Link Ends Earlier, Starts Later
Several comments have raised concerns that the August 29th service change shortened Link's service day, so that it now ends earlier and starts later. This interacts with the launch of ST Express Night Ride" routes between midnight and 4am. These theoretically can replace Link trips. But the ST Express routes bypass several high-ridership Seattle Link stations. This can force trips that were on Link in the midnight hour or 11 pm hour or 4 am hour to an ST Express or Metro route, turn a 1-seat ride into a 2-seat ride, and the bus routes are less frequent than Link was.
I wanted to know, did the spans really change on August 29? What is the current situation on weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays? What kinds of trips at what hours are newly 2-seat rides? Where is the best place to live to have the earliest or latest Link service? Which can you go to on those lucky runs?
I looked at the new 1 Line and 2 Line schedules to quantify the current situation and changes. To reach these pages from Sound Transit's website, use the schedule form on the home page to get to the interactive charts. To get a PDF of the schedule, go to the bottom of the page and press the Full Schedule PDF" button.
I tried to make a consolidated list that would organize the first/last runs in different areas and days. But it was an insanely difficult job, and after a few hours I gave up.
So instead we're going to crowdsource the issue.
How has Link's span changed since August 29th? Has this affected your trips? Or do you see other people's trips that are affected? Can you glean more from the schedules than I can? Can you figure out the right questions to ask AI to figure it out? (If you do, please disclose AI's role in the result.)
Some of these impacts have already come up in recent articles' comments, but this article is a place to consolidate them all together so we can see the total impact. And it will be a reference in the future when people have a question, so that they can find it all in one easy-to-find place.
The problem I had with the interactive schedule pages was I had to keep scrolling four directions to get at the first or last full run and short run, and when that would get you to Westlake or SeaTac or the final terminus. I had to keep going up to the date switcher. I kept finding mistake after mistake in my results, so I had to go back and reconfirm them, or compare weekday to Saturday again, and make sure I hadn't jumped back to a date before the service change. Reading the PDFs online was a lot of up-and-down scrolling with similar printing. Printing the PDFs to get a wider-area view at once would take 34 pages per line. Maybe ST has a printed schedule book with them but I'd have to go search for a copy. I didn't want to publish a list with mistakes that would waste everybody's time.
Maybe if different people address small parts of the issue individually, we can get those facts more accurately and a better idea of the whole.
ST in the future wants to shorten Link's span further, or have more single-track reductions, or more weekend closures of segments, to increase the time available for maintenance. We desperately want ST to increase maintenance because Link's reliability is far below peer cities' networks. This causes passengers to get stuck en route, be late for appointments, or drive to critical appointments to avoid the risk that Link will hiccup that day. It also snares visitors and gives them a negative impression of Seattle and Seattle's transit. So we really want maintenance to be increased to make Link more reliable.
At the same time we need Link's late-night and early-morning service. If ST Express night owls bypass several Seattle stations in the shoulder hours Link used to provide, then it's not an adequate substitute. ST says Metro has night owl buses in all those areas (7, 36, 49, 67, 70). But those night runs are funded by Seattle's transit levy, and will go away if voters don't renew the levy this November. Metro stopped funding Seattle night owls in the 2014 recession. Also, the bus routes are half-hourly or hourly, as opposed to Link's 15 minutes. If you switch to say the 49+597 or 36+597 to workaround the loss of Link, you may be waiting 30+30 minutes or a full hour.
This affects people coming home from bars, staff working at bars, people who start or end a night shift, people going to the airport for an early-morning flight, and people coming from an evening flight that was delayed and didn't land until midnight or later, and airport workers with early-morning shifts.
So what are the actual problems now? Did Link's span decrease August 29th? What kinds of trips, where, and when are affected? If in the future ST ends Link even earlier at 10pm or 9 pm every day or on monthly maintenance days or two-week maintenance periods, how big a deal would that be? How would we cope with it? What should we tell Sound Transit and our politicians about all this?