Given the above, what would a sane night-owl network look like? I would start with the Seattle RapidRide network (Lines C, D, E), and then add the primary bus routes from each of the remaining points of the compass that remain unserved: Northgate, Lake City - 41 U-District, Northgate - 73* Capitol Hill, U-District - 49 Central District - 3 Rainier Valley - 7 Beacon Hill - 36 Delridge - 120 and, if I had any money left, Georgetown - 124. Night owl routes need to reflect this not-really-new demographic reality. People working these jobs were some time ago pushed to less-tony areas of Seattle ($) - Northgate, Lake City, Delridge, White Center, and the southern Rainier Valley - if not out of the city altogether. But those people aren’t then going home to Queen Anne, Broadmor or Madison Park, and they haven’t been for a generation. In the era of relatively cheap cab alternatives (UberX, Sidecar, etc.) and convenient by-the-minute car rentals (car2go), the people using very-late-night transit are likely low-income people going home from the city center, mostly after working swing shift, or maybe from a night out, so it makes sense to have the network radiate out from downtown this much our current night owl service gets right. An effective transit service connects the areas of highest likely demand.While the petal-loops arrangement above is a great way to get a bus within half a mile of most of the people who lived in Seattle during the 1950s, its uniqueness, complexity and indirection detracts from the good work Metro has done over the last two decades, of focusing Seattle’s transit network down to a core of simple, direct, understandable routes. Riders shouldn’t have to memorize shifting, elaborate patterns of service for different times of day variations, where unavoidable, should be minimized. Ideally, transit should be like driving on a road: you show up and sit down, and it takes you in the same direction, the same way, every time. An effective transit service is a simple, comprehensible service.Let’s state two basic transit planning precepts that apply here: If we’re going to spend city money on saving very-late-night service, we owe it to city taxpayers and transit riders to spend the money effectively, rather than perpetuating a horribly outdated route structure through sheer inertia and loss aversion. Specifically, I’d like to call out the fact that in the context of 2014 Seattle, the service map above, which comprises a dismembered-flower-petal arrangement of one-way loops, designed to serve the city 60 (or more) years ago, is bonkers. Instead, I’d like to discuss the structure of the service which the Mayor proposes to buy. In this post, I want to sidestep questions of whether the city should spend money on more very-late-night (post-1am) service, and where the city could find that money. Martin’s post this morning described the trade-offs around Mayor Murray’s decision to redirect some SDOT funds to prevent cuts to Seattle’s Night Owl service. Note that Routes 81 & 85 were changed to D & C Line trips in 2012.
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