Chris Moore, the production manager at Chop Suey in Capitol Hill, has a hell of a time getting home on public transit after his shift.
In Seattle, a city doing the least to fight its early-to-bed reputation, the last light rail train stops running at approximately 1 a.m. and service does not resume before 4 a.m. A handful of buses operate between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. buses, but most run only once every hour, with a few twice-an-hour exceptions. It makes getting home from a concert, a bender, or a graveyard shift a grade-school word problem.
On weekdays, Moore finishes work—booking, bartending, doing sound, and balancing the books—after midnight. On Saturdays, once the last ravers have retired and he wraps everything up, he’s not homeward bound until 4:30 a.m. Pretty much all of his coworkers drive to work and brave the nightmare (financial, logistical) of parking on Capitol Hill. Moore does, too. Except on Thursdays when his partner has dibs on their shared car. If he’s lucky, and manages to catch the last light rail train and his bus to Fremont arrives on time, or at all, the journey will take an hour.. Usually, it’s a longer ordeal; if the buses don’t show, he ends up forking over $40 for an Uber anyway.
“I don’t know why it’s so inconsistent for someone that works a nighttime job to rely on public transit,” Moore says. “It’s great during the day.”
That much is not a mystery: Transit systems focus on funding frequent bus service during peak-service hours when people are commuting to and from work or school. The lack of investment in nighttime transit strands workers and revelers alike, forcing people to drive, overspend on a Lyft, hurting the city’s nighttime economy in the process.
And yet, nighttime service in the area is better than it’s ever been. Last week, King County Metro added a few new nighttime routes in its fall service changes and the South Link Connections project to its Night Owl bus system. Sound Transit also added two new night buses that run every 30 minutes along the light rail lines while trains are not in service.
But that’s still not enough for Moore to ditch his car permanently, or for his coworkers who live in Kent to bus to and from work. Moore wishes the light rail would at least run late on weekends, but Sound Transit says it needs those late night hours for maintenance. Buses can fill the gaps, but the frequency and reliability isn’t there yet. Even though parking costs and car payments are expensive, commuting by car is a sure thing at the end of a late night.
One thing transit advocates and legislators think could help is the new version of the Seattle Transit Measure (STM).
Voters last approved this sales tax to fund bus service, transit access programs, and capital projects in Seattle in 2020. In July, the Seattle City Council approved the biggest STM in the tax’s 12-year existence, doubling the tax and extending its typical lifespan by four years. If Seattle voters approve the 0.3 percent sales tax this November, the city will double the amount it spends on Metro bus service—from $50 million to $100 million—amounting to 100,000 additional bus service hours over the next 10 years.
When the Seattle City Council discussed the proposed STM, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck included an amendment that stressed the importance of steering funds toward increasing overnight bus service. The council can’t actually direct the funds, but they can set it as a priority that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) can implement, Rinck says, speaking in a personal capacity. The amendment is more vibes than strict policy. There is no specific allocation amount for nighttime bus service outlined in the amendment, but Rinck is hopeful it’ll result in more nighttime service hours.
“Fingers crossed that voters say yes, and then in the next year we’ll see which buses will go from having 10-minute wait times to seven-minute or five-minute wait times, and which buses get expanded into late-night service as well,” Rinck says.
Her hopes are based in precedent. The STM is responsible for the existing King County Metro nighttime service. With a bigger pot of STM funds to pull from, those services should expand. Since its inception, the STM has helped make buses people rely on available at non-peak hours according to Kirk Hovenkotter, the executive director of Transportation Choices Coalition.
In the early 2010s, the night routes were “these really circuitous, silly, routes” that weren’t direct or quick, he says. The first STM in 2014 caused a “big shift” with investments in late-night service on routes such as the Rapid Ride H line, which runs from Seattle to Burien, or the 7, which runs from downtown to Rainier Beach, and the 49, which goes from the University District to Downtown through Capitol Hill.
“Night buses actually were seen as not this measure of last resort,” Hovenkotter says.
The current STM funds 63 percent of Metro’s 19 existing Night Owl routes, according to King County Metro spokesperson Al Sanders. Those routes include the 44, the 48, and the 70, to name a few, plus every late night Rapid Ride route except the A. (Six of Metro’s eight Rapid Ride routes have late-night service.)
The big STM on November’s ballot should add even more bus service to nighttime and weekend bus routes, especially since those hours are actually the cheapest to buy for Seattle, Hovenkotter says.
“It’s really expensive to buy more service during those [peak hours] because every Metro bus is already out there,” Hovenkotter says. “But there’s a bunch of buses that are just sitting, waiting to be used on weekends or late nights. So the city is being really smart at using these STM dollars to buy those hours.”
For people like Anna Zivarts, the founder of Nondrivers Alliance, who, shockingly, doesn’t drive at all, having reliable nighttime transportation is truly an accessibility issue. “I want to be able to get home whenever I want and not feel trapped,” she says.
Rinck is familiar with that trapped feeling. Not long ago, Rinck worked at a restaurant in Lower Queen Anne Uptown near Key Arena Climate Pledge Arena. Similar to Moore at Chop Suey, Rinck would get off work and have to wait in the dark and cold for upwards of an hour for a bus to take her home.
“All you want to do after working a long shift is be home,” Rinck says.
Perhaps, the STM can help make that happen, and in doing so, make Seattle a city that can stay up past its bedtime, and help help the nighttime economy, says Scott Plusquellec, Seattle’s Nightlife Business Advocate, also known by his unofficial title (which he does not like, but I do), the Night Mayor.
“It would transform the city if we had more late night transit,” Plusquellec, the Night Mayor (sorry, Scott), says. His “great white whale” is getting the light rail to run longer. That’s not happening any time soon, or at all, so, it’s up to the buses.
“It would go a long way towards making us a 24-hour city,” Plusquellec says. “When the buses stop running and people can’t get around, then they’re either just going to stay in their own neighborhoods close to their home, or they’re not going out.”
Why buy a concert ticket, or a movie ticket, or meet friends at a bar, when getting home is a puzzle they have to solve tired and drunk? People choose to stay in, he says.
“That’s a ticket that’s not bought. That’s drinks that aren’t bought. That’s the dinner that wasn’t bought,” Plusquellec says. “You are deflating people’s ability to go out because they don’t have the option.”
Workers are the other side of the equation. Seattle doesn’t have a full picture of how many people work nighttime jobs. Plusquellec’s department in the Seattle Office of Economic Development will soon publish a study on overnight workers. He hopes the data can inform future nighttime transit route improvements.
