Riders on King County Metro’s Route 40 through Fremont, Ballard, and Crown Hill will soon get a boost as installation starts on bus priority lanes included as part of a long-planned route upgrade. The new “business access and transit” (BAT) lanes will go in on five stretches along the route and increase bus travel time and reliability on Metro’s fifth busiest bus line, providing benefits for nearly 9,000 riders every weekday. Crews will start putting in bus lane markings as early as June 30, with full installation set to take several weeks.
The City is touting creating additional bus priority now as an improvement that will help maintaining mobility in advance of major freeway construction work the long overdue Revive I-5 maintenance and preservation project will bring. On July 21, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) will reduce I-5 across the Ship Canal Bridge to two northbound lanes, reducing its capacity by half until mid-August.
Two full weekend closures of northbound I-5 from I-90 to NE 45th Street on July 18-21 and August 15-18 are set to send even more traffic onto parallel routes. Work is expected to continue through 2027.
It’s been a long road to get to the point of putting down red paint along the Route 40, a corridor slated for a full upgrade to a RapidRide line in the 2015 Move Seattle transportation levy. A financial realignment of the promises of that levy in 2018, in light of a changing federal funding environment and overly rosy cost estimates, prompted the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to scale the project back to spot improvements targeting the route’s most congested segments.
Other promised RapidRide lines that fell victim to that 2018 cut included Route 44 between Ballard and the U District, and the 48 between the U District and Mount Baker.
But even reduced in scope, those upgrades encountered opposition from business groups wary of ceding road space. In 2021, North Seattle Industrial Association President Eugene Wasserman contacted then-SDOT Director Sam Zimbabwe to ask for a “restart” of the project, calling the 30% design that had been put forward “totally flawed” and accusing the department of a lack of consideration for freight movement. Wasserman also asserted that added bus priority along Leary Way and Westlake Avenue would spur “increasing gentrification” of the city’s industrial areas.
“It appears to the Maritime/Industrial community that SDOT is willing to sacrifice the viability of maritime/industrial businesses and their employees so that Amazon workers can get to their offices 5 minutes earlier,” Wasserman wrote to Zimbabwe.
Wasserman’s push against the 40 upgrades was joined by others, including the Fremont Chamber of Commerce and the Ballard Alliance, as the project progressed through design. The debate simmered throughout 2022 and 2023, with a last-minute push in early 2024 as SDOT was preparing to put the project out to bid. Signs featuring an ominous bus with blacked-out windows popped up along Westlake Avenue N and in storefronts in Fremont.
“The addition of a 24/7 north bound bus-only lane on Leary Avenue NW between 20th Avenue NW and NW Market Street will have substantial access impact on small businesses, as well as residential and retirement communities located all along the corridor,” read a January 2024 letter signed by Fremont Chamber President Pete Hanning, Ballard Alliance President Mike Stewart, and dozens of business owners along the corridor.
“Equally impactful, the 24/7 bus lanes in both directions of NW Market Street between Leary and 24th Avenue NW – along with new curb bulbs – will eliminate two travel lanes, as well as already scarce on-street parking spaces and load zones that are very needed for the small businesses located along this corridor,” the letter continued.
The concerns raised by business and property owners along the route weren’t ignored, with some major design changes prompted by that feedback, including a first-in-the-city pilot of a bus lane that also shares space with large freight vehicles. But the City of Seattle held strong on the core components of the project, in conjunction with support from allies like Ballard Fremont Greenways and the Transit Riders Union.
Once complete, the city expects to see a 5% to 10% drop in transit travel time along the entire Route 40 corridor, with riders between Ballard and Downtown getting to their destinations 15% more quickly. Just as importantly, trips will become more reliable, with riders experiencing fewer late trips. Faster and more reliable trips will entice more riders, as Commute Seattle’s rider surveys have underscored.
Though ridership has climbed significantly in the last few years, Metro has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Route 40 averaged more than 13,000 daily riders in 2019, making it part of that trend. The route’s 2025 ridership is sitting at two-thirds of the 2019 baseline, mirroring systemwide ridership.
The Route 40 upgrades aren’t the only transit upgrades planned to coincide with state Revive I-5 work, with peak-hour bus only lanes along Aurora Avenue N — home to the busiest bus in the Metro system, the E Line — recently converted to 24/7 operation. But other key corridors, including 15th Avenue W and NW, and 23rd Avenue, haven’t received much attention even though they’re also poised to see significant spillover traffic that could hose transit riders.
When the bus lanes finally roll out along the 40, riders will benefit from a hard-won upgrade that is just the type of change that should be deployed across the city.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.