An Open Letter to King County Metro

This afternoon, we spotted these signs in the Queen Anne neighborhood on the King County Metro Route 4. We purchased our house with the benefit of this route being so close and convenient, and the King County Metro system has been proposing to remove this specific route for quite a while.

My letter to Jack Whisner follows:

Good afternoon Jack,

Per the posted notices on the Queen Anne route 4 stops, I want to protest the loss of this loop of service in the strongest possible terms. Reducing the Queen Anne Service routes to just a route 3 is in my mind a tremendous loss of service to the neighborhood and the services in this neighborhood. In addition to the John Hay Elementary School that this route serves, there’s several handicapped homes that take extensive advantage of the bus route service, and in my past 15 years of using this transit route, the ridership has been increasing consistently – right up until the point that King County Metro changed the layover and forced all the participants of the route to “get out and walk the rest of the way” at Queen Anne and Blaine St, earlier this year.

I was annoyed, but accepting (for the good of the drivers, as it was posted) of this change previously, but now I simply perceive it as yet another inconvenience put in place to make it appear as though King County Metro is “doing us a service”, when in fact the service is decreasing and getting consistently worse compared to years past.

I’ve been a strong and active advocate for the King County transit system, and specifically advocated in the neighborhood and generally for all measures supporting the Transit service and advances in funding. That will absolutely end, and in fact completely reverse, as I’ve no interest in supporting a service that doesn’t support the walking neighborhoods of Seattle that I know and love, instead focusing on the massive hops and packing the busses ever more full to have a metric of “increased ridership”, when in fact the service availability for neighborhood residents around the core of Seattle has decreased.

The route 4 is a staple of the Queen Anne neighborhood and should remain open, and King County should undo the layover change that moved the end-of-route from Nob Hill Ave and Galer St to Queen Anne Ave N and Blaine St.

Sincerely,

Joseph Heck