seattle bridge and 99N during the rush hour, traffic has worsened compared to 4-5 years ago; and I suspect this is a product of more density in WS with more or less the same transportation infrastructure.

I wonder if Ballard is having similar issues since it's up next for potential light rail expansion.

There's never going to be enough money available to build fast rail transit everywhere it might be useful. Buses will always be part of the network, at least on the less intense travel corridors.

A key part of an effective urban transportation network will be buses that can move, that don't get stuck in every minor traffic kerfuffle.

If there really is a "war on cars," we mustn't let it also be a war on transit. Every major bus transit corridor should link buses to the traffic signals, so when buses approach controlled intersections, they get a green light.

This should be part of Seattle's Complete Streets policy.

@11

From looking at the traffic from the bus on the West Seattle bridge and 99N during the rush hour, traffic has worsened compared to 4-5 years ago; and I suspect this is a product of more density in WS with more or less the same transportation infrastructure.

That's our #1 main District 1 complaint in a nutshell, despite any FUD otherwise lovable Stranger writers sometimes assign to us because of a handful of over the top loud mouths out our way complaining about other stuff. Tiny little choke points to squeeze everyone through and declining transportation options. Every transportation issue we have can be resolved with the will to spend money to resolve them (which needs to be done), and our peninsula is substantially growing in population over time (which being blunt cannot be realistically stopped no matter what an extreme minority says otherwise).

I wonder if Ballard is having similar issues since it's up next for potential light rail expansion.

We lived in Magnolia from 2005-2012, before back to my wife's home turf of South-southwest West Seattle. I commuted five days a week, probably 95% of the time by the #33 or #24 bus to downtown and maybe 5% of the time by car, along Elliot/15th from usually the Magnolia Bridge and by Dravus Bridge when I drove. From 2005-2012 the traffic on Elliot/15th absolutely felt slower and worse. Once they converted one lane to bus only only people who had legitimately no choice but to drive for some reason switched to the bus. The buses became far more crowded but became an absolutely joy to commute in. I could do this commute most days in <25 minutes on the way into work and maybe <30 minutes on average on the way home. The dedicated bus lane was a godsend. It easily took 10-15+ minutes off of my bus ride each way and saved me at least 2 to 3 hours a week in commuting time. Which doesn't sound huge, but when you multiply it by everyone on the bus, it's a huge amount of freed up time and resources to the community.

For a variety of good and bad reasons we are going to do NONE of the things which the dreamers (above) would like.

For example, dreamer #1 wants "grade-separated light priority bus". How? Is that tunneling the city's major arterials? Or double-decking them? Seattle has narrow arterials, relative to many global cities. So where do we get the extra room? Get rid of sidewalks? Bus-only lanes? But they are at-grade.

Sorry folks, the car-based system works too well and work for too many people to be changed very much.

We should all be hoping that the driverless car gets here very soon.

caution&daring @14: For a variety of good and bad reasons we are going to do NONE of the things which the dreamers (above) would like.

I'm sure you were making the same predictions that we'd never build light rail and we'd never pass Sound Transit 2.

The rich irony here is that your point is that we should be supporting "the driverless car." Now, who's the dreamer?

(Or hey, maybe you're not as naive as you make yourself out to be. Maybe you're just another rail transit foe who's offering just another Trojan horse to distract us, the way GM trotted out its jet-powered buses back in the '60s to help defeat our region's first attempt to pass rail transit--that time the federal money went to build Atlanta's MARTA system instead.)

“simply require all of its citizens to have an ORCA card”
Only thing simple about that plan is the mind that thought it…

@16
Why do you think that the robo-car is a dream?

20 years after voting to spend billions of tax dollars for rail, you're not supposed to be waiting for a milk run bus.

Hey, where's Montoya?

Isn't he supposed to be investigating why?

It would also be nice if ORCA could be filled *when you need it*, and not 24+ hours before.

@18, why do you think Sound Transit 3 is a dream?

In answer to your question, there's a little thing called economics. Or are you still imagining a future where we have the kind of mass American affluence to pull this off? And how do you think those cars are going to power themselves? By gas? That ain't getting cheaper. Electricity? Well, I hope electricity, but there's another expensive upgrade right there that's going to be painful enough in its own right, apart from your self-driving folly.

Happy to check back with you in, oh, 50 years to see how your dream pans out.

Do what they did in London: charge cars a fee for access to the city core. Stop treating a slot in traffic as a free good.

