Snohomish County may lose Sunday bus service

Bob Fletcher took the bus Sunday to escort his foster daughter to a meetup at Aurora Village, then back north on Highway 99 to Home Depot in South Everett, followed by Lowe's in Lynnwood, finding supplies to build a rain canopy for his wheelchair.

He'll spend his Sundays closer to home after mid-June, if Community Transit board members Thursday approve a drastic proposal to eliminate service on Sundays and holidays.

By cutting Sundays, managers are striving to preserve the bulk of the busier weekday service, although some cuts are planned there, too.

After putting up a brave face through a gas-price spike followed by recession, Snohomish County's public-transit agency is succumbing to a 15 percent drop in sales-tax revenue since 2007.

Its response points to a profound shift in the mission of public transit. Instead of serving mainly as a social-safety net for those who cannot drive, Community Transit has focused on surmounting gridlock for commuters.

In fact, cheaper local fares are rising 25 cents while the higher-priced commuter fares are not. The agency is still buying new "Double Tall" bi-level buses for long commute routes into King County and keeping its promise of a bus every 10 minutes on the new Swift bus-rapid transit system on Highway 99 (except Sundays).

"It's not just about maintaining commuter service. It's about maintaining our core local service as well, so that when the economy improves, we still have a good core to build from," said spokesman Tom Pearce. "It's terrible for the people who are losing their Sunday service; it's the absolute last resort."

Community Transit provides bus and vanpool service throughout most of Snohomish County, and to downtown Seattle, the University of Washington and the Eastside.

Some numbers:

The average Sunday sees about 8,400 boardings, compared with 35,000 per weekday. Despite fewer bus runs, Sundays require similar overhead, including supervisors and mechanics. So the agency would need to cut 1.7 hours of bus travel per weekday to preserve 1 hour of Sunday service.

The 'community'

Fletcher, 64, rides the bus 20 to 30 times a week. A former small-scale land developer with a love of backhoes, he lost most of his eyesight to diabetes, and his mobility to degenerative-bone diseases. He rides the bus partly to keep his sanity, rather than molder inside his home near the Ash Way Park-and-Ride just north of Lynnwood.

Wednesday morning, he rode crosstown to Shari's in Mill Creek for coffee with a friend; other days he'll hit Costco to eat the food samples.

Fletcher agrees that transit CEO Joyce Eleanor is doing a logical thing, from a purely fiscal point of view.

But he also meets elderly women who take a bus to church, and teens who need buses to go to work at Alderwood mall. He's a huge fan of Swift, but on Sunday there will be a gap between Everett and the King County line for anyone traveling Highway 99.

"I will be less affected than a lot of people. I'm more concerned with people who have got to have it," he says.

Says his son Michael, a limousine driver: "They're taking the 'community' out of Community Transit."

Kathleen Custer, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1576, said the agency hasn't taken a serious look at alternatives. The union Thursday will call for trimming management and deferring certain capital projects, including the double-decker buses and a high-tech vehicle-tracking system.

Sharing the pain

Transit officials say commuters will share the pain.

For example, people leaving the downtown Edmonds ferry terminal would switch buses at the Edmonds Park-and-Ride near Highway 99, instead of taking a one-seat ride into Seattle.

Twelve routes would be eliminated, others would be less frequent, and some bus routes would end at park-and-ride lots instead of reaching outlying neighborhoods. Some workers at Boeing have seethed over proposals to reduce routes to the Everett plant from small towns.

Sunday service has been suspended here before, for two years following Tim Eyman's Initiative 695 in 1999, when voters supported a statewide cut in car-tab taxes.

Snohomish County isn't the only place sacrificing Sunday buses.

According to an American Public Transportation Association (APTA) survey last year, 54 percent of transit agencies that made service cuts either reduced or eliminated weekend runs. (Meanwhile, 54 percent also reduced peak-time travel.)

Kitsap Transit suspended Sunday service in February 2009.

King County Metro, on the other hand, has not proposed service cuts, though it warns they might be looming.

Nationally, transit agencies have seen a surge in what they call "choice" riders in the past five years, as former drivers seek refuge from gas prices and traffic. That means about 60 percent of riders are traveling to or from work, said APTA spokeswoman Virginia Miller.

That's a big motivation for transit politicians to cater to commuters, though Miller emphasizes that "all types of people ride public transit."

Locally, the plight of Community Transit and other agencies is being invoked by transit boosters in Olympia, where Rep. Marko Liias, D-Mukilteo, has co-sponsored an amendment to let transit boards enact a $20 car-tab fee.

More than 500 people have attended public meetings, and 800 comments have been filed, about the proposed Community Transit cuts.

Just about every Sunday bus rider is a weekday rider too, Pearce emphasizes.

Those include Bob Fletcher, a gadfly to transit officials. He's having tests at UW Medical Center on Thursday. He'll make the 3 p.m. board meeting in South Everett — if the buses bring him back in time.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com