The hopes of thousands of Route 8 riders were dashed last week when the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced that it has ruled out reallocating additional space on the most congested part of Denny Way for bus-only lanes. Extending priority for eastbound buses from Fairview Avenue to Ninth Avenue, the city says, would significantly increase delays for drivers on Denny Way.
However, Seattle’s official mobility plans call for a significant increase in transit usage, something that will likely only happen with significant increases in the speed and reliability of transit trips.
This recent push to speed up King County Metro’s most perpetually delayed bus has come about in large part thanks to a rider-led campaign. An early July event where attendees on foot raced Route 8 coaches up Denny Way doing a wide range of activities — with most beating the bus to the foot of Capitol Hill due to heavy traffic — brought out hundreds of transit riders eager to help.
Without putting down red paint to extend the 8’s transit priority, the route will almost certainly continue to see abysmal performance numbers like those from July of 2025, where only 41% of evening rush hour buses arrived within five minutes of their scheduled time. The problem was most pronounced in the eastbound direction where just 31% of buses were on time during evening peak times.
In explaining its rationale, the department cited an increase in drive times along Denny Way that doesn’t seem to hold up to rational scrutiny, and suggests that drivers would spend an additional half-hour sitting in gridlock on Denny Way rather than find alternate routes. One such alternative would be the prioritized buses that could move freely under the bus lane scenario.
“Analysis shows that extending a bus-only lane east of 9th Ave (near Denny Park) to Fairview Ave could help with bus reliability and would cause severe traffic congestion in the area,” SDOT said in a blog post last Thursday breaking the news. “Overall traffic would likely be significantly worse along Denny Way, with estimates showing general purpose travel times increasing between 17 to 34 minutes at peak travel times.”
On the other hand, mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, who came out of the August primary with a significant lead against incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell, says the issue is simple: reallocate space for bus lanes. Wilson has led the Seattle Transit Riders Union for over a decade, advocating for upgrades for riders.
“Transportation issues can be complicated, but in this case, the solution is simple: we need bus lines on Denny! Get out the red paint,” Wilson’s campaign wrote in a post on Bluesky on August 11.
The decision against implementing additional bus priority isn’t a major surprise, since the department had assessed the issue just two years ago, as part of an evaluation of potential improvements to be included with a major street repaving along Denny Way. The Complete Streets checklist for that repaving, completed in late 2023, recorded that SDOT briefly considered the idea of reallocating street space on Denny Way, but also that the idea was ultimately vetoed by the department’s Traffic Operations division. The fact that the city had just completed signal upgrades intended to move more traffic down the corridor was cited as a top reason.
“[The Traffic Operations Division is] not supportive of channelization changes at this time given recent investments in the signal infrastructure as part of Denny ITS project; Need to monitor the effect/improvement of the Denny Way ITS project and wait for traffic to normalize to understand the new baseline before evaluating additional operational changes on the corridor,” the checklist stated. Instead, SDOT and King County Metro tweaked bus stop locations near Dexter Avenue, and that was the full extent of the transit upgrades.
Without a bus lane on Denny — or rerouting I-5 traffic by closing the Yale Avenue on-ramp — the only way to speed up the 8 would be to route buses onto a different street, which seemed to be SDOT’s long-term play when it requested grant funding to design and implement a new transit corridor three blocks north, along Harrison Street. And while that project is still moving forward, neither SDOT nor King County Metro are directly promoting the idea of moving the 8, which means Seattle is planning for a transit corridor that could potentially not have any buses on it.
Meanwhile, SDOT did announce plans to carve out additional bus priority space in 2026 along a less-congested part of Denny Way, for eastbound buses between Queen Anne Avenue N and 2nd Avenue along with a new transit-turn only lane north of Denny Way for those same buses. That’s on top of a previously announced plan to restrict turns eastbound onto Denny Way from Westlake Avenue, a move that will help two other high-ridership routes along with the Seattle Streetcar. Those upgrades likely wouldn’t have happened without advocacy around the urgent need to speed up the 8.
But transit advocates aren’t giving up on the main issue, pointing out that SDOT seems to have its order-of-operations backwards, counting on mode shift to happen before actually implementing the changes necessary to make it happen. The Seattle Transportation Plan, adopted last year, aims to achieve a goal of 28% of Seattle residents getting around on transit by 2044, but includes no specific target for improved transit speed and reliability.
“SDOT’s assumption that drivers to Capitol Hill would sit in traffic on Denny Way for 34 minutes instead of taking the newly fast and reliable bus is obviously wrong and a dangerous assumption keeping a situation at odds with virtually every goal that voters, mayors, city councils, and SDOT itself has set for the city,” Nick Sattele of the Fix the L8 campaign told The Urbanist. “Our planet is burning, our city growing, and our traffic worsening. If our city can’t make the bus faster than juggling or jumping rope, what exactly are we doing to solve these crises?”
Blaming a traffic model for a decision to maintain the status quo is an age-old tradition when it comes to transportation planning in the U.S , but this episode is a clear test for a city that prides itself on forward thinking when it comes to transit and mobility issues. Ultimately, it may take new leadership at SDOT to try something new on Denny Way, with current interim Director Adiam Emery formerly the head of the Traffic Operations division.
“Hoping to fix congestion by continuing to prioritize the least efficient mode of transportation is nonsensical. The best way to reduce traffic is to provide viable alternatives to driving and to get drivers out of their cars,” Jason Li, Sattele’s co-leader on the Fix the L8 campaign, told The Urbanist. “Bus lanes are the solution, not the follow-up.”
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.
