I pretty much always have a crappy bus ride between my apartment on Queen Anne and the Stranger offices here on Capitol Hill—wait, ride downtown, wait some more, transfer, ride to up the hill. All to travel about two short miles. But today I decided to jump on the #8 along Denny. No lolly-gagging downtown! No getting stabbed and robbed at Third and Pike! It would be way faster this way, right?
The bus didn’t show up on time. Or 10 minutes late. Or ever. I ended up taking the next scheduled bus after hanging around for half an hour. I could have walked faster.
I started thinking back—the #8 has been late literally every time I’ve tried to ride it in my life. So I’m hereby nominating it for Worst Bus in the City. Always late, always in traffic, and 6,000 stops along the way. It’s definitely up there with the “mobile patchwork” of crackheads and vomit that is the #7.
Let this legally binding poll decide the issue once and for all:
onebusaway.org
Real time GPS updates to your phone or computer tells you exactly when your bus will arrive.
You’re welcome.
i think the #358 can be worse than all of those and i’ve ridden them all. isn’t that the one they had to rename after that driver got shot and the bus careened off the aurura bridge ?
Seriously, the 8 is the absolute worst. If you’re planning on making a connection, you can bet on being late wherever you’re going. And if you’re trying to get up the hill, you can expect a 20 minute walk from the bus stop, because it’s not coming any time soon.
More often than not, I wound up watching it speed by, full of passengers and not taking any more, because it runs on some ridiculous 45 minute interval.
“Stop your fucking whining and just get on the damn bus”
Great advice if there’s actually a bus to take. With the 8, don’t count on that.
Yeah, I was just about to say OneBusAway. I use it every time I need to take a bus trip.
Also, it takes about 15-20mins to bike to the office from Easy Street Records.
@1 beat me to it.
One Bus Away is so accurate that sometimes I miss the bus because I’m used to late buses and don’t hustle to be there when OneBusAway tells me to.
@2 is right. clearly you’ve never been on the 358
The 8’s timeliness aside, I can’t RAIL on it (had to) terribly much – it’s one of the few district-to-district buses in Seattle that doesn’t go through the U or the Downtown core.
If there was a Capitol Hill <-> Ballard bus that ran half as well as the 8 (and I’m not including the sometimes-goes-to-Ballard-43/44, which is about as indirect as you can get without being outright silly), I’d be fucking ecstatic. Bu no, logical bus routes and service after 2 am when we want drunks off of the fucking road – too much to ask for.
Given that, I can’t get too terribly pissed about the fact that it takes anywhere between five minutes and 30 years to get one bus from First and Mercer to Aurora and Denny.
Ooh! I used to take the 358 once a week when I was taking violin lessons up on Aurora. The most delightful bit was when a man asked me about the violin and I explained that my mom had taken lessons when she was a kid, blah blah blah. Speaks up another gentleman at top volume, “FUCK YOUR MAMA!”
In his defense, when I made some shocked response like “No, She’s a nice lady, really!” he was like “oh, uhhh okay.”
@1–I was using One Bus Away’s kick-ass iPhone app, actually. It was telling me the 8 was five minutes away, which is why I tried to make that transfer.
The #3/#4 is the WORST bus I have ever taken in my life. Starting in the Ride Free Zone it picks up the most drunk, high, smelly, dirty, freeloaders who take it to the jail, the bail bondsmen, the courthouse, the Harborview methadone clinic, and then on to the central district to buy the day’s stash of meth and crack. I have been vomited on, spit on, hit on, slept on and screamed at in Korean on these buses and they are pretty much the only option to get up the hill to Harborview unless you live out in Shoreline and can take the express 303. The acceptable alternative that goes from dt to Hview runs for about an hour in the morning and an hour at night. No joke. Has anyone else not experienced the terrors of the 3/4?
You should get slapped with a bum’s wet wool sweater for not mentioning the worst one of all- of course everyone has been mentioning it- the 6 (remember that?) aka the 358 route.
Queen Anne has astonishingly poor bus service for being adjacent to downtown, especially after 7pm or so.
I vote for the 358. You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
http://www.transitriders.org …
i just took the 8 from mt baker transit center to top of capitol hill. not a bad route except for the thoroughly idiotic left turn at MLK/Jackson where it makes a loop over to 23rd, then cuts back up to MLK a block later and makes a left turn against heavy traffic. adds at least 5 minutes to the journey. no point to that milk run.
@1, @10, etc: onebusaway does not use GPS data. Metro coaches aren’t using GPA (yet). The data is based off of odometer readings which get sent back to the base. That is why the arrival information may not be correct (i.e. if a bus is on a re-route, etc.).
