Riding Transit in Seattle

May 17, 2008 - Bernard and I were originally going to rent a car for our trip to Seattle. We read that Seattle isn't the most transit friendly city in the world and the fact that we need to go up to Everett for the Boeing Factory Tour, we should really rent a car. After some research though, we found that it would be super expensive for us to rent one (not to mention the high gas prices), so we decided to take on the public transit system in Seattle and take the bus everywhere on our first three days in town.

First of all, I have to say that the transit system is not as bad as most people say and for a system that relies entirely on buses (the Monorail and the SLUT don't count), it's really not that bad (kinda reminds me of Ottawa, except Seattle has a transit tunnel that Ottawa is dying to have). With the arrival of the Sound Light Rail System next year, the system will surely improve. Anyway, a few highlights from my experience of riding Seattle transit:

1) The Downtown Transit Tunnel

The tunnel is currently used for buses in the heart of downtown. Instead of having surface bus routes running through congested downtown streets, the tunnel allows buses to run underground, thereby improving service reliability and avoid the bus congestion that you see in Ottawa. The tunnel was retrofitted last year to allow LRT service to run through the tunnel as well.

It would be interesting to see how the sharing of LRT and buses will work inside the tunnel. I should note that the buses don't travel that fast inside the tunnel, but that waiting for the bus inside the tunnel isn't that much different that waiting for an Ottawa bus on Slater Street for example. Buses still bunch up and it's hard to see which bus is coming up next. However, at least the buses don't get stuck in traffic.

2) The Downtown Free Zone

Transit is free in downtown Seattle during the day! We didn't take advantage of it though cause we pretty much just walked through downtown (it's not that big).

3) Pay-When-You-Leave

During certain hours of the day, you pay your fare when you get off the bus. I'm not entirely sure why they do that, especially since it really does add unnecessary travelling time: people could only exit using the front door, you can't board until everyone has paid. At least there are clear signs on the bus that tells you exactly whether you pay when you board or when you leave.

4) Direct Suburb-to-Downtown Service

Like Ottawa, the city provides direct suburb-to-downtown service on many routes (no wonder they need a tunnel downtown!). What I also liked as a commuter is that even though buses run every 20 minutes or so after rush hour, because of the fact that multiple routes go to your destination, you can catch a number of different buses, thereby reducing your wait time to 10 minutes at most (not bad for an American city). Routes 70-74 all serve the U-district for example.

5) The Orca Card

Seattle just introduced a smart card system for its transit system, but it's still on a trial basis and does not seem too popular with locals. Not all the buses have the system and I only saw 1 person use it the 3 days that I took transit.

Other things I like about Seattle transit: the neat trolley buses, the extremely friendly drivers (maybe we were just lucky?), the time-based transfers (would the TTC ever switch to those?), and the fact that people of all race and class seem to ride transit, which is not the case for most US cities.

We also saw the SLUT (South Lake Union Trolley) streetcars and I really do love their slogan (ride the SLUT, it gets around!). But because the system doesn't go anywhere that we wanted to go, we didn't get a chance to experience the SLUT first hand. We did ride the Monorail between downtown and Seattle Center three times though, but I wouldn't really call it part of the transit system.

Next blog, I'll talk about some of the other highlights from our trip, including an incident involving someone's nose mucus at the International Fountain at Seattle Center.