More street surface buses?
How about if we just removed all parking downtown. There's some statistic about how much traffic is just people cruising around looking for parking. It's an eyepopping number.
Discourage the special benefits given to driving, and people will drive less.

... and people like me, who can no longer walk long distances, will be shut out of the area.

But what I actually intended to comment on is why didn't they dig out a second layer for the tunnel? It seems to work well enough in San Francisco, with the Muni Metro streetcars/light rail on one level and the BART on another. The geographic concerns should be pretty similar. Is it just another example of Seattle waiting till too late and then half-assing the job?

@1: So I suppose you would agree to a special permit, such as to pick up and deliver food (like for caterers) and for delivering and picking up large objects (like oil paintings)?

@2, I think the city is too cheap to build a second layer; It would have to put up some sort of regressive tax initiative, e.g., property or sales, to pay for one, and deal with a lot of negative public fallout.

For buses coming from 99N into pioneer square to get into downtown, it is a time consuming slog due to the car traffic. With all the buses coming to the surface along with the present lack of right of way public transportation, the present is as good a time as any for the mayor to initiate a downtown congestion charge to SOV's, limited to peak time transit periods-M through F.

In an area so transit-starved and where traffic is a source of daily frustration, it definitely feels like a step backwards. The convention center matters more to our leaders than those who commute to work though.

C'mon, even the Stranger is going with the "kicked out" terminology? The DSTT was designed so that one day it would be used by just light rail.

When I moved to Seattle in 1985 and lived downtown the "bus" tunnel was just being built. Downtown Seattle seemed like a war zone because of the construction (cut and cover for the tunnel - no underground drill). Seemed crazy at the time. But dang - we now have light rail, a new expanded waterfront ... I applaud the visionary leaders who started and continue to improve our regions transportation system. It's not easy and there are always critics.

and by the way - the vision was to always have light rail in the bus tunnel to replace busses.

@6-8: Thank you for pointing out how research is a really great thing to do before posting an article.

Other ignored history includes:

Turning Third Avenue into a Transit-only corridor was one alternative to building a tunnel in the first place;

Metro employees have been assisting bus boardings in the tunnel for years now;

Metro bus routes have been migrating out of the tunnel for a long time.

Excellent news. Yes, traffic will get worse. This will continue to incline folks to switch to bus, walk/ride, or telecommute. We may think of this as an adjustment period: as folks decreasingly drive, traffic will loosen, which will in turn move public transit along. Sooner or later, a majority will gain the understanding that each of us driving a single-occupancy vehicle around is not helpful to our city or our neighbors (to say nothing about the environmental and financial impacts of owning and driving a car). Yes, some of us may have a good reason or a necessity for one, and we shall have to trust each to make that decision.

We are each a model for the behavior of others. If we want a city with less traffic, we each need to make decisions toward that ideal. And let us continue to fund and pressure our political and corporate leaders to incentivize the use of public transit and to ensure it operates efficiently and to the needs of the city's visitors and inhabitants.

We may debate how we feel about these issues or concerns, but I think we can all agree that the time of driving around Seattle without coming across much traffic is coming to an end. How then shall we face the future? With anger and resentment, or acceptance of the inevitable change that is part of living? (If you need help deciding: one of these options leads to high blood pressure and the concomitant health complications; the other, not so much.)

Need to remove all tax-subsidized on street parking storage for all private vehicles.

Originally, they were going to switch to light rail only, but someone (hmm, that guy with the 40-100 story Seattle future, maybe?) convinced them to dual usage and phase it in as ST came online. It worked. Now ST LINK has high enough capacity and is expanding in ST2 and ST3 so out come the bus lines.

Adapt. Fossil fuel cars are over. This city was built for bikes and streetcars, actually. Cars came later.

Yes, we are ready. This is good news. Glad to see the tunnel finally shifting over to be the "subway" it was always meant to be.

@3: Special permits would not be needed, because they already exist: simply ban vehicles with non-commercial license plates from the downtown grid during peak times. Hand out enough pricey tickets, and word will get around fast.

Elimination of on-street storage for private vehicles, as @11 suggests, will help immensely in moving this process along.

The only reason I liked the tunnel was that it was less cold and soggy than waiting on the street but meh, whatever. Just open the damned north end stations already. Bus service on Lake City Way is truly and awesomely sucky.

The unspoken truth is the f-cking Democrats just can't help but f-ck up the city's transporation systems.

So what?

Anyone who didn't realize that this was inevitable once Sound Transit was up to full service through the tunnel had their head up their wazoo. It was always going to happen because it's not safe to operate Sounder trains and buses on full schedules through the tunnel. Duh.

There are far more important things to whine about than what amounts to a minor inconvenience for many bus riders.

Save your political polemics for stuff that really matters. Complaining and blaming about this makes you look like a fool.

@17 -- Hate to tell you Zepol... A Single-Occupant-Car-Centered model is not a "transportation system". I'm sure you would like to go back to a gentler time, when Seattle had 200,000 people, King County had 1,000,000, and the average commute was 15 minutes. It ain't happening.

So unless you have a grand plan to evict a half million from within Seattle, and 2,000,000 from the metro area, then what we need is a Transit System. And lo! It is slowly coming into being.

(The only people trying to F*ck up our transportation system is idiots like Tim Eyman and Kemper Freeman... Republicans)

Somewhere in a Mexico City used bookstore, Grant Cogswell is laughing his ass off.

Excellent article Lester. Too bad some readers (@6, @8, etc.) have trouble with their reading comprehension. The only reason the buses are being kicked out now is because of the Convention Center expansion (a dubious project in its own right). They are not being kicked out because of the trains. Eventually they would have been kicked out when the train reached Northgate and the train cars they ordered arrived, but kicking the buses out early is a major transit fuckup. The riders of those buses will be hurt the most (of course) but all riders will be hurt, as the buses encounter more congestion, and bus stops are moved well up the hill (as explained in the article). It is just another example of Seattle treating transit riders like shit (except in this case it will get better in a couple years -- unlike southbound Aurora having left hand exits for all the buses -- that fiasco may never be fixed).

@18 -- Sounder trains don't run in the transit tunnel. Your other mistake is noted in my previous comment (the buses are NOT being kicked out because of the train, they are being kicked out because of the Convention Center expansion). Of course the obviously thing to do was to wait until Link reaches Northgate, and then build the expansion, but the county just couldn't wait.

22 Again, who cares? This is a small tempest in a very small teapot. The last time I used the tunnel, admittedly a year ago, there was a Sounder Train running right through it. The bus I routinely ride downtown runs on the surface. I have a disability and it's not a problem. Frankly, I don't understand why this is a big deal. Seems more like an excuse to whine and complain.

Are the buses now going to not stop serving downtown because they can't run through the tunnel?

So what, if they run on a street or in a tunnel. In most major cities the only way one can catch a bus is on a street corner. Boo hoo for the tunnel rats who don't want to stand or walk a block or two in the rain (or be unable to enter their building directly from the tunnel). But hey, this is Seattle. You can't avoid getting wet standing and walking in the rain forever. You want to stay dry? Move to Arizona. We probably won't miss you.

I commute via Link every working day. Service delays in the tunnel are a daily occurrence, because of the variable boarding times for busses, which tend to have longer boarding times than do the trains. This makes the tunnel a bottleneck for train riders. Removal of the busses does not and should not wait for further extension of the Link line.

Our Dear Zeppa is right: if only we had had Republicans in charge these last thirty years. There would have been a prayer-based solution to transit.

You live in my city, @25, and you know it