Psst, Seattle also has a reliable, free, and open source pair of apps for knowing where you bus is and when it’ll arrive. These apps are built and maintained entirely by volunteers. (In the case of iOS, this is basically just me.)
If you have any background in iOS or Android development and want to help improve your own commute in Seattle, come check out our projects and pick up a bug or two. Hundreds of thousands of people will thank you for it.
Let me buy you a beer sometime. I can't tell you how valuable OneBusAway has been to me and my friends — no other transit apps I've seen in any city have come close to the utility it provides (even if the estimates are sometimes a bit off).
Thanks for everything you do - your app is a huge part of the reason I can live in the Seattle area without a car.
One note - I just donated, but I almost bailed out when I saw I had to go through the whole UW process (especially when I then paid with PayPal, which has all of that info anyway....). I'm sure you're restricted to using their platform, but even better PayPal integration would go a long way.
I love OneBusAway -- thanks for your work! We've got it in active use in Detroit, powering 100s of thousands of requests a day. Wish I could contribute to the core (I'm not a java dev) but it's a truly impactful system.
That's awesome! Are you only using the backend, or are you using the mobile clients, too? I'd love to talk with you more about the Detroit deployment as this is the first I've heard about it. Can you email me at aaron@brethorsting.com?
A lot of the anti-transit comments here are simply saying "yeah but it's hard to get to X place by transit" (particularly Microsoft). This may be true now, but from my perspective only underscores the need for even better coverage — for example, ST3 reaching Redmond will help enormously for people getting between Seattle and Microsoft.
In general, focusing on transit at the expense of drivers is simply the smart thing to do — roads are a limited resource, and as the population grows we have to use them more efficiently. Doing so helps the most people for the least cost.
I'm sorry if you own a car and things get a little less convenient for you, but in the end we have to create the most value for the most people, especially those who don't have the luxury of owning a car.
> In general, focusing on transit at the expense of drivers is simply the smart thing to do
Plus, as Seattle continues to expand, it's only going to become more expensive and difficult (zoning, nimby etc) to build rail mass transit. Now is the time to do it and do it aggressively. You put it into place now because you won't be able to later.
It's a real shame that we've chosen with ST3 to build rail to the suburbs instead, deferring the much-more-important task of rail between the neighborhoods for the next generation.
We should do both, both will get expensive. It does seem wrong that we aren't building to ballard at the same time we are building through bellevue to go to microsoft. But the whole thing takes so freaking long, I want to start working on all segments at once, subject to our capacity to plan.
So what, we don't invest in light rail at all? That's why we're in the traffic mess we are now — because voters 30 years ago didn't prioritize long term improvements.
We are shooting ourselves in the feet by intentionally diminishing road traffic capacity before the alternative is ready. You are not serving the underprivileged by making it too expensive to drive, since middle and lower income people can only afford to live in the outlying areas in the first place.
That's wonderful, but now you're trying to solve mass transit and affordable housing at the same time. The fact of the matter is that a war on driving is a war on the working class. You can get a used car for just above $1000, but that's how much more you would be paying per month to live within transit distance of your workplace.
> The fact of the matter is that a war on driving is a war on the working class.
It's not a war on driving - it's favoring public transit over driving. There's a contradiction in your statement because public transit is often opposed by wealthy communities for fear of attracting "undesirable elements" (read: the poor). How can public transit both be used by working class people but also be bad for them?
To add on to that, how is it better financially for working class people to put thousands of dollars (a significant fraction of their net worth) into an otherwise unproductive asset that sits idle 80-90% of the time? Not to mention that $1000 used car is far more likely to break down and require expensive repairs (due to more use) when used by a poor person who has to drive an hour each way every day (because housing within decent commute range is too expensive). Operating a car can cost quite a bit too. Insurance can easily be another $1000/year and gasoline is maybe another $1500 more. Compared to that an unlimited VTA pass is $70/month. And the cost of sitting in traffic vs sitting in a train/bus and possibly getting some sleep or work done.
> now you're trying to solve mass transit and affordable housing at the same time.
