RapidRide G :) pic.twitter.com/4qI822pAUW
— jseattle (@jseattle) June 26, 2024
It was unlikely to come up in Thursday night’s presidential debate but you can thank Joe Biden. The new federally-backed RapidRide G bus rapid transit line finally has a launch date: September 14th.
The Urbanist was first to report the date as King County Metro is preparing for the first service on the 2.50-mile, 10-station Madison route and scaling up its operations and driver schedule to meet promised levels of service: “incredibly frequent service,” as the Urbanist says, including a bus every six minutes between 6 AM and 7 PM Monday through Saturday.
The G Line will operate 23 hours a day, from 5:00 AM to 4:00 AM between 1st Ave downtown and MLK Jr Way in Madison Valley with stops across First Hill and Capitol Hill along the way.
Those service levels were established as part of the Federal Transit Administration’s $59.9 million that formed the core of the funding for the $135 million project.
September’s opening will come after years of construction. RapidRide G broke ground in 2021. In addition to transforming the corridor’s transit, biking, walking, and driving safety elements — and lots and lots of paint — RapidRide G work included millions of dollars of attached utility and infrastructure work by the city that has created years of major challenges for businesses and residents living along Madison.
Madison Rapid Ride starting to look real. pic.twitter.com/a81ghq4TIP
— Curtis Ailes (@curtailes) June 27, 2024
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Car drivers are gonna be sitting at those lights forever, lol
another reason to take transit :)
Honestly good. Seattle needs to stop being so car dependent.
nice to see he’s up to other things besides backing genocide
It will be interesting to see what the ridership data is. With service that frequent, I suspect the buses will be mostly empty.
I still think this project is a colossal waste of money, because it decreases the transit time from 1st Ave to MLK by only a few minutes. Yes, the infrastructure component needed to be done, but that could have been accomplished gradually over a period of time, as it is elsewhere in the city.
It’s also really bizarre to me that the implementation of this project means there’s not going to be ANY route going all the way east on Madison from downtown–I have friends in Madison Park whose commute is getting LONGER as a result of this project. Even before the regrades, 130 years ago–literally! found an 1890 transit map yesterday–there was a dedicated streetcar going from one end to the other.
There, fixed that for you. What you’re neglecting to add is that reliability will be drastically increased, meaning it hits its scheduled times more often. It’s happened for every other RapidRide line.
This line will be successful and extremely old infrastructure gets a desperate upgrade. Win-win.
I have said this before, the Madison BRT aka Rapid Ride G, is a very expensive solution in search of a problem. I think transit time improvement is a fine thing, but SDOT’s extensive introduction of turn restrictions has an impact on those of us residing on First Hill. Not all of our trips can be by bus and cab and rideshare drivers are equally frustrated by the new restrictions.
Visitors to the hospitals are also impacted negatively.
So you’re suggesting that we should have foregone federal transit funding that was leveraged to also update critical infrastructure over a century old and instead paid significantly more for this project? In reality, upgrades would have likely continued to be tabled until some sort of catastrophic failure. This is also the plan for Eastlake in the coming years. Where are you seeing these major infrastructure improvements happening more gradually?
Actually, there currently is no fast single route from 1st to MLK. The two buses that run to MLK are the 8 and the 11, neither of which do what the RapidRide will.
Due to John McGilvra, who in 1864 cut the dirt road right through the forest directly to his lonely house on the lake (no other houses were built out at Madison Park until the later 1880s), Madison is the only street that runs diagonally through the entire city. That angle brings it into contact with more varied neighborhoods than any other street, too.
RapidRide makes sense as a regional express service. Converting East Madison into a RapidRide simply was a municipal ploy to suck federal money to pay for arterial bike lanes. Its blatant and cynical corruption. Shame on those supposed idealists who champion such nonsense by the justification that bicycles will save the world. Bus Route 11 is far more useful for far more people — it actually reaches Madison Park.
Huh? There are no bike lanes on Madison. And the BRT project serves the densest section of Madison. Not many people who live out by the lake or in Broadmoor are taking the 11.
There is a long-standing tradition in government called “use it or lose it” whereby government officials accept additional funding and spend it regardless of the merits of the project. I think this RapidRide is a great example of this tradition.
No, it was a municipal ploy to suck federal money to help pay for badly needed water and storm water infrastructure that was underneath the street… if nothing else federal bucks reconstructed the road. It had nothing to do with bicycles.
I like the removal of car lanes and the turn restrictions. Already makes Madison a much more appealing ped street.
Totally agree. This is why I’m skeptical of the “neighborhood residents” who are complaining about the turn restrictions. Surely they’re walking in the neighborhood just as much as they’re driving, and appreciate the better walking environment.