This is an updated proposal for transit service in Seattle that exceeds King County Metro’s definition of frequent service on all routes 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Compared to its predecessor, it incorporates some changes to mitigate potential overcrowding, and, more importantly, uses a corrected budget of in-service transit hours. Correctly assessing, and holding to, this budget is critical for this proposal. In-service hours drive agency operating costs. As tempting as it is to imagine what a better-funded King County Metro could accomplish, I fear that not holding to a budget would push a proposal that is already ambitious and challenging into the realm of the totally impractical. As the budget of in-service hours is about 12% less than previously thought, the resultant route map looks sparser. Some bus routes that many people use daily would disappear, without direct replacement, under this proposal.

Removing existing routes is bound to be unpopular. Why consider it when running routes with uniform headways throughout the day and night is unheard of among transit agencies? I assert that their choice not to do so contributes to automobile dependence. I made this argument in more detail when I debuted the initial proposal. In short, if a person fears that relying on public transit will eventually leave them in a situation where they desperately need to make a trip, but can’t in a reasonable amount of time, they will prioritize purchasing a car. Once a person owns a car, the marginal cost of each use is low, compared to the fixed acquisition and maintenance expenditures. It will get used even for trips that could be reasonably made with transit. The increased congestion undermines transit that shares right-of-way with private vehicles. It can even hinder attempts at constructing dedicated right-of-way, since construction decisions will favor minimal traffic disruption over optimal station placement. As unusual as uniform frequency may seem to a transit planner, I believe that it is a necessary ingredient in a transportation system where fixed-route public transit is intended to largely supplant, not supplement, private vehicle use.

Peculiarity alone isn’t the only reason why the previous version of this proposal drew skepticism. The doubts clustered around three themes. Each one has some merit, but none are so concerning that they make a proposal of this nature seem unimplementable.

Uniform frequency means that transit capacity isn’t scaled up during the traditional commute times. It would be reasonable to expect this to cause crowding. In response to that fear, I analyzed recent ridership figures from King County Metro. Metro’s own documents show that, currently, none of its routes are crowded to the point of requiring additional service. With Metro’s current fleet, the restructure would threaten this. Yet if Metro were willing to reconsider its crowding threshold, reconfigure some vehicles for greater standing capacity, and—for just a handful of routes—procure higher-capacity vehicles currently used throughout Europe and South America, these changes would not result in riders being passed up due to full buses.

Uniform frequency would also mean introducing scheduled bus trips that are likely to have comparatively low ridership, and thus poor farebox recovery. I don’t dispute this, but per-trip farebox recovery is not a meaningful measurement. Nothing about this restructure is intended to decrease the number of paying riders throughout the day, and thus overall farebox recovery should not go down. I reject the notion that its small decreases in peak frequency, when coupled with larger-capacity vehicles, guarantee decreased ridership on the whole.

I found most compelling the critique that this proposal would require more transit operators to work overnight shifts. At the same time, though, it lessens the need for other undesirable employment patterns like split shifts and mandatory part-time work. It also would allow an overall smaller work force, since the maximum amount of simultaneous drivers is lower. In the past, this could have been seen as threatening, but King County Metro’s already-reduced service is currently being held together with overtime. Metro’s contract with its operators would likely need to change under this proposal. I lack the domain knowledge to speculate as to how this could be done. Nevertheless, I think that labeling this proposal’s labor implications as wholly negative ignores that varying the level of service throughout the day also forces transit operators to work undesirable shifts.

Clearly, not every detail of implementing this proposal has been figured out, or can be figured out without additional expertise. This isn’t something for Metro to implement tomorrow, but the ideas underlying it merit research and advocacy. I consider it to be no more tenuous and ill-defined than Metro’s actual plans for an entirely zero-emissions bus fleet, but with a better chance of benefitting transit riders.

The Proposal

This is a route map of the frequent, 24/7 King County Metro bus service that would exist in Seattle. Sound Transit’s Link 1-Line is not shown on this map. Aside from running its current 8-minute peak headways all day, every day, it is unchanged.

The software-generated map has some limitations compared to a hand-drawn one. It doesn’t handle overlapping portions of routes in a particularly elegant manner. The route viewer tool provides a way to see individual routes with their stops, as well as tentative schedules.

Route colors are entirely cosmetic and randomly determined; they don’t correspond to characteristics of the route. All these routes exceed King County Metro’s current definition of frequent service. The lettered RapidRide lines, route 7, and the First Hill Streetcar run every 10 minutes. Every other route runs every 15 minutes.

Some portions of routes’ paths are misaligned with the underlying roads; instead, a straight line connects two stops. This happens when a route serves stops that currently do not have a route running between them. While the time between stops is typically based on Metro’s existing schedules, in these cases, I made a conservative estimate.