Yes, that's exactly how it needs to happen. Transit works more efficiently in higher-density areas, and higher-density areas become more appealing when served by transit, and everyone benefits. The solution is obvious: upzone all the low-density neighborhoods within city limits, then build transit links connecting them.
The working class can drive on largely un-congested roads to a park and ride. No one is taking away road capacity in places that aren't getting better mass transit.
If you look at the highly affordable and working class friendly cities in the midwest and Texas, the one thing that they all share in common is that they are all highly driveable cities. Rents are driven by supply and demand, so by allowing people to seek housing away from predetermined transit lines, supply increases and rents become vastly cheaper.
How long would it take to widen the freeways to account for the same number of commuters that the light rail is predicted to carry? I'm guessing rebuilding all those roads, overpasses, underpasses, purchasing rights of way, etc, take some serious time and money..
Even maintaining current capacity would be an improvement over what's happening right now. They are intentionally trying to reduce the number of drivers before the transit system is ready to handle them.
OK, so gather signatures and organize more funding?
Dynamics of mass transit infrastructure in the Seattle region is dominated by a multi-decade absence of adequate funding and building. Seattle spent several decades through the mid-20th century in decline, but even as jobs and residents started flowing back (beginning in the '80s) Seattle nevertheless squandered additional decades failing to build out infrastructure. Only recently has that changed, and the process has to overcome a reluctance towards taxation and government spending in the area (Seattle specifically has very low taxation levels compared to a city of its size) and the deep hole of those lost decades. The only way to counteract not building up transit for decades is either spending decades building up transit or taking a hard short-term financial hit to accelerate the process.
Your comment makes it seem like population growth is inevitable. I don't think that's true at all. The city can manage their policies (for example around permitting) more reasonably, to slow down/disincentivize unchecked population growth, to protect the quality of life for folks already living here.
Things are not just "a little less convenient" for people who use a car. That's minimizing what has been a much more real impact to me and many others I know. There was a time even only a few years ago when I could zip around the city and do many different things in one day, making the most of the limited time me, my family, and friends have. Now a lot of that way of life is simply not possible due to the amount of planning/time it takes to get around - we can't casually expect to be some place at some time, and in the end we just plain do less and live a less-enriched life as a result. That's a lot more than a slight inconvenience to us.
And along the same lines, certain neighborhoods in the city (e.g. Capitol Hill, Ballard, etc.) are downright inaccessible to anyone who doesn't live there, whereas previously it was possible to drive there and find parking (even if it took a little bit :D). I'm sure someone is going to mention there is now light rail to Capitol Hill, which I'll head off by saying that the nearest light rail station for me has no parking, and taking a bus to get there and then waiting for the light rail basically adds 40m+ to the trip and just makes it not worth it. ST3 is also not a panacea. It will take years for it to reach its intended coverage (whereas the population is growing _now_), and there's also a good chance that it will not be enough by the time it is ready.
Lastly, I think saying we have to "create the most value for the most people" is also more of an opinion than a fact of life IMO. From my perspective, the city government exists firstly to protect the quality of life of its existing constituents. It is plainly failing at that.
all those people "blocking you" already moved to seattle, it's just going to get worse. so lets deal with reality. certainly there is a limit to the number of people our infrastructure can handle comfortable. As someone who rides a bus to work each day, we are past that limit already.
To add to the points raised in the article, Seattle’s public transit system and transit policy are just plain good. Buses are clean/new, frequent, and on-time; trains (while they don’t yet extend as far as they need to) are reliable and have good coverage along frequented routes; HOV lanes are (finally!!!) present along the entirety of common longer commutes (especially across the lake).
The bus system is especially critical to this. It doesn’t take billions of dollars to add a new bus route, or make buses more frequent on a route, so congestion issues at bus stops are largely addressable. The routes are also generally being made more convenient, so the added benefit of driving in a car is diminished.
I live in New York now, and while the subway coverage here is certainly unbeatable, its unreliability, dirtiness, congestion, and the borderline-criminal mismanagement of public transit infrastructure in NYC (including buses) make me really miss living in Seattle.