@13,

I wish those bus lanes were available 24/7. The second the bus lane goes away, the bus commute suddenly feels like a crawl.

@4,

I work on Lower Queen Anne, and, ever since the city started working on "fixing" Mercer (we're up to a couple of years now on that project), traffic in this area is a clusterfuck between 1 pm and 7 pm, even on days when there are no special events that cause extra traffic. Traffic on Mercer is bumper-to-bumper starting at First Ave West. It is much worse than it used to be.

In the interest in taking the future of driverless cars seriously, I will say this much. Cars are already coming out with more self-driving features; cars are becoming "smarter." They will continue to. The problem is getting to the point where they change the dynamic of cars in the built environment enough to be the proverbial "game changer" that makes them any more of an alternative to fixed-rail mass transit than cars already are.

Waiting for someone to speak up next in favor of personal jet packs...

@20:

My ORCA card does exactly that: automatically - and instantaneously - transfers funds from my bank onto my card when it's too low to cover the fare. You might need to change your account settings, but it's totally doable.

Toll the freeways. If you want on 6AM-10AM, 3PM-7PM, you pay $5 (or more). Take the money to build transit. Probably not legal (tolls to build transit) and no sane representative would support it, but it would work.

@8 You're talking past my point. Charles only gives a shit about transit as it concerns the City of Seattle only. He doesn't give a shit (or more likely doesn't understand) that there are people who need to be connected to the system that are traveling north or south of Seattle.

I'd love more buses, that's perfectly find by me. But Seattle isn't the only dense area of people, and people commuting to/from work isn't the only source of traffic out there.

Missing from this story: Metro has supposedly "added" thousands of hours of service by cutting recovery time at the end of each run and reducing minutes between time points, making it increasingly impossible for drivers to keep on time.

Get on THAT reality, Charles. ATU 587 awaits your call.

People skeptical about robo-cars might want to learn more about the potential before opining.

Also missing from this story: the 520 bridge was closed all weekend, making I-5 a parking lot.

Minimalist station monorails and cantilever (eg freight train) bridges.

Problem solved.

Pay for it with 1/20th of the money wasted on the Big Bertha Tunnel Of Failure

@30 Shhhhh! You're not allowed to examine other causes to the problem! It's a lack of handles on paper bags or nothing!

caution&daring @29, that's not an answer to my question. If you're so sanguine that "robo-cars" are going to be an alternative to mass transit that regular cars aren't today, then explain to us where you're coming from.

Also, strangely, you didn't answer my other question. Why do you think we're such "dreamers" for thinking this region can and will expand light rail, and that it will make a difference?

(I'm reminded of how, whenever the topic of California High-Speed Rail comes up on forums like this, somebody stops by to "hype the Hyperloop." I see that phrase is not original to me.)

@22: This will solve very little. The majority of the traffic clogging our roads is NOT going to the downtown core, and it is already relatively well-served by transit.

It's the rest of the region that has the problem.

@36 has a point / not Seattle creating the problem - we USE transit, bike, and walk it's the lazy tax-subsidized Suburban Takers and their subsidized cars that are the problem

@22 in many ways London is an example for what NOT to do in a city, a dystopian hellhole

@37: Oh shut up with your one-note trolling, Will. Check how many cars are heading OUT of Seattle in the morning, out to Boeing and Microsoft and Costco and Google and Alaska Air and Weyerhaueser and so many others.

Geez, Charles gets an annoyed commute and has a fit on Slog as if it is systemic failure. Try this Charles, I took the last express bus out of my neighborhood and the engine blew up. The driver had no solutions for passengers. Worse, he had no communication from HQ for passengers. An underage girl who would miss the last bus to Evertt? Too bad, you will be stuck downtown if we get a replacement bus. The guy with a plane to catch? No, there is no communication about an ETA for a replacement bus. Can Metro send one of the dead heading busses passing us to pick up? No, this is Sound Transit, there is no lateral communication to tell that bus to stop. Are there any other routes nearby we could walk to? The driver didn't know (and honestly wouldn't expect him to know beyond basics) but he had no way for his bosses to research it either.

Because of OneBusAway on my phone, I was able to figure out a local route that would go downtown a block from this broken bus. ST had nothing to offer to help, and in the case of that underage girl, telling her to survive, unprepared, on the streets of downtown from midnight to 6AM that's downright negligent. For most people who drive, this one incident would sour them on ever riding the bus again, forever.

