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Yen, Ghost, and Buses for the People

1/19/2016

4 Comments

 
Picture
"Can I request a night stop?"
"Sure!" 

She specified a block in between stops along the Prentice loop.* She was a demure east Asian woman I've seen before but never spoken with. Now that we were alone on the bus, she said, "You're probably the most nice driver I've ever seen. You are so nice to everyone. It is really great to see. We run into some crappiness out here."

Her voice was reedy and small. She explained further, in a voice that knew the awkwardness of her words but needed to quietly say them anyway, because they were true. Sometimes a phrase will sound trite, but where else do you turn when you have no recourse but the truth? Haltingly, she said, "I have brain cancer. What I'm saying is, seeing you being so nice makes life seem worth living."

My thanks to her hardly seemed adequate. It was important for her to share, and it's all she wanted to say. We may receive many compliments or affirmations in our lives, but sometimes it's the most spare, unaffected, and passing of them which still us to the bone.

---

A young man named Ghost was on my 7 last night, also making use of the Prentice routing. In a different way he said something similar. We were having a wide-ranging conversation, making use of the expansive time from Capitol Hill to the bottom of the Valley.

At one point in Pioneer Square he said, "you know why I smile at people now?" 
We'd been discussing the value, and rarity, of doing such. He was sprawled out over the first two chat seats, a gangly octopus dressed in oversized swaths of black cotton and polyester.

I said, "how come?"
"'Cause I read this article once. It said,"
"What'd it say?"
"It said, it was talkin' about this guy, this guy who was gonna kill himself but he didn't commit suicide 'cause somebody smiled at him."
"Oh wow. Oh wow." I looked at Ghost, processing. "That's, talk about making a difference in someone's life."
"Yeah. Just because somebody took a second to smile, made him feel human again."
"Acknowledgement."
"Yeah."
"Wow."

---

*The Prentice loop is at the tail end of the 7 route, and although the 7 is very frequent (every 10 minutes all day with frequent service til midnight, plus 24-hour service) only a few trips continue on to do the loop. The Prentice Street (upper Rainier Beach) neighborhood is served every 30 minutes until about 10:30pm, and sometimes less often than that. That may sound like pretty good service, but for this transit-dependent part of town, it isn't. Elsewhere, mediocre bus service is an inconvenience. In places like this, it shapes lives. People who don't ride the 7 will tell you the Prentice service, which used to be more frequent, is underutilized and therefore not as many buses are needed up there. Actual passengers will tell you the only reason the service is underused is because of how infrequent it is. 

This is one of the great catch-22's in transit planning: if the service isn't used, the company will reduce the amount of service. If the service is reduced, nobody will use the service because it isn't good. An example of the opposite would be the 545 which, upon being introduced as a frequent, all-day express route between Redmond and Seattle that ran every 15 minutes or less and covered its distance in speeds comparable to driving a car, many thought was actually too good, and believed there was no ridership to justify its existence. But people came. They materialized, because the option was so attractive. Now it's one of Sound Transit's busiest routes.

Last year there was a sixteen-car accident that shut down Rainier Avenue in such a way that a shuttle bus had to be devised that night to ferry passengers from Rainier & Rose to the end of the route up on Prentice. For convenience the shuttle driver (a friend of mine!) drove every single one of his shuttle trips up through the Prentice neighborhood. Despite the fact that Prentice service ends at 10:30, he kept going up there until his shift ended at 3am. People used the service on every trip, all night. Not only did many people ride up there, there were people waiting for the bus up there at 2am, long after bus service would normally stop. Though I don't feel every 7 needs to go to Prentice, it's undeniable that if the service was improved, people would use it.

The least Metro could do is address the (in)famous 60-90-minute gaps in Prentice service during both weekday rush hours, when there is no service to or from Prentice exactly when it is most needed. There was a time when folks thought running 10-minute service south of Othello was extravagant, but now we're accustomed to the glut of people traveling between the Henderson loop and Rose, who would definitely be walking if the service wasn't as frequent as it is. No 7 driver hasn't heard the familiar "I'm just goin' to Rose" less than a thousand times.