Bus routes are a circuit, so they are more heavily impacted by traffic than other modes of transportation. Thus, heavy traffic regularly makes Seattle's commuter buses 10-20 minutes late. The bus from Mountlake Terrace can sometimes be over an hour late, and rush hour makes this a 2-hour ride on top of the wait.
With a car, you can hop off the freeway and take a side street and you're there in 30-40 minutes instead of 2+ hours.
If you want to discuss borderline-criminal mismanagement, there's the $50 billion ST3 plan. We could put one WA State resident on the moon for that price.
> With a car, you can hop off the freeway and take a side street and you're there in 30-40 minutes instead of 2+ hours.
You're comparing the best case time with a car to the worst case time of a bus. How long do you think the car will take in 5 years, or 10, as the region continues to grow?
> We could put one WA State resident on the moon for that price.
Perhaps, but what's the utility of that? Infrastructure costs money and the region needs mass transit or it will suffer from increased gridlock and commute times.
The best time with a car was 15-20 minutes. I haven't had that commute in 3 years so I'm not sure how it is today. Seattle is at maximum capacity, and it's spilling out into the larger region. I don't forsee commutes getting much worse, as if commute times get any longer, fewer people will commute, balancing out travel times over weeks to months.
A call to the absurd is a way to illustrate my frustration with the relative lack of return on the investment.
There are also comparatively very few people who live in the Redmond area and who commute to work downtown Seattle. It probably shouldn't be a heavily serviced path, realistically speaking.
During regular working hours? No way! 545 is awesome and takes ~30 minutes to Seattle. So an hour is more realistic. Even carpool is not bad with much better HOV coverage.
> Seattle’s public transit system and transit policy are just plain good. Buses are clean/new, frequent, and on-time; trains (while they don’t yet extend as far as they need to) are reliable and have good coverage along frequented routes...
Did we live in the same city? This is the exact opposite of my experience with Seattle transit.
Yeah I suppose I might have just experienced a particularly good section of it. I've lived in Kirkland and Bellevue, and took either the 540->372 (change at Westlake) or 255->522 (change in U District) to get to Lake City nearly every day. Buses were always pretty pleasant (esp. compared to NYC), and only added ~15 minutes to the trip. Also would commute across 520 a bunch, and found the bus service to be pretty darn convenient getting to SLU, Downtown, U-District, Cap Hill, Fremont, and Beacon Hill. Obviously not EVERY route was convenient and used Uber to pick up the slack, but 9/10 times public transit was only slightly slower and slightly less convenient than using a car.
I was going to say, Seattle buses were not new and often not clean five years ago (in my experience). Metro suffered a lot after the 2008 financial crisis. It's really only in the last few years we've been getting new buses to replace all the old ones.
As far as cleanliness goes, it really depends on the route. Commuter routes tend to be pretty clean.
It's so much better than it was, and still so much better than so many other cities in the US. Not to say that it is actually good relative to the rest of the world.
Ya I take the bus to work everyday and rely on public transit here 99% of the time I'm going anywhere and 'clean, frequent, on-time' happen, but are not the norm. Some of the express routes if you're lucky to live near them are frequent during day time weekly business hours but once you get outside of that and core downtown travel it gets much harder to get around. I put up with it but everyone I tell about my use of public transit here thinks I'm crazy for not owning a car, and I'd agree.
We probably don't live in the same place. You see, I live in reality, while you live in a fantasy world where your ability to drive your car for cheap matters.
Roads need to be _EXPENSIVE_ to use, Cars need to be expensive to own
Transit needs to be _UBIQUITOUS_ and _CHEAP/FREE_ to use
_ANY_ other combination is insanity. It has been proven time and time again that any other combination leads to insane amounts of congestion.
I'm not sure you can attribute HOV lanes on an interstate to the city of Seattle. Most of the I-90 bridge is not even in the city limits. In this case maybe you mean "Seattle" as in "Seattle Metro area" which would be fair. ST + Seattle Metro transit seem to be doing a good job considering the realities of transit around here.
Many of these (on state and interstate highways) are paid for by Sound Transit. It's more proper to say "Seattle area", but it's largely our tax dollars.
