Major changes coming to Olympia’s bus system. Locals are upset about new route
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- Route 41 will be renumbered Route 32 and will turn right on Harrison Avenue.
- Riders from the college down Division Street will need to transfer to reach downtown.
- The system-wide changes take effect May 3.
Intercity Transit, the Olympia area’s bus service provider, is set to embark on a system-wide route reconfiguration early next month, and one of those route changes has grabbed the community’s attention.
Or at least it has on social media and in an online petition, which asks that Intercity Transit make no changes to Bus Route 41, a longtime route that travels between downtown Olympia, the west side on Division Street and The Evergreen State College.
The change also has the attention of Olympia City Council member Robert Vanderpool, who serves on the Intercity Transit Authority.
At issue is this: Bus Route 41 will soon be known as Bus Route 32, and when it’s headed from the college and down Division Street, it will turn right on Harrison Avenue toward Capital Mall, rather than left to downtown. It’s that direct route to downtown some residents want to maintain.
Under the new change, those riders will have to transfer buses to get to downtown, said Rob LaFontaine, IT’s planning deputy director, at Wednesday’s authority meeting.
Although there have been dozens of comments about route 41 online, only one person spoke during public comment.
“We voted to extend our tax money to improve bus service, and it’s hard for me to see where cutting people’s lifeline to an existing, decades-long successful bus route is improving things,” said resident Meghan Hall. “For me, it makes it harder to get to my daily destinations. It makes it harder to get home from work. It takes what works for decades, and it seems to be throwing it away.
“In conclusion, when you allocate funds to improve things, you need to also be willing to make changes and adapt to negative feedback,” she said. “So I hope bus riders will continue to give feedback that the 41 route needs to continue from downtown to Division Street and Evergreen, and that you will listen and restore the service. It doesn’t need to be called the 41, but it needs to be there for us.”
Vanderpool asked several questions about the route, including whether Intercity Transit could make its system-wide change but leave route 41 untouched.
“What’s stopping us from doing a full-system change and then just keeping the 41, right? That’s the first question that a lot of folks are asking,” he said.
LaFontaine responded in two ways: It’s hard to make that change now and the ridership isn’t there, he said.
“If we were to look at this through the lens of, say, a temporary situation where maybe there were circumstances in the community that we’re trying to respond to, that were going to last a matter of days or even a couple of weeks, that’s one thing for the agency to try to absorb, but for us to try to stand up service that’s slated to be retired and do so indefinitely, that’s where the conversation changes,” he said.
People don’t ride the route like they used to. As far back as 2018, Intercity Transit reduced the frequency of buses on the route because ridership was low even then. That’s still true today, he said.
“The route 41 now routinely falls in the bottom half of ridership of our routes, while at the same time, we’ve heard from representatives of the Olympia School District who are advocating on behalf of low-income families in west Olympia who struggle to reach places that are not geographically far away,” LaFontaine said.
LaFontaine acknowledged that the lower ridership on the route could be the result of lower student enrollment at Evergreen.
“And so the new route 32 is part of the redesign in west Olympia. We can’t say the 32 is going to be the sole change, but the other routes included in west Olympia are part of a comprehensive change to allow residents of west Olympia to mobilize within west Olympia better than they can today.”
Two things LaFontaine wanted to clear up: riders on the west side will still be able to get downtown and the Nightline service, a midnight to 3 a.m. service for students traveling between downtown and Evergreen, will continue, he said.
“That’s a service that’s updated annually because it’s an agreement with the college that they pay for,” LaFontaine said.
Lacey City Council member Carolyn Cox, who chairs the authority, shared what she had learned from Emily Bergkamp, IT’s general manager, about the forthcoming changes.
“In conversation with Emily, she did say that we’re going to be taking a look at this as we launch it, and there may be potential for fine-tuning this, and certainly we’re paying attention to the public comment we receive,” said Cox.
LaFontaine said the next opportunity to consider substantive route changes likely will be in September.
Vanderpool is already looking forward to it, he said.
“When we look back at the system in September, I do want to see options in front of us, right, particularly around this route, and I want us to continue to have conversations with the community about this, because I don’t think it’s going to go away,” he said.
The system-wide changes take effect May 3. But in preparation for the September conversation, residents should check Intercity Transit’s customer service page for phone numbers and email and share their comments, LaFontaine said.
