By Tom Pearce, Public Information Specialist
Since the February service change, we’ve been listening to customers and tracking service to see where things haven’t quite worked out. With that in mind, starting Monday, April 9, there will be changes to the Route 196 schedule.
On that date, all Route 196 trips in both directions that start after 2:40 p.m. will begin five minutes later. This adjustment, combined with a change to the way drivers’ work is configured, will help keep these buses on schedule the rest of the day.
The new Route 196 schedules will be posted at each stop by Monday, April 9. Meanwhile, the new schedules have already been posted online and are loaded into our Trip Planner so trips can be planned for after April 9.
Route 196 is a new route offering all-day half-hour service between the Alderwood mall area and Edmonds waterfront. The route is averaging more than 500 riders a day, which is very good for a new route. So far, this route has suffered from late trips in the afternoon and a lack of stops around the Lynnwood Civic Center/Lynnwood Transit Center area. We continue to work with Lynnwood officials on the bus stop issue.
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When this route was 1st proposed you said it won't go to the transit center but it will stop near it on 196th, you must have known months in advance that lynnwood will not let a stop be put in the fred meyer area so why didn't you rou8te it thru the transit center?
ReplyDeleteWhy did no one think of putting bus stops in the Fred Meyer's areas in the first place? That to me was a HUGE glaring oversight, since that is one of the busiest spots in all of downtown Lynnwood. I'm glad for the 196 route, I personally thought it should have been created years ago, but the lack of stops in the 50th to 30th blocks of Lynnwood shocked me.
ReplyDeleteThank you for agreeing that Route 196 was a good idea. Certainly our planners thought so. The idea not to have this route go through Lynnwood Transit Center was to keep it as a quick-moving route that could easily get people from east-west on this corridor. Going into and out of LTC adds time, which slows the trip and is more expensive.
ReplyDeleteThat said, there was every intention to have stops located by the Fred Meyer to make it easier to make those connections to LTC, however, as explained in a Feb. 21 blog, we have to request stops and it is up to local jurisdictions to grant them. It is our hope that cities or the county will let us put a stop where we think they should go, but that is not always the case. Or, in some cases as with Lynnwood on 196th, it may take longer for that decision to be made.
Could you not route the bus behind fred meyer using 48th-194th-44th and back to 196th?, there are already bus zones there, and it would not delay the bus that much like if it went to the transit center. It was pretty poor planning not to have stops confirmed in this area before starting this route, it would be great if you could now make use of the existing stops behind FM for this route.
ReplyDeleteI second the idea of using the stops to the north and west of Fred Meyer. A lot of seniors live in this area and this would help them ride CT.
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good idea, routing the bus behind Fred Meyer. This would help the seniors and Fred Meyer's shoppers immensely, as well as another way to get to the Lynnwood Library. It's still be a little bit of a walk for many seniors to get to the Lynnwood Transit Center, but it would not be nearly as bad as it is now.
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