You're right, of course. I don't really know how the city coordinates with the state, but I'd assume that there's certainly collaboration w.r.t. main conduits of traffic into the city, as well as with the greater Seattle metro area.
I have visited Seattle a few times and I agree. I live in a transit desert and Seattle by comparison is 'streets paved with gold'. I tend not to rent cars during my visits now and just use the bus service as much as possible, with Car2Go/Lyft for emergencies.
Public transit in Seattle works for many commuters but the two largest residential neighborhoods in the city are still poorly served. If you are not near the main line getting to a bug stop can be very difficult. Local bus service still seems to be lacking in many areas of the city.
For me it's no problem, both my office and apartment are on the C Line route but if I lived in North Admiral I would probably just ride my bicycle to work.
Public transit in Seattle is still not convenient or even possible for actually getting around the city. I still use Uber/Lyft or my own car or motorcycle to get around other than getting to work and even then I prefer to ride the motorcycle in traffic over being crammed into the sardine can C-Line.
Yeah, we could use a lot better coverage in a lot of neighborhoods. Hopefully expansion of the light rail and bus lines that work with it will help, but I don't think it can ever ideally serve everyone – which is why we need to make sure we still adequately serve cyclists and drivers to pick up those who can't be reached.
But hopefully we can expand transit to where most people choose it over cars.
Yeah we lack a lot of last mile coverage. I'm hoping that with light rail expansion we keep the same number of buses but move then to more last-mile service to help people get to light rail stations.
Just anecdotal experience, but I think our increased transit use and decreased SOV come from a variety of factors:
1. Geographical limitations (we literally cannot build more freeways) -- we're on an isthmus.
2. A newfound willingness of the public to vote for transit (ST2, ST3 etc). Some of this is generational, some is new yuppie residents (i.e., AMZN employees) (this is not intended as an insult, just a demographic observation).
3. As a result of (2), light rail. Light rail is a commuting density godsend and we're building more of it as fast as we can.
4. Benefits for HOV carpoolers in the city — access to expressways and HOV lanes.
5. Parking lots downtown are too expensive not to sell to developers, and even if there is a mandatory minimum parking on new construction, it doesn't seem replace existing supply. So, to put it another way, parking pressure / increased expense makes driving less appealing.
6. Rapid ride / BRT ("Bus Rapid Transit")? Some buses are at least supposed to be very frequent and have fast load/unload. Supposedly they have dedicated lanes and access, too, although this doesn't always work out in practice. Still a lot better than the historical Seattle standard of buses every 15-20 minutes that would arrive within +/- 20 minutes of their scheduled stop time.
How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit.
Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Quality of life down for most drivers, maybe. But by focusing on transit, moving around and in/out of the city becomes a lot easier for more people than it becomes worse for, so I'd say overall quality of life goes way up.
You've managed to choose an arbitrary route that is an extremely uncommon commute and one of the worst possible commutes into the city. You're also neglecting time to find parking and the cost to park (and as long as we're mentioning costs, gas, insurance, and wear and tear on the car).
Fair enough, but I take measurements like these as a need to further improve transit. For example, the light rail reaching Redmond should help that particular route a lot.
In general, it doesn't make sense to invest in making it easier for cars as the population grows — it's not as sustainable as improving transit, since public transit is a far more efficient way to transport people.
That estimation may change in the coming decades. Self driving cars would allow for pooling and far greater car throughput on existing roads (no human latency/error, synchronized top speeds)
Even if self-driving cars were perfect and every manufacturer came out with one tomorrow, it would still be 20 or 30 years before the existing cars on the road were all replaced. To say nothing of the decades of R&D that will be required starting now in order to get us to that point.
I think it's naive to suggest this as an alternative when we could have working mass transit systems using proven equipment within a decade. Why would we wait for what might come when we could have something better today?
Absolutely agree. Traffic in Seattle is some of the absolute worst in the country. 25% of workers drive to work only because there isn't even enough room on the road to fit more of them. Getting around Seattle is a massive pain in the ass and public transit just isn't keeping up.
