Wallyhood bus riders, here’s your chance to improve bus service for those who live and work in Wallingford!
With the Rapid Ride E Line and other transportation shifts on the horizon, King County Metro is forming a “Sounding Board” to be comprised of Metro riders in North Seattle and Shoreline. Among other things, they are specifically looking for people who make transit connections in Wallingford.
To join the Sounding Board, you must complete this online application by Monday, Sept. 3.
Here’s more from King County Metro:
Are you a bus rider that regularly rides routes in Shoreline or North Seattle?
King County Metro Transit is forming a community sounding board to give us advice about changes to bus service in these areas. We’re looking for a diverse group of members to help us develop service change recommendations for fall 2013. The sounding board will meet 9 to 12 times, from September 2012 to March 2013. Sounding board meetings mostly will be scheduled on Thursday evenings unless a scheduling conflict occurs.
Why change bus service? Starting fall 2013, the Aurora Avenue N corridor will be served by RapidRide E Line between Aurora Village Transit Center to downtown Seattle. The E Line will provide a backbone of new, frequent transit service that other routes in the area can connect to and complement. Working with the sounding board, we’ll be considering changes to improve:
- connections to the E Line
- bus service in the neighborhoods surrounding Aurora Avenue N
- connections between transit activity centers such as Fremont, Wallingford, Greenwood, Greenlake, Northgate and Shoreline
If you’d like us to mail you a printed application, or have questions about the sounding board, please contact: Ashley DeForest, Community Relations Planner at [email protected] or via phone at 206-684-1154.
You may remember that last fall, King County Metro proposed changes to Route 26 and other buses that serve Wallingford. Luckily, Metro held community forums and scaled back some of their proposed changes. This time around, we can have a Wallingford representative on the board. Woo hoo!
If anyone is reading this and will be attending, could I offer what seems like a really obvious suggestion of creating a 16 express that bypasses the rush hour parking lots by Seattle Center and goes directly onto Aurora like the other expresses? There’s a significant gap in rapid coverage between the 358 (soon to be E) and the 26E.
The 16 would be a viable transit option for a lot more people if this were the case, but if you ever make the mistake of riding it north from downtown on a weekday, you’ll know exactly what I mean. From what I remember, the justification for its current alignment is to give tourists an easy connection from downtown to Seattle Center (which I imagine is what the monorail is for, but whatever). A separate rush hour-only 16E would retain this service but give people in central Wallingford and Tangletown a much more convenient rush hour option.
I think it would be better just to skip that deviation entirely. There are several other buses that go from downtown to Seattle Center.
I’m with Michael. I’d skip Seattle Center entirely. Stops on Aurora would be a few blocks away but could save a huge amount of time. The northbound 16 is a mess.
We mostly use the #16 bus to go from Wallingford to the Seattle Center. So, while an afternoon rush hour by-pass of the Seattle Center makes sense, I suggest that on weekends, evenings and other off-peak times the Seattle Center and EMP stop stays en-route.
I’ve seen this idea elsewhere. But if you ride the route and watch people get off and on at the Seattle Center stops, are they really all going to/coming from downtown? When I ride it, there are as many coming from/going to the north. It seems kind of absurd to me to expect these people to hike over to Dexter or Aurora to catch a bus.
There might be a way to drop 16 service to Seattle Center, but we’d have to replace it with something else.
And traffic jams are not a very good reason for it. It’s frustrating and annoying to sit in traffic, but that’s a larger problem that’s going to change faster than you can plan bus routes around it. Long term stability is important for bus routes.
Donn-
I’m a frequent 16 rider and I typically see a lot more folks getting off at the Center than getting on headed northbound during tourist season. Outside of tourist season I’d say it’s more balanced. I wonder if folks who do take in northbound from the Center would trade off reliability and speed for a short walk? During events at the Center or even especially bad traffic on Mercer it can take forever to do the portion on 5th North (I’ve been stuck there for 20 minutes before). The reliability and speed of the route is really bad and I think the Seattle Center portion is largely responsible for it.
I would also add that I’ve never had a significant delay headed southbound.
My family does not commute any more but if we do go DT we take the #26. We can also take it to Greenlake. The # 26 should stay as it is.
What seems like “a few blocks” is usually an uphill downhill proposition in our neighborhood. I’m usually carrying purchases or supplies. This can make hills challenging.
