Comment on the Sound Transit 2020 SIP
It's Service Implementation Plan time again. The 2020 (draft) version of the plan has three fairly significant bus route changes:
- The 540 and 541, both variations on a line from the U-District to the Eastside, would go away in favor of the 544, a Microsoft-SLU run with a few key stops in between. It would run every 15 minutes in the peak.
- Weekend 577 trips would continue on from Federal Way to go to Auburn, to increase frequency between the two cities.
- Route 566 would abandon 2 stops on I-405.
The first change certainly opens up a lot of interesting transfer opportunities. Although midday and weekend frequencies aren't high enough to make it work, the emerging system certainly resembles canonical "open BRT" with relatively clear right-of-way on the 520 bottleneck and tendrils fanning out to UW, Downtown, SLU, Kirkland, Redmond, and Bellevue.
You can take a survey or show up for the Oct. 3 public hearing at 12:30 at Union Station.
But the real fun is in the route-by-route data, which is world class in its depth and presentation. For any bus or train route, if you'd like to know daily boardings per stop, or load factors by time of day, all that data is here for you.
I don't see any datum in particular that stands out, but this is the kind of data set that could spawn a dozen Page 2 posts.