Also, you kids are lucky the the #8 now runs every 15 minutes during peak hours from downtown to cap hill. Until recently it was every 30 minutes.
It was scheduled to run every 15 minutes during midday hours in Feb ’10 or so, but maybe that has been scraped due to budget cuts.
Also, did you know that yelp has bus route reviews?
http://www.yelp.com/biz/seattle-metro-ro…
Yeah, the 3/4 is pretty horrifying. I didn’t vote because I haven’t tried enough routes in the city, but I did immediately think of the 3 as the worst bus route I personally have been on.
That said, I live very near the 8’s route over Cap Hill and into Madison Valley, and since I ride the 43 pretty much exclusively, I should see the 8 all the time (since they share most of the route). I don’t. I never see the 8, and if I do, it’s from the opposite direction. I pity the suckers who need to ride it and have no other option.
Three. Five. Eight. The Riz is right, (359) except any bus that leaves the confines of downtown does not exist in The Strangers lexicon.
@1, @4, @6, & @10, your fancy phone app is USELESS if you’re at the very start of the route (Lower Queen Anne, in the #8’s case). It will always say that it’s on-time. Seriously, how a bus like that can be 15 minutes late 10 blocks from its starting point is beyond me…
The 8 has never let me down going to Seattle Center, but going to Cap. Hill, it’s always a crap shoot.
I once had a bus pull up to the stop in front of the hamburger stand showing it as going to base. It sat there for about a minute without opening the door, then as it pulled away it changed it’s number to an 8.
Even with that experience, I picked the 48, because it is unacceptable to wait for an hour for a bus while 4 buses pass you at rush hour with going to base signs. Then 2 48’s show up at once. And that happened far too many times for it to be a fluke.
The #3/#4 is THE WORST route IN THE WORLD.
Why wasn’t included in the poll?
It’s so obvious this poll is fixed since it doesn’t include the 358.
@16 – odometer readings? ugh, i at least thought it was radio transponders – that’s why i thought you were screwed if your bus went off it’s route for any reason – it doesn;t pass an assigned transponder.
i sure hope they get the gps system up and running in 2010. bustracker drives me nuts.
Why is the 44 even on this list? It runs on time and often.
1
7
4
how could you soulless hipsters neglect the ghetto sled express itself: the harbinger of hoodrats, mallcrawlers and dime-bag selling gangsters to the downtown of our great city – the 150.
You haven’t lived til you’ve ridden the 358 to and from work everyday for 3 years. The 8 is a fucking trip through the park in comparison.
@17 The recent doubling of service on the 8 should demonstrate to luddite Seattle transit planners (if they’d bother to pay attention) how useless it is to expand service without fixing everything else that’s wrong with the route and/or system (stop placement, light coordination, drivers with some sort of genetic defect that renders them indifferent to making the light).
i think the two lines that run to sea tac airport and federal way. the 176 and the 196? would put any seattle route to shame in terms of rowdiness, specially when they hit pac highway. fuggetabout it. at night its a shuttle for prostitutes, dealers and broke pimps. in seatlle, it use to be the 42, the 42 made the 7 look like euro rail.
but now that the 42 has been replaced by the #8 is not as bad except at night when the wee thugs ride it up and down MLK. you actually ride the 8 on the ez part of the run. though i have not taken it as much cuz we now have light rail, like i said it can be pretty chaotic at night.
The 358 belongs in this poll. The 44 and the 48 do not. There is literally no fucking comparison to the badness that is the 7, except for the 358.
Oh, and what about the 174? the non-freeway bus route between SeaTac and downtown. I suppose it’s rendered moot by the new light rail, but seriously – the most uncomfortable I have ever been on a bus was the 174.
The 44 (between Ballard and the U-Dist) may not be the worst route, but there is often weirdness associated with it. First, it takes a looong time to travel between 45th/UWay and Ballard. Install a streetcar or light rail already. Secondly, a number of sketchy people can often be found on the route. I think I saw my first open use of drugs on a bus while on a 44 (by a guy sitting in the seats right behind the driver). The 44 gives buses a bad name.
And if I recall correctly, this bus driver was driving a 44:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/306074_vo…
so its 174 and not 176. thats the one though. ive taken that one at night. now its not a bus in philly going through germantown avenue, but it hold its own as far as a bad experience.
Ahh the 358. Interesting interactions between passengers on this line. I’ve been on it when the driver got out of his chair and ran up and down the entire length of the bus spraying air freshener once a particularly ripe homeless guy go off.