I’d like a convenient way to take a bus from the Greenlake end of Wallingford to the PCC area of Fremont.
@Abigail – Have you tried the 26? I use it to get to Fremont quite easily. It originates in Greenlake and runs down Latona.
Yes,thanks, i take the #26 … the difficulty for me is getting to Fremont at the canal from the shopping areas of N 45th st. and Wallingford Ave N in the center of Wallingford and N 55th St. and Meridien N in the northern area of Wallingford.
Many buses go from Fremont to Wallingford but they now travel on N 40th Street instead of going through Wallingford on 45th the way they used to. The changes were made to facilitate traffic flow.
i appreciate our metro bus system. We can go in all directions with our transfers.
Yes to much of the above. I can see some benefit to modifying the #16 route, but for us (numerous) south Wallingford residents who commute downtown, the #26 is an essential route.
Many of us on the north end of the #26 route depend on this bus.
I did not know the #26 used to go on 45th St instead of N. 40th.
I ride the 16 daily to and from Seattle Center (where I work). And it’s true, going northbound during rush hour in the evening, the portion on 5th/Mercer is a huge mess. This is due to the fact that Mercer is simply a giant mess – it’s basically a parking lot during rush hour with everyone trying to squeeze through the corridor toward I-5, and the construction has only made this problem worse right now. It will be interesting to see if it improves once the Mercer project is complete, because apparently they’re rearranging a bunch of stuff.
That being said, there are definitely evenings where I walk the extra distance from Seattle Center over to Aurora to catch the 16 north (or the 358, whichever arrives first) rather than catching the 16 on 5th, because on a bad day it will literally take the 16 longer to travel the short distance between 5th and Dexter on Mercer, than it does to complete the entire rest of my trip back to Wallingford.
The walk under Aurora is not pleasant, though… it’s loud, dirty, the sidewalks are narrow, and there are always several homeless dudes camping out in the green space at the Mercer & Aurora bus stop, that I don’t feel very safe catching the bus there after dark. This is more of a problem in the winter, when it’s dark by the time I leave work; less of a problem right now with the long days.
Rerouting the 16 away from Seattle Center would ultimately be a bummer for people like me who use it specifically to get to Lower Queen Anne.
(Taking the 30 from Seattle Center to Wallingford has the same problem, as in there’s an even longer portion of the route on Mercer, and it sits in the same traffic. And it seems to run even less frequently than the 16. So it’s really not a great alternative.)
My hope is that they can just fix the disaster that is Mercer Street, and then the 16 will start running (mostly) on time again.
Connie, the #30 and/or #31 went along 45th to Stone Way, down Stone and then west along 35th and over to the Fremont Bridge. as i remember, anyway. It was easy to get to Fremont from the center of Wallingford. That was when the QFC was the Food Giant.
I’ve been riding the 16 for over 15 years, and the portion on 5th and Mercer when it’s heading northbound has always been, and always be, a disaster. It used to turn left on Dexter and then hop on Aurora, now it loops around so it can stay in the right land and not have to cross 3 lanes of Mercer, but it is always the portion between 5th and Dexter that takes forever.
Southbound, the 16 makes sense, at all times of the day. Northbound, it should skip the Center, or, in the alternative, alternate routes so that boarders at the Center are still served, but riders farther up the line aren’t looking at 20 minute or more delays for every bus. The only people affected by this would be people boarding at the Center who want to get to Wallingford and are unable to either get to Aurora and Mercer or to Denny and Battery (where the 5 and 358 stop).
The old 16 Express (now the 316) is a good solution for those at Green Lake and north, but it hops of I-5 at Ravenna (way north of Wallingford), plus it runs (counterintuitively) southbound through downtown before hopping on I-5. If you know it, it is great. If you are a visitor or infrequent rider, it is a bit of a challenge.
Anyway, the 16 is great southbound and including the Center is no biggie. Northbound it is just a mess and the number of riders affected is very small, but I do understand that those with mobility concerns, packages, etc. want that service. To tell the truth, if I was at the Center in the afternoon, I would catch a 16, 3, or 4 towards downtown, hop off at Bell or Virginia, and then catch a 5, 26, or 358 heading north to save the aggravation, but that is smug of me to say since I don’t have any mobility issues.