I decided to try a new route home on the 15th instead of my normal hop onto the Sound Transit #545.  This was a mistake of grand proportions.

Usually from Overlake Transit Center to downtown the #545 usually takes about 18-22 minutes.  Even on the worse day of traffic I’ve seen yet, it was still only about 35-40 minutes.  The #545 is timely and frequent enough that I don’t worry much about missing one during the core work hours.

Fast forward to the #256, holy crimeny this bus goes on the oddest route.  It only runs about every 30 minutes, but does go just enough different places that I suppose it has a reason to exist.  The frequency however is horrible and Metro runs a full 60 foot bus on the route.  This I don’t understand, the number of 60 ft buses that are used when 40 foot or even smaller buses would work fine.  I suspect Metro uses way more fuel than they should really be using.

My Plan to Resolve the overuse of 60 foot Busses:

So I have this idea.  Metro should send TriMet about 50-60 of these 60 foot buses and TriMet can send Metro some of their 40 foot busses.  That way TriMet can bump up service appropriately on the #72, #9, #14, #15, and other routes accordingly and Metro can scale back their excessive capacity on route that don’t need the big busses.

There, another solution to a transit problem.  Some other time I’ll throw out my random solution for the bottleneck of Highway 520 or 90 across Lake Washington.  Those are some absurdities if I ever saw them.