Another entertaining incident. Only time I’ve seen a driver physically remove a passenger–a completely broken down homeless alcoholic in a wheelchair with only three wheels. I don’t know what the guy said to the driver, but it came close to a fist fight when he 86ed the guy.
And none of this happened in the free zone.
Worst bus rides in town can be had on the 358 and 174 in that order.
On a side note… at one of the debates for City Council candidates, non-stranger-endorsee Jesse Israel made a cogent, well-researched, logical argument that the Mercer Street Fix, while and easy political whipping-boy, should be viewed less as a beautification project and more as a long-overdue shift from Seattle’s bottleneck-plagued “arterial/non-arterial” design philosophy to one that emphasizes traffic-diffuses (parallel through streets). With Denny as the only true east-west arterial, it gets the worst of the traffic, and the #8 fares worst of all.
But now we get another term of Nick “liberal-on-paper-but-would-never-bother-to-do-reasearch-for-the-purpose-of-achieving-actual-progress-because-that-wouldn’t-be-the-Seattle-way” Licata.
no mention of the 174 or the 358? both those buses are easily 10 times worse than anything i’ve experienced on capitol hill or the UD.
i could bike from queen anne to cap hill in about 15 minutes. even in the worst of traffic
get a fucking bike, stop complaining.
174 & 358 should be considered the South & North versions of the same route, aka the 99 MilkRun. The 358 is the only route (in some 8k+ bus trips) that I’ve seen a passenger booted for swearing. It should also be noted that those routes have only rookie drivers, as the seniority system keeps the older survivors on safer routes.
Never taken the 7 or 8, though I have waited for many a 44 that never showed. Given the provenance of the passengers, it might be the most germ-infested route going.
I am a daily passenger, btw, on the pristine yuppie confines of the 17. Just riding this bus makes me feel like I’m oppressing the less fortunate. But it sure is a relatively pleasant experience.
ride your bike.
The 358 and 174 certainly suck, but don’t qualify. ‘Cause it’s Worst Bus In The City, and those go outside The City.
I was riding the #2 a couple of years ago when I got punched in the head for no apparent reason (if I was doing something provocative, I instantly forgot about it when my head bounced off the seat in front of me). So, while I’m sure there are worse buses out there, that’s my least favorite.
The 43 should be included, if only because it gets held up by the boat traffic at the University Bridge, just like the 44. Also, the 43 just seems to take way too long. Perhaps it should be re-routed.
I’ve never been on the 7, but I used to ride the 48 and 358 regularly. Both were horrible for different reasons.
The 358 had drunk people getting into fights, meth addicts a plenty, and a homeless guy who put his headphones on my head while he was sitting behind me because he wanted me to “hear the boss.” I’m still not sure if he was talking about Springsteen or the person giving him coded messages through his tape deck.
The 48 would usually show up as a pair of 48’s, one twenty five minutes late, the other only ten. Both would be packed well beyond capacity doing the leapfrog thing. When it’s rainy and cold out, it was like an extremely crowded sauna in there because they blast hot air at you and all the windows fog up as humidity passes approximately 900%.
Route 16 was quite decent considering how terrible its neighbors were.
@38 & @41: Not everyone on earth has a lifestyle that allows them to dress for biking all the time or take a bike everywhere they go. When well you self-righteous pricks get it through your heads that bicycles are NOT a replacement for a functional transit system? (P.S. Can we take those cumbersome and time-wasting racks off the front of the buses since you have no interest in using them?)
I love all the routes listed, because even though they may be late, they get me where I need to go. And ever since onebus I haven’t had a problem with the 8.
The only one I have a problem with is the 48 on Saturday afternoon/evenings, when it’s being driven by Slow Man. Then even onebus is useless, because it can’t factor in the ridiculous slowness of this man’s driving.
@41,
Riding a bike on Denny is suicide.
@46- If you’re going to bitch about wait times (inevitable with mass transit) then there are about three alternatives: bike, walk, or car. Cars are wicked expensive, walking is wicked slow, and biking is totally awesome. Downtown to Cap Hill in half an hour does not require fancy clothes or a high fitness level.
Seattle has a functional transit system, it’s not world class but at least it exists.
I use the racks every morning to cross the 520 bridge.
I remember the time some fat fuck sat next to me on the 358 and told me he could smash my head if he wanted to. And he could, the guy was over 6 feet tall and had at least 100 pounds on me. Fortunately he just got off at 85th; I don’t know how I would have gotten around him if he was still on by the time I got to my stop (100th).
Nonetheless, I kept riding the bus and seldom saw anything like that unless I was riding at midnight.