Not 10 minutes, but 34 minutes

By Marc Calhoun

I recently read an ad for condos near Morgan Junction. One thing struck me as I read it; the ad said they were "only 10 minutes west of downtown Seattle." Wow! Ten minutes! Golly gee, maybe I should consider moving to Morgan, as it takes me a lot longer than that to get to town.

But before I sold up and made the move, I decided to test their claim. So join me now, on a cold winter morning, as I travel from Morgan to downtown.

The schedule says a 54 Express departs Morgan and California at 7:39 a.m. I am tempted to take the non-express, which would add several minutes to my travel time, but I want this experiment to be a fair one. So, standing in front of the condos, I start walking to the bus stop at 7:34.

I arrive at 7:38 and wait with the small crowd. The 54 shows up on time, and there are no traffic delays as the bus winds its way up Fauntleroy and down Avalon.

Then the joy begins. There is a long backup getting onto the bridge and, 23-minutes into the commute, the bus comes to a stop in front of the old piano store. (Which subsequently became a tattoo parlor, and is now the Tillicum Village office). It takes four minutes for us to ooze down onto the bridge, and as the bus creeps forward I see that the traffic coming down Admiral Way is backed up to the top of the hill.

Once we've nosed our way over to the transit bypass lane the bus picks up speed, but for an all-too-short time. For we then come to another stop in order to merge onto 99. Once we finally reach the on-ramp it is a slow creep around the big loop, and, after a three-minute slog, we start trundling north on 99. But it is a short trundle. Three minutes later we reach another bottleneck, the Seneca off-ramp. After inching our way over to First Avenue we zip across the road, and just as the front half of the articulated bus starts up the steep hill to Second Avenue a loud pop startles everyone aboard. It sounds like the bus has broken its back, as the circular hinge plate in the middle catches and releases its outer rim. After that bit of adrenalin boosting excitement we come to a stop, and I step down onto the street at 8:08.

My commute took 34 minutes. Not bad, all things considered. But my trust in the veracity of mankind had been shattered. To think someone would blatantly mislead the public in order to sell condos. But perhaps we should give them a break. After all, it just might be possible to get downtown in 10 minutes at some time during the day. Nah ... on second thought, I don't think so. I've made a few trips to downtown emergency rooms at midnight, and even then it took longer than 10 minutes (and I was speeding).

Postscript: I wrote the above back in November. It languished on my PC for a while, as I was not happy with the ending. It was just a description of the type of frustrating bus ride so many of us put up with every day. I needed an ending that made a point, and I could not come up with one.

Then Metro came to my rescue. I received a brochure describing their "RapidRide" initiative, a "special new bus service coming to West Seattle in 2011." That's a long ways off, and the only mention anywhere in the brochure that addressed the main problem with route 54 was: "The city of Seattle is considering transit lanes for portions of work in conjunction with the transit only lane on Spokane Street and the West Seattle Bridge."

I hope they indeed "consider" doing just that. For, as my little experiment illustrated, the 54 can not be improved in any significant way as long as those three terrible chokepoints exist: the merge at the foot of Avalon; the merge onto 99; and the Seneca off-ramp. Only by putting in bus-only lanes that bypass these points can the 54 be truly improved. That needs to be the priority, and it needs to be done ASAP. Only then can it truly be a rapid ride.

Marc Calhoun may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com