Welcome Back Sunday Service !

By Emmett Heath, Community Transit CEO

On Sunday, June 7, Community Transit will return to a 365-day transit operation. It has always been our mission to serve the residents of Snohomish County the best we can. The Great Recession interrupted our ability to do so, in a number of ways.

Emmett Heath, CEO

Returning Sunday and holiday service is one of several actions we are taking to make good on our promise to fulfill our mission to customers.

Beginning June 7, we will add 27,000 hours of bus and paratransit service to our system, the largest increase since the recession.
• We are adding more trips in the mid-day and on Saturday.
• We are restoring a one-seat ride between Granite Falls and the Boeing plant in Everett.
• We are providing more robust service along Highway 2 in east Snohomish County, and serving job centers in Monroe that we had previously cut.

In the past year, we have hired 120 drivers to offset attrition and to ramp up for this service expansion. These new drivers are happy to be working here, and we’re excited to have them. Next week, we will have all our buses in service and all our drivers on the road doing their best to get you where you need to go, safely and on schedule.

But we’re not stopping there.

We have 22 new Double Tall buses that will be delivered this summer. Seventeen of those will replace older 60-foot buses, adding extra seats on the Seattle trips they serve. Five of those will be additions to the fleet that will increase our ability to serve that popular Snohomish County-to-Seattle market.

We also have ordered 10 additional 60-foot buses that will arrive in early 2016. Those buses will be available to increase our service within Snohomish County as many of our routes, particularly in the south county, are running at capacity.

Today, with concurrence from our Board of Directors, we approved a plan to add more service hours this fall. It is an acceleration of our planned 2016 service enhancement, but it will not provide extra trips. These 12,000 service hours will be used to adjust our schedules on trips that have been struggling to run on time as overall traffic congestion has increased travel times. These hours will go to trips running on I-5 to UW and downtown Seattle, as well as local trips on Routes 115/116 and 201/202.

We like to get people to their destinations on schedule, and some daily driving conditions prevent us from doing so now and then. When we see trips that run late almost every day, we have to invest in more service hours to give our customers a reliable schedule. That’s what we’ll be doing this fall.

I thank you for supporting Community Transit, and wish you a safe and pleasant ride.

New Sunday/Holiday service proposed for 2015

Community Transit has announced a proposal to bring back Sunday and holiday bus service in June 2015.

The service increase is possible due to increasing sales tax revenue, which makes up about 65 percent of the agency's operating budget. It was a sharp and prolonged reduction in sales tax revenue that led to the service cuts in 2010 and 2012.

In addition to Sunday/holiday service, Community Transit is proposing to add some trips to both commuter and local service on weekdays, and local service on Saturdays, as well as several small routing changes. See details online.

Sunday/holiday service
By next June, it will have been five years since Sunday and holiday service was suspended, a move that was always considered temporary, but the recession proved so dire t
hat it has taken this long for it to return.

The proposed Sunday/holiday service is different than that of 2009. Buses would not be as frequent, hours of operation would be shorter and some routes have changed since back then.

DART paratransit service
In this proposal, DART paratransit service would also return on Sundays and holidays parallel to the 16 fixed routes. By federal law, DART will pick up riders and take them to destinations that are within 3/4-mile of an all-day fixed route bus line. The Sunday/holiday bus suspension meant that DART riders could not get service on those days.

DART riders may also be impacted by the routing changes. There are three areas where regular bus service would be eliminated, in Marysville, Monroe and Sultan. There are also areas of Marysville and Monroe that would see bus service added, so DART riders in those areas should review those route changes carefully.

Public comment
The service proposal is just that, a proposal. Public comment will be taken through January 9, 2015 and every comment made through official channels will be provided to the Board of Directors for review. A public hearing will take place before the board on January 8, 2015, so whether you have submitted a comment or not, any person can take three minutes to state his or her opinion about the proposal at that meeting.

Details on how to submit public comment are available online at www.communitytransit.org/2015changes.

While dialogue is encouraged on this blog and through other social media channels, only the comments provided by letter, email or phone call are considered official. You can also attend any of the four public meetings to ask questions about the proposal, or ask them here.