At least until it’s up and running on Saturday. Or until I think of something else. But I was looking at the map of C route on West Seattle Blog that I linked to in the Open Thread, and I had a few more thoughts.
First off, every time before now that I saw the maps, I’d completely missed that they were connected. Up at the top it says, “Continues as Rapid Ride D.” For some reason I had thought they were separate routes. So, it’ll be sort of like now from West Seattle downtown, the 54 changing into the 5, sometimes. You won’t have to get off. This alleviates some of my worries about the D route deadending in North Downtown. So if you’re in Pioneer Square and you’re heading to Ballard you catch the C North and it quickly turns into the D. Hopefully always? Like it’s one route.
I don’t know if that was a branding issue, or what, but it seems like it would make more sense to call it one line now that there’s no free ride area to confuse when you board. Maybe it’s a lesson from the failure of the Monorail where everybody criticized it for going from West Seattle to Ballard, when obviously the point was it went from Ballard or West Seattle to Downtown and then continuing to the other.
The other thing I noticed is that it goes on the Viaduct. This makes sense for now: it’s going from West Seattle to Downtown. But the Viaduct won’t be around much longer, and the tunnel won’t have an exit on Seneca or an entrance on Columbia. Presumably it’ll either go through SoDo or I-5, but either way will make it less rapid. If it’s through SoDo, hopefully, they’ll have figured out signal prioritization.
Thread fail.