While this proposal is focused on improving travel within Seattle, some of Metro’s service enables intercity trips. Amending the frequency and span of only the parts in Seattle required splitting routes into Seattle and non-Seattle sections. The Seattle sections were changed such that there is at least 15-minute service to the border. The non-Seattle portions do not see any changes to span and frequency. They are not simply truncated at the border, though, but continue to a point where the rider can transfer to the 1-Line, a route with 10-minute frequency, or multiple routes with 15-minute frequencies. As a result, there are some routes with new numbers within Seattle, and places near the border where the new and old routes overlap. The only exceptions to this are the RapidRide E Line and H Line, which have 10-minute headways all day, every day, along the entirety of their existing routes.

The network of cross-border and non-Seattle routes looks like this:

It can also be viewed in the route viewer tool.

Combining the two maps would still yield a transit network that looks more sparse than King County Metro’s current Seattle service. Some corridors that have transit today lack it under this proposal. To an extent, this was the case with the previous version of the proposal too. In downtown, transit remains removed from 3rd Avenue in the section between Pine Street and Jackson Street. University Way and much of 15th Avenue Northeast continue to lose service in favor of stops on nearby, parallel roads. With only a small number of corridors losing service, a major selling point of the previous proposal was that very few existing transit stops would lose service.

This version can’t make that case; deletions are much more widespread and severe. In Queen Anne, routes 1 and 13 are gone. Route 5’s path through Fremont has been removed. The stretch of route 8 on Martin Luther King Jr Way has been eliminated. There is no longer service on 19th Avenue East in Capitol Hill. SODO loses service on 1st Avenue South and Airport Way South north of South Lander Street. Magnolia loses service on 28th Avenue West. Route 27 has been eliminated. No route 28 trips continue to Broadview. Much of route 57’s corridor no longer has service. The portions of route 62 on Dexter Avenue North and in Tangletown are gone. No part of the city has been spared from cuts.

I made these selections by identifying sections of routes that have alternative service nearby. I didn’t employ any hard and fast rules about how close that service needed to be. Some corridors are very close, but a significant change in grade or a widely-spaced perpendicular street grid means that one nearby route isn’t a good alternative for another. Whether or not transit service runs on a perpendicular street fed into the decision to cut or not as well. The goal was to select areas where overall access would be harmed the least, hoping that there was enough redundancy in the network to prevent any catastrophic losses of access altogether.

Cataloging Its Implications

On weekdays, the proposed network improves unweighted access throughout Seattle by a little over 15% compared to current service, for a 30-minute time budget. On Saturdays, the improvement is around 21%, and is 19% on Sundays. The network makes this improvement while needing .67% less in-service time compared to the current network, on a weekly basis.

Breaking down the change in access geographically indicates that the benefit would not be felt evenly throughout the city. This map shows the access difference between the proposed and present weekday service. The access viewer tool allows this comparison map, or the access maps of the restructure itself and current service, to be examined in greater detail.

A loss of access downtown is not unexpected. Transit service in Seattle is currently very downtown-centric, with many routes going to or through it. The restructure changes this, but still doesn’t make it particularly difficult to reach downtown. Even though service through downtown is limited to the 1-Line, the access scores of the sectors most profoundly affected fall from around 3.5 standard deviations above average to a still-notable 2. Belltown also loses out because of the reduction of service to downtown; fewer routes are funneled through it on the way there. In spite of the severe reduction, access in downtown is up in the immediate vicinity of Westlake Station, presumably due to improved 1-Line service and a new connection to First Hill.

First Hill itself falls victim to a peak and midday frequency reduction on the portion of route 3 between downtown and 23rd Avenue. This bleeds over into the Central District, where the loss of route 27 perhaps plays a role as well. For much of the area, though, transit service remains above average compared to the rest of the city. Unfortunately, these losses compound with the deletion of service on Martin Luther King Jr Way, to bring parts of that corridor from around average to slightly below, even though routes 48 and 14 are on nearby, parallel streets.

The northwestern portion of SODO and North Beacon Hill see access reductions, while the southern parts of these neighborhoods see increases. The International District loses its assortment of trolleybus routes on South Jackson Street, resulting in access decreases outside the vicinity of the Link station. Access remains comfortably above average, due to 10-minute First Hill Streetcar frequencies. A few spots in Westlake, Fremont, Wallingford, and the University of Washington campus round out the list of places with appreciable degradation.

Red areas, signifying increased access, are numerous and can be seen through West Seattle, the Rainier Valley, Georgetown, Magnolia, Ballard, Ravenna, Sand Point, and basically every neighborhood north of Green Lake. There are even some areas where the closest bus route was removed, or reduced in frequency, but access has improved overall due to improvements to nearby routes. There is no longer bus service on 28th Avenue West in Magnolia or 10th Avenue West in Queen Anne, but reworking the surrounding routes means that access is nevertheless improved. Route 36’s path south of Beacon Hill Station no longer has 10-minute midday frequency, but access is greater due to the introduction of stronger east-west service. While it may not improve transit everywhere, this restructure isn’t concentrating improvement in only a few areas either.

