Route 8 serves thousands of riders per day, with the highest ridership per service hour out of all routes King County Metro operates. Demand for the workhouse route is rising, but reliability has not kept up, and it is also the most delayed all-day bus route in the entire system. Buses are chronically mired in traffic on Denny Way, and the odds of an eastbound bus arriving within 5 minutes of its schedule drops embarrassingly close to 30% during the evening rush hour. To make things worse, once your bus finally does arrive, the same traffic means it takes over 17 minutes on average to travel a mile, which is essentially walking speed.

It’s unacceptable for such a vital connection in the city to be allowed to languish like this and bus lanes must be added on Denny to fix it. Unfortunately, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) recently ruled out bus lanes, but their analysis studying them did not even consider the fact that drivers would switch to taking the bus after bus lanes are installed. This makes their study fundamentally flawed and its results cannot be trusted to guide policy. The solutions that SDOT did propose are also woefully inadequate and won’t even make a dent in fixing Route 8’s issues.

There is money available for this already from a line item in the 2024 Seattle Transportation Levy for transit improvements on Denny and Olive Ways. Cost and construction impacts will be minimal as the Denny Way Paving Project has already completed the pavement overhaul that typically comes with bus lanes. SDOT has previously designed and installed a bus lane in as little as 5 days for the U District Campus Parkway and Route 8 deserves similar urgency to fix it.

Tell our city and county leaders that we need to give Route 8 the priority it deserves to achieve our climate goals and improve the city!

If you want to get more involved, make sure you check “Keep me in the loop for actions and events!” to the right! We will also be posting regular updates to FixTheL8.com!