Planners! Feedback from a neighborhood that doesn't email in quite as much: the peak-hour Prentice gaps, plus the early quit time for bus service to that neighborhood, are the complaints I hear about the most. The consistent positive feedback I get refers to the evening through-routing with the 49, and the direct service to downtown (if the community ever finds out how the RapidRide+ corridors will split the route up, they'll riot!). The suggestion I hear most that isn't a complaint is the idea of dividing the tail into 2 terminals: every other 7 should serve Prentice, with remaining trips serving Rainer Beach Station. Or better yet, have outbound 7s turn right on Cloverdale, L on MLK, L on Henderson to either the Henderson layover or Prentice, for better connectivity and a single route from downtown that hits all three "hubs" of Rainier Beach: the light rail station, the high school, and restaurant row.
4 Comments
Mia
1/19/2016 04:33:31 pm

Effort, interaction, and connectedness make a difference. What needs to happen to improve Prentice Loop service?

Reply
Nathan
1/20/2016 09:37:22 am

I don't feel qualified to state how the service should be improved, other than to say that its peak service and night service are lacking. The real embarrassment is the lack of peak service- for a 90 minute stretch from 4:03pm to 5:35, Metro has no service going up there, which, considering the hour from 4:30 to 5:30 is the busiest traffic hour of all the 24 hours, seems practically premeditated. In reality I imagine it's just an oversight, as this gap used to be filled by the 7 Express, which upon being deleted, never got replaced with corresponding local service. I've contacted Metro multiple times about this, to no avail.

I wonder though if better data collection is the real answer here, rather than band-aiding various issues here and there; particularly with respect to ridership patterns and schedule performance. For whatever reason, planners are not aware that most northbound 106 riders who deboard at Henderson are actually trying to get to Rose, Holden or Othello, in part because the 106 used to serve those areas for years; or that there is desire for an east-west connection on Graham between Rainier and Beacon; or that if the 50 ran more frequently between Rainier and Sodo it would get a big bump in ridership. These neighborhoods are not as proactive or as able as others in contacting Metro with such information.

Additionally, every bus driver will tell you of the disconnect between the schedules and real-world conditions. Things like the 41 famously only getting 15 minutes to travel from Lake City to Northgate regardless of time of day, the 70 having 5-minute recovery times despite having four choke points (Virginia, Stewart, Eastlake Bridge, & Mercer Mess), and so on indicate to me not a malicious intent on the part of schedulers, but simply lack of relevant knowledge and understanding. And it isn't that their hands are tied because of funding: I once told a scheduler that you can't get from 12th & Jackson to 5 & Jackson within the scheduled 2 minutes, because that distance contains 5 signalized intersections and 4 zones. He *reacted with surprise.*

I'll stop there!

Reply
Mia
1/20/2016 06:47:43 pm

90 minutes! That's awful...way too long. I feel for the people who have to wait and wait and wait. I miss the 7 Express.

Sometimes, I take the 125 from the college and transfer to the 50 at Sodo during rush hour. 20 minutes make a difference.

Schedulers should actually ride the routes. Field testing. First hand knowledge might help.

I hear you!

Reply
Nathan
1/21/2016 12:08:02 am

The 7 express is definitely the best example of the phenomenon of making a route worse by cutting trips, to the point that no one rides it. Reducing trips on it when rail opened was always a mistake, since the rail is not a 7 alternative; the corridors are too different to be considered such. But that's harder to notice on a map than on the ground, and as you say, every planner and scheduler would be better at their job if they rode the service. I know of some who did, and they were great.

If the 7 express ran every 15 minutes during rush hour, and made 5 stops along the entire length of Rainier, it would be a massive hit, no questions asked.

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