Assessing Its Potential

The access results, while positive on the whole, reveal barriers to implementing this proposal. My analysis leads me to believe that this could be done without increasing King County Metro’s current operating budget. While it would require changes to Metro’s crowding policies, fleet, and labor force, I doubt that these challenges are any less surmountable than issues that Metro would face in another ambitious project. The 15% overall access increase demonstrates this networks benefits quantitatively. Qualitatively, a network that makes it equally easy to reach varied destinations, regardless of the time of day, is more responsive to the numerous and sometimes spontaneous needs that motivate travel. The feasibility and technical advantages ultimately may not matter. I can’t identify an existing constituency that would be inclined to fight to implement this network.

In my experience, transit advocacy is often parochial. People rally around the transit service in their neighborhood when it is threatened with deletion. A proposal where some neighborhoods see increased access, but others lose it, may be welcomed in some communities, but it would absolutely enrage others. People are more inclined to defend something they already have, over something that they don’t have yet. That nature hinders a proposal wherein access is being redistributed to enable transit trips that currently are not being made.

On top of that, transit advocacy often emphasizes the concept of equity over equality. The goal isn’t to provide all people with same amount of the service; it is to distribute transit to those who need it most. In general, I think that this is a laudable mission. Generations of systematic oppression have caused some groups of people to have less access to opportunity and resources than others. The distribution of transit service can be a tool to mitigate historic and ongoing injustice.

In this proposal, some of Seattle’s historically Black and Asian neighborhoods—the Central District and the International District—see a decrease in access. Some areas, where the echos of race-restrictive covenants can still be detected, see an increase. This looks absolutely awful from an equity standpoint. I did not create this proposal intending that result, but that doesn’t change the fact that my proposal asks some groups to make a sacrifice. I’ve largely been spared from oppression and injustice in my life. I have no first-hand basis to understand what would be lost if equity were less of a focus of King County Metro, Sound Transit, and those who advocate for improved transit service. I can’t unabashedly support this proposal when I can’t honestly assess the downsides.

But something must be done so that transit can correct another longstanding wrong, where distributing service equitably is not the solution. Pervasive private vehicle ownership and use is a scourge on cities that harms and impoverishes their residents. This proposal’s focus on nearly-uniform service throughout Seattle is intended not to just remove actual barriers to transit use, but remove drivers’ excuses for their actions.

Making access improvements in Magnolia, for example, is not a triumph for equity. The present service that runs there today consists of three routes, that even on weekdays have substantial service gaps. Routes 24 and 33 become hourly by 7 PM, route 31 stops outright before 10 PM, and none of these routes make it easy to go north. This level of service gives cover to those who oppose anything that makes driving less convenient anywhere in the city, whether those are congestion charges, bus lanes, pedestrianized streets, parking reductions, or road closures for Link construction. They can credibly say that their transit service isn’t good enough to avoid using a car. Evening out access over time and space, as this proposal does, is a step toward eliminating this claim. Better transportation policies will be made when the concerns of drivers can be dismissed as unimportant, because the genuine need to drive within the city is rare.

Perhaps the proposed network is best viewed not as something that must be fought for in its entirety, but as a thought experiment. In spite of its problems, it reveals something intriguing. I’d guess that most transit riders in Seattle would not expect frequent, 24/7 transit service to be feasible unless something radically changed about King County Metro’s and Sound Transit’s service. This proposal asserts that that is not true. This network isn’t radical. The route coverage, while diminished somewhat, isn’t that different from that of today. The vehicles required to run it without inducing crowding are exotic in the United States, but serve in the fleets of transit agencies throughout the world. A network with frequent routes running all day and all night is a choice that Metro and Sound Transit could reasonably make.

Today, King County Metro considers ridership-based productivity measurements of individual routes, and equity scores for the areas those routes serve. Advocates had to argue that it was reasonable for transit service to be distributed equitably, even when it wouldn’t maximize farebox recovery. Like combatting systematic oppression through equitably-distributed service, seeking to eliminate widespread vehicle ownership is something that a transit agency can, and should, be pressured to prioritize. Designing a network that makes it easier for any person, starting at any origin, to get to any destination, regardless of the time of day, is a step toward that. I suspect that a misapprehension of the feasibility of running all-day, all-night, frequent service that would enable this has hindered the development of a community advocating for it. I hope, then, that this proposal can inspire one to coalesce.

Even if advocates do take up this cause, the exact 24/7, frequent transit in this proposal won’t be coming to Seattle anytime soon. The proposal takes a reasonable, implementable idea to a logical extreme, with some problematic consequences. Logical extremes don’t survive in the planning of public transit networks. Metro already needs to reconcile competing ideas when making decisions, as productivity and equity goals may suggest different actions. There is no reason why King County Metro shouldn’t fold the explicit mission of eliminating car dependence within Seattle into that decision-making process as well. The principles behind this restructure should be represented in Metro’s network—even if each individual element of it isn’t—and that’s worth advocating for.