To me, this is just evidence to expand public transit even more. There's only so much road space, and as the population grows we need to more efficiently utilize it – busses and rail are some of the most efficient ways. While we always need to support some car use cases, public transit is really the long-term solution to traffic.
I would love to have good public transit, but being someone who bused from 2008 until 2015 it will never happen.
Busses in the city are plagued by our homeless. A lot of the busses simply don't feel safe, especially if you're a female traveling solo.
The exception to the rule seems to be the 'commuter' busses, double deckers that go to park and rides straight downtown, but park and rides are full by 6:30 with not enough parking, and service is limited.
Connecting busses out of county (Community Transit, Gnomish county) sucks, no service out of 9-5 hours Monday through Friday. Total roundtrips for most people start at 2 hours and go up to 4 (my commute to college and home).
Ultimately, the buses are torn between two opposing causes: serving disadvantaged members of the community by being cheap and helping people commute at odd hours, or serving mass commuters that work downtown, and it fails at both.
> Commuter buses … pay for the city buses that serve the disadvantaged
This is actually the opposite of the truth. Commuter buses are far more expensive routes to run due to both the distance (wear and tear, fuel) and the deadhead (empty) return trips. City routes cost far less to run per head.
> Metro's higher-than-average cost per boarding can be at least partially attributed to its high percentage of commuter routes, which run at peak hours only, and often only in one direction at a time. As of 2011, 100 of Metro's 223 routes are peak-only. These routes require significant deadheading (particularly on the one-way routes), as well as a very large part-time labor force, both of which drive up costs.[29]
> Metro's lowest-cost route overall, route 4 (East Queen Anne to Judkins Park), had a cost per boarding of only $0.46 during peak hours in 2009. By way of contrast, Metro's peak-only route with the lowest cost per boarding was route 206 (Newport Hills to International School), at $2.04. Metro's highest cost route by this measure, route 149 (Renton Transit Center to Black Diamond), had a peak time cost of $34.47 per boarding. Route 149 serves the rural southeastern corner of King County.[30]
Starting on page 24 (20 in the document), you can see look at "Fare Rev. / Op. Exp. Ratio." The "West Subarea" is the city of Seattle; the East and South subareas are suburbs. You can see that the aggregate fare recovery per operating expenses is much higher in Seattle than in routes serving the suburbs.
I agree that more transit is necessary, but the city just hasn't been keeping up. They are making it harder for cars without providing viable alternatives.
Where are you going to move to? Every big metro area in North America that is significantly geographically constrained has horrendous traffic: SF, NY, Boston, Vancouver, ...
I don't know a single person who drives in Manhattan, except people who live in Queens... There's no need. The subway is fine, occasional delays and all.
Fair warning, Denver may not be Seattle bad, but people are moving here at a crazy clip and traffic continues to degrade as we fail to see improvements in roads or mass transit to effectively offset the growth. And with the possibility Amazon HQ2 landing here it may only get worse.
As a Redmond resident who,has investigated getting out, I sincerely wish you luck. I’ve kept an eye out in Idaho and Montana, and though the jobs are there, the pickin’s are slim. Denver or SLC might be a better shot for the first job, and more importantly, the second job when the first doesn’t work out.
Thankfully I’ve recently landed work in Bellevue (as opposed to Yet Another Pioneer Square Startup), so maybe I can hold off for a while longer. Love Redmond, but a lot of the work is across the lake. And, no, I’m not moving to Seattle.
Apparently, you have never driven in another major city? Have you tried the commute to Chicago? There is a reason >300,000 people there take the metra trains every day to downtown.
Yup. Seattle is terrible compared to some hypothetical ideal that doesn't exist anywhere in reality. Portland? LA? San Francisco? Chicago? New York? Driving in any major city in the US during rush hour is an unmitigated nightmare. Seattle doesn't have the geography to add a bunch of a bypass highways or to increase the number of lanes on major highways (even if those things helped), building out transit is the only way things get better.
Hypothetically speaking, given the tremendous expense of accommodating cars and the necessary ridership needed to get public transit working well (e.g. the greater the bus ridership, the more routes & times), I could imagine this actually being a rational step in moving a population over to mass transit.
