By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
“This is not just about The Viaduct,” as Linda Thielke from the King County Department of Transportation puts it.
But Alaskan Way Viaduct work is a major reason why Metro has some big changes coming up, especially for West Seattle and SODO riders, early next year. WSB was there as Thielke and Metro’s Jack Lattemann outlined them in an informal briefing downtown Thursday afternoon.
Because of construction projects – also including ongoing utility work – Metro is revising more than 30 routes when the February 5, 2011 service change takes effect.
Among them, the 21, 22, and 56 will switch more than half of their current 1st Avenue routing to 3rd/4th Avenues, between Broad Street and Edgar Martinez Way. (No digital copies yet of the maps we saw at the briefing, but the basic path is 3rd between Broad and Yesler, then 2nd Extended [south] or Prefontaine [north] to/from 4th, then to Edgar Martinez Way, west and back onto the existing route on 1st.)
The work that’ll turn 1st into even more of a “bottleneck,” as Lattemann termed it, won’t all have kicked in by February, but Metro wants to minimize the number of changes riders are facing, so they’re starting to get the word out now about one big round of February changes that should keep bus routes fairly reliable for some months beyond that. “When we have to go through multiple construction areas, our schedules go out the window,” Lattemann noted. They also warned there’s a chance of a revision even sooner, in January, depending on how some Pioneer Square-area work is going right after the first of the year.
If you are a regular downtown rider, you may wonder just how many more buses 3rd Avenue can take; Metro plans to “introduce new patterns,” including “skipped stops” (not every bus on 3rd stops at every bus stop, which will be a new concept for those used to the 1st Avenue route using every stop on that road. To clarify things for riders (and drivers!), Metro will introduce new “communications tools” – maybe color-coding or letter-coding. Other changes include Route 99, the green/yellow buses that travel the route of the former Waterfront Streetcar downtown – that won’t travel both ways on Alaskan Way any more. As of February 5th, it’ll go southbound on Alaskan, but northbound on 1st Avenue South (till turning around at Broad).
And looking way ahead – Metro is as eager as you are for the new 1st Avenue onramp to the Spokane Street Viaduct to be open (projected by next fall) – asked how soon buses would return to the high-rise West Seattle Bridge once that’s open, Lattemann said, as soon as they can (though the decision’s not yet final if they’d make the change instantly upon onramp-opening). They’re also making plans for how buses that use 99 will handle the detour that’s being built by the stadiums for use while the South End Replacement Project is in full swing, asking for a “queue jump” lane so buses are able to get around backups.
Even further ahead, they haven’t finalized how RapidRide will make it from The Bridge into downtown – Lattemann says it remains a frequently asked question. By then, with viaduct detours under way, they expect to be able to compare 99 backup times to any extra time that would be taken by using, for example, the new 4th Avenue offramp from the Spokane Street Viaduct, and they will ultimately plan to use the route that is “more predictable” – more consistent, so that the schedule doesn’t have to frequently go out the window.
Speaking of predictability, we asked about the status of new bus equipment that would provide real-time “where’s my bus?” information. Answer It’s starting off in the buses for RapidRide – which just launched in South King County – and then moves to a “rolling install” through the rest of the system over the next year and a half. So if – heaven forbid – we have bus delays caused by a Snowpocalypse Sequel this winter, for example, “we’ll have more real-time information,” Thielke says, “but not (yet) a minute-by-minute, route-for-route.”
Watch for Metro to directly seek you out with more information on the February reroutes – but for now, consider yourself warned.
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