Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson made good on a major campaign pledge Wednesday, laying out a plan to speed up buses on infamously congested Denny Way by installing a new half-mile eastbound bus lane and permanently rerouting traffic heading to a busy I-5 on-ramp. The reconfiguration is poised to help the notoriously delayed Route 8, often dubbed the L8, and make the journey between Uptown and Capitol Hill much quicker and more reliable.
After these changes are made in August, drivers heading to the southbound I-5 ramp at Yale Avenue from Denny Way won't be able to make their turn at Stewart Street since the slip lane from eastbound Denny to Yale will permanently close, improving pedestrian safety. Instead I-5 bound motorists will turn right at a reconfigured Boren Avenue intersection, and take a left onto Howell Street to reach the ramp.
A new eastbound business access and transit (BAT) lane will keep Route 8 buses mostly out of traffic between 5th Avenue and Stewart Street, with the existing bus lane between Fairview and I-5 moved curbside. Drivers will be able to use that BAT lane to turn right into businesses.
This additional red paint will join already planned Route 8 improvements closer to Uptown. A stretch of BAT lanes are set to be installed in May, before the FIFA Men's World Cup shuts down city construction projects early this summer.
The 8's newfound priority will be timed to go in just ahead of King County Metro's fall service change on August 29, when the route will see an increase in frequency throughout the day from every 15 minutes to every 12, thanks to funding from the 2020 Seattle Transit Measure.
"This is probably one of my favorite moments so far as mayor to be here announcing this process," Wilson said at an announcement Wednesday afternoon at Denny Way and Westlake Avenue. "The Route 8, as someone who lives on Capitol Hill, is one of my favorite busses, and one of my busses. I've taken that bus with my daughter to explore the tide pools in that direction. I've taken that bus to Seattle Center to watch Shakespeare plays. I've taken that bus to take my daughter to daycare, and then, of course, down to Mount Baker to access so many locations to the south. This is just a workhorse route."
The Route 8 has been famously unreliable for decades, trapped in block-long lines of cars trying to get onto the freeway – the band Tacocat released its famous single F.U. #8 in 2014. But the slow but steady return of traffic to Denny Way following the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a fresh push from transit advocates to free transit riders from gridlock.
The Fix the L8 campaign, a partnership between Central Seattle Greenways and the Transit Riders Union, launched in 2023 to elevate the issue of "Seattle's least reliable bus route" as on-time performance along the corridor plummeted.
"Major investments in the area give drivers other options: a new waterfront highway, a chronically underutilized tunnel, and a major highway interchange," Fix the L8 co-founder Nick Sattele wrote in an op-ed in The Urbanist that year. "Unfortunately, bus riders can’t use any of those because no buses traverse them. Instead, we’re stuck with the worst of both worlds where riders are stuck in the traffic drivers have made because the bus is too slow for them."
But that advocacy ran into roadblocks at City Hall.
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) tore up Denny Way for a monthslong repaving project in 2024 and 2025, but turned down the opportunity to make more substantive changes to the corridor, such as extending bus lanes, despite having internal discussions about doing so. Even with advocates pushing hard to free Route 8 from traffic jams, more extensive transit priority on Denny Way was too bold for SDOT officials under former Mayor Bruce Harrell's administration.
Undeterred, advocates persevered. Last summer, Sattele and co-founder Jason Li organized a "Race the L8" event, encouraging attendees to show up to see which modes could beat a Metro coach up Denny Way – leapfrogging, dancing, hopscotching, anything. The event attracted hundreds of attendees, illustrating the groundswell of support for improving the Route 8. Among those sidewalk users who easily bested the Route 8 was Seattle Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, who made it clear that she saw what the solution should be. "Let’s get out the red paint," Wilson said at the time.
All that pushing did convince SDOT to conduct another study looking at increasing bus priority for the Route 8, released early last fall. Incredulously, that report concluded that adding a bus lane would create "severe traffic congestion" and increase general purpose travel times by 17 to 34 minutes during rush hour. But that study, as advocates quickly pointed out, didn't account for new transit riders who would turn to a more reliable bus rather than sit in traffic congestion.
"In 2009 The Stranger deemed Route 8 as Seattle's crappiest bus route, and it has held that title ever since," Sattele said Wednesday, taking the stage after Wilson. "Since 2009, South Lake Union has boomed. Capitol Hill and Belltown are some of the densest places in the state, and as mayor Wilson alluded to, Tacocat wrote their anthem F.U. #8. Since that headline, we've had six mayors. Six mayors that haven't acted on making Route 8 the fast, frequent and reliable connection it deserves [to be]. We've done more studies and more analysis and more delay, all as we've seen climate change get worse, our traffic get worse and our transit slowly, slowly gets slower."
So what's different now, apart from having Katie Wilson in the Mayor's office? SDOT says they took a broader look at potential changes, including serious look at what mode shift would look like.
"So we built from the study that was done previously, and we did some additional evaluation to look at, 'hey, what happens if folks detour off of Denny, find other pathways, take the Route 8'," Laura Wojcicki, a supervisor with SDOT's Transportation Operations Division, told The Urbanist. "So we started to look at that, and then started to also look at what other changes can we make to make this work. Knowing this is a priority here, to put this bus lane in, to figure out, how do we make it work, and how do we make it function? And, one of our primary goals here is, we don't want to impact other transit corridors as well, on north-south streets that are intersecting with Denny. So really looking at it from that holistic network."
Wojcicki noted that SDOT already tested out how the reroute of I-5 traffic worked during a temporary construction closure earlier this spring between Fairview and Stewart.
"We were able to see that during the peak [hours], the volume of getting on that southbound ramp actually stayed pretty consistent. In the very peak of the peak, they found their way making the right turn from Howell," Wojcicki said. "But then in other times of the day it did decrease. So I think people shifted their travel patterns and changed behavior. And we were able to see during that time traffic did not back up to Denny from Boren."
SDOT isn't stopping with Route 8. A memo dated last week sent to Wilson from Acting SDOT Director Angela Brady also outlines other transit corridors currently on the department's radar for bus priority, including 24th Avenue E through Montlake and Lenora (Route 48 and 43) and Blanchard and Lenora Streets in Belltown, which together serve Route 40, 62, and the C Line and more than 23,000 daily riders who use those three lines.
"These corridors were selected because they rank in the top 15% of the network for priority locations to address delay and unreliability in the system, when also considering ridership, frequency, and equity, and after screening out segments already addressed by the Move Seattle Levy, 2024 Transportation Levy projects, or individual transit spot improvement projects," the memo noted. "Delay scores were either significantly above the Seattle Transportation Plan target of being within 20% of free-flow travel time or were very unreliable. By focusing transit performance improvements on these corridors, SDOT expects to deliver benefit for riders across the transit network."
Those bus lanes have the potential to coincide with increases in bus frequency funded by a renewal of the Seattle Transit Measure, set to be on the ballot this November. Wilson has said that increasing bus trips across the city is her biggest priority when it comes to that package. Under the last two mayors, the bus measure has become somewhat of a catch-all transportation funding measure, including siphoning funds to boost transit security and launch a team of planners working on Sound Transit 3 permitting.
Doug Trumm
Ryan Packer