Yes. Approval of an insane number of construction sites in downtown core has lead to absolute gridlock, the removal of lanes on arterial roads for wider bike lanes, and the 405 toll lane are the first which come to mind.
Ugh, that 405 change is almost enough to have me start an armed rebellion. Not only did it make traffic worse, as a motorcyclist it made my commute far more dangerous because they couldn’t be bothered to spend money for even the most trivial of barriers. Even the car drivers are scared, because they all huddle in the left HOT lane. It is one of the few public projects that blatantly appears to involve some degree of graft.
I think what he's saying is that the city has enabled unchecked population growth, and this has hurt quality of life for those already living here, who have put down roots, and been paying their taxes. This is plainly true - the ever increasing height limits in South Lake Union, rezoning of various neighborhoods, etc. has made it much harder to get around as density increases and shared resources (e.g. roads, parks, etc.) become vastly over-subscribed.
Are you suggesting the city of Seattle has any control over 405? I agree that the 405 toll lane(s) are awful, just not on the part about Seattle's culpability.
I think it's more a question of what they haven't done as the city has grown. If you increase the populace, but don't increase the amount of roads and parking, driving gets worse. (I'm not arguing that that's a bad thing.)
Interstate 405 toll lanes, turning two way roads into one way roads to add a bicycle lanes in many places, lowering arterial speeds from 30 to 25mph and in downtown streets from 25 to 20mph.
The 405 toll lanes originally removed capacity on off peek hours by removal of the HOV lanes, until pushback had them undo it. 2 person HOV was removed.
The way the WADOT has been measuring success of the toll lanes is by polling people at the Bellevue Transit Center to find out if they are now taking the bus because of the toll lanes.
Yes, lots of actions. I'll name just a few but this is FAR from exhaustive:
- They have eliminated car lanes in favor of bike lanes that are typically not highly utilized - even in neighborhoods far from the downtown core, street parking is being eliminated for bike lanes, and is making even simple tasks hard and hurting quality of life (e.g. taking the kids to the dentist but not being able to park anywhere nearby).
- They have reduced speed limits in many places and therefore added travel time everywhere. This includes thoroughfares obviously designed for high throughput (e.g. WA-522, Lake City Way).
- Next month, the main on-ramp at Mercer Avenue onto I-5 will begin to be metered, which is going to be incredibly painful given that traffic is already super bad on Mercer (as always they are claiming it will "improve safety").
Many lanes on important highways and connecting streets downtown are being made bus-only all the time, when they really should be Bus+Carpool or allow regular car usage outside peak hours.
Cars aren't going away in Seattle. The bus is a good alternative, and maybe often a superior alternative to driving if you live near a bus line that also stops near where you are going. If your bus trip involves a transfer, it is almost always going to be a better choice to drive. Buses are a great, but they are no panacea.
I guess my real complaint with articles like this is that they assume cars are a problem and buses are a solution. This is wrong. The problem is that I need to get from point A to point B. Buses are a possible solution, and cars are a possible solution, bicycling is a possible solution, walking, heck, even electric skateboards are possible solutions.
The big problem right now in Seattle is that any form of commuting (especially downtown) sucks. Buses are more popular now and cars less popular now, but that's largely because for many of us commuting by bus sucks less than commuting by car. But make no mistake, they both suck.
I don't think the authors of the article would really disagree with you.
The problem isn't cars per se. It's the percentage of trips made with cars and the relative low person-density of a SOV (or even a fully occupied car, relative to fully occupied buses or light rail).
There will always be routes that are not well served by transit compared to cars. The end goal is not zero trips made with cars. The goal is to make transit convenient for the majority of trips, so that people choose transit over cars. The result of higher person-density transit is that travel times do not become even more unreasonable as the region grows.
Here's to hoping Portland's increasingly-awful traffic situation reaches a similar inflection point where the misery forces people to do something other than drive.
If you have any background in iOS or Android development and want to help improve your own commute in Seattle, come check out our projects and pick up a bug or two. Hundreds of thousands of people will thank you for it.
iOS: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-iphone/
Android: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-android
Come talk to us on Slack: https://onebusaway.herokuapp.com/