September 2016 Service Change Details
Sounder and Route 580 at Puyallup (Brian Bundridge - Facebook)
The September service changes will be nowhere near as systematic as the recent ULink restructure, but they will bring a number of substantive changes nonetheless. Angle Lake Station's September-ish opening will surely be the headliner, and Sounder's new off-peak round trip will also be a big splash. The big SE Seattle restructure will also take effect, the Yesler closure will continue, and South Bellevue P&R begins its 5-year closure (a bit later, likely November). Finally, Metro will continue tinkering with the ULink restructure. Route-by-route highlights below the jump.
Route 8 will see 10-minute PM peak frequency extended to 6:30pm.
Route 9 loses mid-day service, with half-hourly service retained during peak, with a few extra peak-direction trips.
Route 15 will get 10-minute frequency between 8-9am. Routes 17/18 will also combine for 10-minute service during peak-of-peak from Ballard to Downtown.
Route 21x will add a trip to offer a 9am arrival in Downtown, whereas current service ends at 8:37am.
Route 26 will add an extra AM "Peak of Peak" turnback trip from Green Lake in order to provide 10-minute headways between 8:30-9am, paid for by deleting the 8:22AM outbound trip on Route 131.
Route 38 is discontinued as part of the SE Seattle restructure, folded into the new Route 106.
Route 40 will add a couple extra AM peak trips into Downtown, beginning at Crown Hill instead of Northgate.
Route 45's first two trips will be consolidated into a 5:30am trip. Late night service at UW Station will become more of a "pulse", with Routes 45, 48, 372, etc adjusting their trip times to match Link when it falls to 15-minute service levels.
Route 48 gets a doozy of a northbound detour as the 23rd Avenue saga continues. Buses will turn west on Union, north on 19th, and then east on Thomas.
Routes 11 and 49 will shift to Pine Street at 8th Avenue instead of Bellevue Ave, reinstating an earlier proposal that was cancelled due to Convention Center conflicts. Pine is a far less congested pathway, without any I-5 related queues to suffer. Route 10 will stay on Pike, meaning both routes will have signalized left turns into Capitol Hill and buses will no longer make the unsignalized right turn from Bellevue onto Pine.
Route 63 will add a late-morning peak trip (departs Northgate at 9:22am) to accommodate the sleepy habits of SLU tech workers.
Routes 63, 64, and 309 will give up their brief experiment in using relatively traffic free 8th Avenue between Seneca and Pine. Instead, buses will endure Boren as far as Pine, then turning west to reach 8th Avenue. Apparently there are safety concerns with the 8th Avenue pathway.
Routes 65 and 67 will get 10-minute headways for 2.5 hours in the PM Peak and 20-minute Sunday service.
Routes 71 and 373 will interline during peak to provide even headways between 15th/65th and UW Station.
Route 73 will add Sunday service.
Route 77 will see its span of service expanded by 30 minutes, from 5:48-9:25am and 3:10-6:40pm.
Route 106 will no longer serve South Beacon Hill, Georgetown, SODO, and the Downtown Transit Tunnel. It will operate via Renton, Skyway, MLK, Rainier, and Jackson, laying over in the International District.
Route 107 will be extended to Beacon Hill Station, with a quick out-and-back to Georgetown along the way.
Metro will reorganize Vashon Island service on Routes 118 and 119 to free up resources to operate Sunday service on Route 118. Importantly, this triggers the requirement for expensive Access service on the island on Sundays.
Routes 111, 114, 177, 178, and 190 will formally begin stopping at Howell/Minor, and Metro will formalize the stop (which has been served by many ST and Metro routes unofficially for years).
Route 193 will change its morning routing and Route 303 will change its afternoon routing, both to avoid Boren Avenue. The routes will make use of 9th and Seneca instead, and will formally recognize that Spruce Street no longer exists at Yesler Terrace.
To compensate for the loss of Route 106 in Georgetown and Sodo, Route 124 will be boosted to run every 15 minutes. Its existing interline with Route 24 will remain, and the additional trips will interline with Route 33. Magnolia-to-Downtown service will be interlined for service every 15 minutes along 15th and Elliott. Route 27 will no longer be through-routed with Route 33, but will terminate in Belltown instead.
New express Route 243 will operate between Kenmore and Overtake.
Routes 555 and 556 will each add a roundtrip, and their routing in Bellevue will shift to Bellevue Way due to East Link construction.
Sounder will add an off-peak roundtrip, leaving Lakewood likely sometime in the 10:00 hour and returning sometime in the 2:00 hour, though the schedule hasn't been publicly released. One major benefit is that it will make the latest PM peak trips more useful to Lakewood riders, whereas currently the last trips (8:00am arrival in Seattle, 6:20pm departure from Seattle) imply a 10.5 hour workday.