If Charles wants to complain about failures, talk about the real failures.

Questions:

If you're so sanguine that "robo-cars" are going to be an alternative to mass transit that regular cars aren't today, then explain to us where you're coming from.

Also, strangely, you didn't answer my other question. Why do you think we're such "dreamers" for thinking this region can and will expand light rail, and that it will make a difference?

Response:

1. Seattle area (for whatever reasons) is incapable of spending the money it should. Been that way since 1969. We are cheap and don't spoend the $$$. That is fact. Even ST is a piddling investment compared to what is needed.

2. Many if not most commentators on robo-cars see them as likely to be shared, in fleets, in which they act as de facto mass transit. Driverless taxis but smaller, cheaper and more versatile. Will individuals also own private mink-lined luxo robo-cars? Probably so. But many believe that private cars will supplant taxis and buses for in-city transport. I agree with that POV.

Disagree if you like, as you seem to. But also please read about driverless-cars and their enormous potential, as well as some grave dangers. (Not not physical ones in terms of "going crazy.")

caution@daring @41, here's what you originally wrote @14: For a variety of good and bad reasons we are going to do NONE of the things which the dreamers (above) would like.

You seem to be backtracking now ever so subtly from that statement. I would agree that so far our investment in light rail has been "piddling." But even with that limited investment and a light rail line that doesn't have the hottest route, that line has managed to have heavy ridership. And when the U-Link line opens in a couple years, that's going to be transformative. That dream is going to be a reality. And then, what will you have to say if and when ST 3 passes? Do we have to have the equivalent of the NYC Subway before you start seeing Seattle rail transit as anything more than a pipe dream?

And let's go back to your original comment:

Sorry folks, the car-based system works too well and work for too many people to be changed very much.

We should all be hoping that the driverless car gets here very soon.

You're saying, let's give up on mass transit (something concrete) so we can pin our hopes on driverless cars, which you so readily admit is hypothetical.

I remember with all these votes on rail in our region the doubters saying, "But it won't work here." Like no amount of tangible experience in countless other cities is enough proof that rail will work here. Like, as Dan Savage says, "we're some special flower." And yet, what is your alternative we're supposed to wait for instead? Something that--drumroll--hasn't been implemented on a wide scale in any city in the world and likely won't be implemented in any city in the world 50 years from now.

@42

1. I don't see the political support for spending the kind of money we should be spending on mass transit to make it a transformative one. You can interpret that as being against transit if you like but it is not what I wrote or mean.

2. The electric robo-car in sharing mode -- like Car2Go -- will evolve, I believe, into a major element of mass transit.

3. I could explain more but
a. it too hot and
b I think you need to do some reading on driverless cars.

I think if the city were really serious it would confiscate and expel residents of single-family housing and force them into apartments, which I understand you to believe to be the natural environment for humans.

Seems like this is as insane as the bicycle nazis demanding that everyone ride a bike. I can't ride a bike. I used to drive, but sold my car, not because I want to be some granola eating nutcase, I had to keep my roof over my head. I push my walker to the bus stop and get on the bus and go wherever I need to go. If I can't get there by bus because the asinine republicans in Olympia just can't seem to fund anything except $9 billion in tax cuts for Boeing ignoring schools, buses, and so many other important things. Not everyone can ride a bike. Some cannot even ride a bus because of their psychological condition. Some cannot drive and probably shouldn't. This is not a perfect system, but forcing ONE system on everyone just stupid. There should be as many options as is possible. But the biggest fix to the traffic, buses, bicycles, and walking. Get a few minutes early. Leave a few minutes early. Instead of being the jerk that wants everyone to rush and get out of your way. Try just enjoying your journey and make the best of things. But do complain, because if you don't you'll probably just get all upset and vote for a republican. Just calm down people, slow down, and try to actually enjoy your life.

The sad thing is that all of the biggest improvements for riders have come from outside of Metro. Without Google Maps or OneBusAway Metro would be incredibly difficult to use.

One of the biggest problems with Metro is that there is no real performance metric that is useful. They measure ridership in bulk and have no real idea of which stops people get on and off at.

@48…spot on true! OneBusAway has made the Metro experience so much better than anything Metro has every done. Kind of sad when you think about it. When my phone battery dies I feel like I'm out in the wilderness even if I know the route schedule. OBA has turned me into a daily bus rider.