To give more history about this route, there is a annual "race the 8! event scheduled by seattle urbanists where people start off on the worst part of its route and do increasingly outlandish activities on foot while still beating it to its designations. Folks have beat it juggling, walking backwards, dancing, etc. Katie and her kids participated before she was the mayor, and you guessed it, beat it.
This route serves an intensely dense part of the city and has been failing people for years. The city/county have been making piddly, empty changes for nearly a decade that fixed nothing, like adding a 1 block bus lane. Yup, one block only.
The bus is regularly 30-40 minutes late, which makes using it miserable and unreliable. The reason its route is terrible is that there is a highway onramp thats right there near Amazon HQ. So for years and years people commuting in and out of the city have been prioritized over people who live in it, and no previous mayor had the stones to push back and fix it for actual residents.
It is not just prioritising car commuters from outside vs locals, it is simply an extremely wasteful use of limited traffic capacity. The bus, not clogged down in traffic, has a way higher capacity than probably even two full car lanes at the highest performance. A bus lane is the only rational thing there. If that makes the highway off ramp redundant because there is no capacity for cars left to justify it, simply tear it down. It is fake capacity anyway if the traffic cannot be supported further down the road and it would even benefit car drivers, as it would remove a clogging point and free up capacity on the highway.
I agree with everything you say until the end. It’s disingenuous to say that residents do not take the highway. It runs through the middle of the city! We all take the damn highway.
To give more history about this route, there is a annual "race the 8! event scheduled by seattle urbanists where people start off on the worst part of its route and do increasingly outlandish activities on foot while still beating it to its designations. Folks have beat it juggling, walking backwards, dancing, etc. Katie and her kids participated before she was the mayor, and you guessed it, beat it.
This route serves an intensely dense part of the city and has been failing people for years. The city/county have been making piddly, empty changes for nearly a decade that fixed nothing, like adding a 1 block bus lane. Yup, one block only.
The bus is regularly 30-40 minutes late, which makes using it miserable and unreliable. The reason its route is terrible is that there is a highway onramp thats right there near Amazon HQ. So for years and years people commuting in and out of the city have been prioritized over people who live in it, and no previous mayor had the stones to push back and fix it for actual residents.
It is not just prioritising car commuters from outside vs locals, it is simply an extremely wasteful use of limited traffic capacity. The bus, not clogged down in traffic, has a way higher capacity than probably even two full car lanes at the highest performance. A bus lane is the only rational thing there. If that makes the highway off ramp redundant because there is no capacity for cars left to justify it, simply tear it down. It is fake capacity anyway if the traffic cannot be supported further down the road and it would even benefit car drivers, as it would remove a clogging point and free up capacity on the highway.
I agree with everything you say until the end. It’s disingenuous to say that residents do not take the highway. It runs through the middle of the city! We all take the damn highway.
Ehh, way more residents take or would take that bus then would use that on ramp. Its mainly an ingress point to the freeway for people who commute.
The ramp isnt even closing, its just being sanely re-routed to not cause such a clusterfuck.