From CITYLAB:
Why Seattle Is America's Bus-Lovingest Town
How did a transit-backward town become a national poster child for ridership success?
LAURA BLISS MAY 11, 2018
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON—David Ibrahim loved his 2005 Toyota Camry. When he moved to Seattle from Northern California last summer, he would have brought it with him, if his sister hadn’t totaled it.
So Ibrahim reluctantly arrived car-free in the booming tech capital. He had no choice: The recent college graduate had accepted a job as an Amazon software engineer. But once he arrived, to Ibrahim’s own surprise, he never felt pressed to buy a new set of wheels. In nearly a year of daily commutes to Amazon’s Bellevue campus, weekly shopping trips, and weekend social calls, he has found that Seattle’s buses serve him well.
“I honestly take them everywhere,” he told me on a clear, spring-like Saturday in March. I’d approached him among a group of riders clustered at a bus stop in Seattle’s International District, where he was standing to catch the 14 to watch a game at a friend’s house. A few minutes later, Ibrahim’s ride pulled up, and he was on his way.
In several respects, this young man is the face of Seattle’s growth. Since 2007, the fastest-growing city in the country has added nearly a quarter million jobs (thanks in considerable part to Amazon), and has grown in population by more than 15 percent since 2010.
Remarkably, though, Seattle has not gained more cars in its most congested areas. The number of commuters driving private vehicles downtown has declined by 10 percent since 2010, even as new residents and workers have spiked. By and large, new arrivals are instead choosing to ride the bus. Seattle’s King County Metro has seen an 8 percent increase in bus riders over the past nine years and gained about 700,000 rides between 2016 and 2017 alone.
Meanwhile, bus popularity is plummeting in most major cities. Some 31 out of 35 high-ridership metros watched annual trips decline last year. Nationwide, ridership on rubber-tired fleets is at its lowest level in 30 years. Dips in the gas prices and new train openings help explain the trend. But the most important factor, analysts have found, is declining bus service—specifically, the mess of route and schedule cuts that started around the Great Recession and were never stitched back. It’s a vicious cycle. Declining bus ridership feeds the narrative that transit is a waste of money; more people take to their cars and Ubers; traffic gets worse and the buses run slower; repeat.
But when transit works well, the cycle turns virtuous. And buses are often the fastest means to equitable and efficient transit for large numbers of people. In that respect, Seattle’s example as an overnight bus haven seems incredibly useful. It demonstrates a simple and powerful truth: Build a system that works, and riders will come.
The story of the Emerald City’s love affair with the bus can be approached from many angles. Road space and funding have been dedicated, frequent bus arrivals and pleasant service have been prioritized, and bridges between agencies and local employers have been built. I’ll go through them all. But perhaps the best place to begin a survey of what’s working in Seattle is by witnessing the sheer volume of coaches running down Third Avenue in the heart of downtown on a Friday afternoon.
Some 250 local, regional, and express buses travel this corridor every hour during the weekday rush hour—more than two buses per minute, the most of any street in North America. They carry 52,000 daily riders. The crisscrossing buses and streaming riders almost feels like a plein-air Penn Station, if the trains in New York ran on time.
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Link:
https://www.citylab.com/transportati...he-bus/559697/
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