I’ve been in San Francisco, where the buses are dirty. The windows and walls are scuffed from graffiti and abrasive cleaners. The seats are approximately as soft as granite. Some floors are carpeted in trash. The roofs leak.

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Here’s a bus in a rain storm. The floor is wet, in part with footprints from outside, but mostly because the ceiling was dripping. You can see the water drops on the guy’s coat in front of me.

These shitty buses are packed from dawn to midnight with the wealthy, the poor, the stable, the crazy—oh my, are some of those people crazy—even though the buses are gross. They’re way more packed than Seattle’s comparatively sterile, cushioned buses.

True, the population density is greater in San Francisco and buses there are part of an integrated transit system of subways, trains, and streetcars, but riding the bus in San Francisco is better than riding in Seattle for two simple reasons: (First) They arrive with shocking frequency. The most popular routes at the busiest times of the week bring you a bus every four minutes. Many run every seven minutes. Some routes at off-hours only come every 30 minutes, but those are the exception. (Second) Many of the bus stops are outfitted with LED reader boards that tell you how long till the bus comes. Basically, riding the bus is about traveling to your destination, not about waiting for the bus—wondering if it will ever come, like in Seattle. People will ride a disgusting bus if it’s the best way to get around.

Seattle doesn’t have enough buses to do this. But by comparison, our buses are really nice: clean, cushioned, dry (even the #3, #4, #358, etc.). Seattle should adopt the dirty-old-bus model to save money and operate more buses. You can wait even at 5th Avenue and Pike in Seattle—where the schedule alleges that five different routes will come—as I did last night at about 8:00 p.m., for 15 minutes without a single bus arriving.

The aesthetics of a bus are worth fuck all if you don’t know how long it’s going to take to arrive. I’d happily switch to having lots of shitty buses that come more frequently. Also, more ballsy public-health messages on buses like this would be great:

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58 replies on “Lots of Shitty Buses”

  3. @34, find a right of way that’s not shared with freight and you can run Sounder all day. Or find several billion to add passenger-only tracks along the mainline and you can do the same thing. Otherwise, you’re stuck. As for no Sounder service to the Eastside – you don’t have the track to do that, either.

  4. Because Seattle has no transit arterial, it has to run buses all over the place, with way to many routes.

    Once we have a light rail system, things will get better, and buses will run more frequently.

    Also, dirty buses like in SF reinforces the stereotype that public transit is for poor people, Seattle is good a braking that stereotype, we can’t let that go.

  6. I completely disagree.

    The old yellow-brown dirty-stinky-filthy-pee buses were so disgusting (Not to mention the harassment and fucked up behavior that were a daily occurance) and they put me off public transit since then.

    Now I have a I-phone and a “next bus” app. The buses in my neighborhood (the 27) is always late with frequent fucked-upness by passengers- but clean.

    Ya gotta have both comfort and reliability. Hence I take Link whenever I can.

    I’ll pay through the nose for driving my car rather than take Metro buses.

  7. @38 it wasn’t then. Alki wasn’t even alki, it was named “New York-Alki”. See also Ebey, Holgate, Simmons and of course Maynard – not just Denny.

    Alki (the Low/Terry/Denny party – later Bell and Boren too) was politically and culturally somewhat separate from pioneer-square-(Bell, Boren and the Denny bros – later joined by Maynard then Yesler) seattle (and for that matter, the Van-Asselt/Collins/Maple duwamish-seattle settlement of 1851 was yet another ‘zone’, too). Sealth was Tyee of all those Salish peoples areas (as well as west bainbridge), but each was certainly different & separate. See also the White Tribe (aka Duwamps)

    The report of women wailing at the rainy sad environment is from November 1851 when the boat the ‘Exact’ arrived: the lone men preceded the families by 5 weeks. And mainly the ladies were sad because the houses the men had started still had no roofing and it was november already.

    But yes, kvetching / whining about how good it ain’t here = long standing tradition. Insert “damn kids don’t hang onto history these days.” comment here.

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