The bus driver: When buses get priority, riders prioritize the bus

On Third Avenue, where Adelita Ortiz’s routes usually begin, her only traffic obstacle is a stream of other buses traveling down the road. The street blocks off cars and becomes a transit-only corridor during the morning and afternoon rush hours (private vehicles are supposed to turn off after a block on the street). Third Avenue is one of a few transit malls in the United States that restrict private automobile use. Only the Portland Transit Mall or Boston’s Silver Line bus tunnels come close to dedicating as much space to public transit as Seattle’s arterial rush hour north-south escapeway.

Ortiz says that not only helps buses to move faster, but it allows drivers to execute a technique called “the weave”—where the buses take turns picking up passengers on the side of the road. Since the buses pick people up at only some stations, they stagger when to yield the right of way, while other buses behind pull over to pick up more people. Without cars in the way, it’s easier for buses to trade off pick-ups.

“There’s a gazillion buses during rush hour,” Ortiz says. “We can't all stop at every stop, so we alternate taking the right of way as a courtesy to each other.” This priority to buses also has helped expand the city’s RapidRide, a rapid-transit bus system that makes fewer stops and features off-board payment and all-door boarding.

Ortiz, who has driven for King County Metro for nearly 17 years, remembers a time when things didn’t run so smoothly. “Back in the day, we'd be on Third Avenue making stops with completely full buses and sitting in traffic,” she says. “We’d be at a light for maybe five or six light cycles and before you knew it we're down 20 minutes on a route where we should have been already uptown dropping people off and coming back to pick up more.”

Since 2010, the city has absorbed an additional 45,000 new workers—47 percent of whom commuted by some form of public transit in 2016 and only 2,225 of those newcomers drove alone to work.

“Over the years I’ve noticed we’ve gotten a lot more people moving through Seattle, a lot more traffic and a lot more passengers,” she says.

Ortiz says that dedicated bus corridors, bus lanes, and other improvements make her job easier. The city is planning its first complete rapid-transit bus route, to be built in 2018.

“It’s all very helpful,” she says. “We're picking up hundreds of people per day. They're depending on us to get them home safely. We do our best to get them there on time.”