Fix the L8: Route 8 Bus Lanes

By JASON LI

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on route 8 and Denny Way. Part 2 will be Tuesday, part 3 Thursday.

Seattle needs more bus lanes. Everywhere.

We are in the middle of a worsening climate crisis, and Seattle's contribution to it is largely driven by personal vehicles. According to Seattle's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, transportation accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the city. Unfortunately, that metric is only increasing. Commute Seattle's 2024 survey results have city center commuters who drive alone outnumbering transit riders and growing rapidly.

Seattle's transit mode share is only about half of what is was in 2019

It's clear that Seattle needs to take drastic actions as soon as possible to reverse this trend to bring these numbers closer to pre-pandemic level, when transit riders outnumbered drivers 2:1. The most effective way to turn would-be drivers into transit riders is just to make taking transit faster than driving. Red paint is an extremely cheap, fast, and effective way to do so, especially when combined with signal changes to ensure buses can take full advantage of transit lanes.

Adding bus lanes is also particularly important as King County Metro faces a looming fiscal cliff. Faster and more reliable buses means that each of Metro's service hours can go further and require less slack and redundancy. Additionally, we urge the county to prioritize service over fleet electrification, which is exacerbating funding issues. If electrification goals take precedence, then we risk a death spiral of worse service leading to fewer riders, leading to even more service cuts. If we continue down this path, we risk pushing even the most ardent of transit advocates to resort to owning and driving a personal vehicle.

King County Metro's upcoming fiscal cliff threatens to result in a death spiral of service cuts

Fix the L8

The Fix the L8 campaign is taking these ideas and applying them to Denny Way, with an Action Network campaign urging city leaders to ensure Route 8 can efficiently serve the city. Anyone who has witnessed the astoundingly inefficient layout of the I-5 entrance at Yale Avenue understands that Denny Way currently is not serving as a road but rather as a glorified queue for the freeway. As a result, Route 8 crawls along the corridor at an average speed of only 3.5 mph and is regularly outpaced by walking. This has earned Route 8 the title of the slowest all-day route in the King County Metro's 2024 System Evaluation for the second year in a row. And it's not just a recent issue either; bands have been singing about it for over a decade. Despite this, Route 8 continues to attract strong demand with overall ridership in the top 10 routes system-wide. In rides per service hour, Route 8 has topped the charts during peak commuting hours (and ranked in the top 4 routes outside peak hours) since 2023, showing just how vital of a route it is to its riders.

Route 8 eastbound reliability craters during evening rush hour

It's unacceptable that Seattle has let such an important connector languish for so long. It must install bus lanes on Denny Way to resolve its speed and reliability issues. If Route 8 buses were able to average just 10 mph, then they could go from Seattle Center to Capitol Hill Station in just 10 minutes vs 20 today. This is over twice as fast as driving during rush hour, and would cause drivers to flock to the bus. Additionally, South Lake Union, the Denny Triangle, Lower Queen Anne, and especially Capitol Hill are all notoriously difficult and/or expensive to park in. This would further incentivize drivers to ride transit. Admittedly, drivers bound for southbound I-5 would not yield any of these benefits, but they are poised to have more transit alternatives than ever when Sound Transit opens the 2 Line's cross-lake connection and 1 Line Federal Way extension next year (knock on wood).

A map of Route 8 and proposed Denny Way bus lanes

Luckily, SDOT and Metro are already studying the possibility of extending the existing eastbound bus lane at Denny and Stewart (built in 2018) to Queen Anne Avenue, but this study continues to be mired in the Seattle Process. Originally scheduled to finish in Fall 2024, it still does not have an estimated completion date, and it's not even clear if it will result in the bus lane extension. While SDOT's hesitancy and thoroughness is understandable given some city councilmembers' hostility to bus lanes, they need to give this issue the priority it demands and implement this common-sense solution. After all, Denny Way has been at capacity for a long time, and its congestion will only get worse as Seattle's ongoing population boom continues. A bus lane is the only feasible way to increase passenger throughput on the road; each articulated bus can hold up to 120 people, equaling an entire mile of roadway capacity if each rider were driving alone instead. Issues aren't confined to eastbound traffic either as the need for a westbound bus lane is apparent during high-traffic events in Seattle Center, but SDOT's ongoing study completely ignores it.

This isn't an issue of funding either. The 2024 Seattle Transportation Levy specifically calls out transit improvements on Denny and Olive Way. In fact, SDOT's 2025 Levy Delivery Plan includes transit spot improvements for Route 8. We hope that this allows SDOT to fully implement whatever treatments it identifies as a result of its traffic analysis. Unfortunately, the larger-scale transit improvements are not mentioned, and the timeline for them is still unclear. We urge SDOT to prioritize this transformational voter-approved project and be bold in its design . We cannot allow this project to follow the footsteps of the Denny Way Paving Project, which is funded by the 2015 Levy to Move Seattle but is still not complete. Additionally, it does not include any new bike or bus lanes in spite of Seattle's Complete Street ordinance, which directs [SDOT] to design streets for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and persons of all abilities" and even specifically calls out that a bus moves more people than a single-occupant car, so we try to protect and promote transit mobility".

Although improvements are moving just as slow as a Route 8 bus, we are hopeful that Route 8 can soon turn from a route that's always L8 to one that's GR8 (groan). We are confident that bus lanes on Denny Way will result in exploding ridership, slashed travel times, plummeting unreliability, and freed up Metro resources. This could act as a shining example of just how much good bus lanes can do, and we hope that it inspires Seattle to apply the same treatments all across the city. If you want to help the effort to push Seattle to install bus lanes, send an email to our local leaders and consider joining the campaign! We are also hosting a Race the L8 event on July 10th at 5 PM to highlight the issues that Route 8 is facing. More details on that will come soon.