WHY WAIT FOR THE TRAIN? BUS RAPID TRANSIT AS A FIRST OR (MAYBE) FINAL STEP

The Puget Sound region's traffic woes are infamous. Community Transit, Snohomish County's primary public transit operator, provides a wide range of alternatives used to ease traffic pains, including local and commuter bus, paratransit, vanpool and TDM services. This paper tries to expand those alternatives even further by adding bus rapid transit as a mobility option. The Evergreen Way - Highway 99 corridor that runs through several of Snohomish County's largest and densest communities is ready for BRT. It carries the heaviest volume of transit riders in Community Transit's system, connects with a dense network of local transit services, and some BRT elements such as transit priority lanes and signals and smartcard fare collection are in the pipeline or already on the ground. There is significant unserved demand for direct all-day connections to downtown Seattle, the region's largest transit destination. Local and regional transportation plans call for high capacity transit in the corridor. Unfortunately, connection to the developing regional light rail system is many years away. While waiting for the new train, BRT can provide a higher capacity, higher quality transit solution, and might even prove to be an effective permanent alternative to rail. BRT can also start small and expand service and facilities as demand grows. Bus rapid transit can mean many things to many people, but essentially it boils down to bundling high quality, high capacity bus service and facilities together along a corridor at the same time to provide a faster, more reliable and more comfortable riding experience. This paper defines Community Transit's approach to achieving these improvements in the context of the continuum of BRT applications being defined by the Federal Transit Administration, and highlights the opportunities and challenges to making BRT a reality in Snohomish County.