After decades of services being slashed, mayors across the four Snoqualmie Valley cities and the Snoqualmie Tribe are collaborating in a definitive effort to address regional transportation issues.
For over a year now, the group has been meeting to address transportation issues and a few months ago created a mayor’s transportation committee, said Amy Ockerlander, the Mayor of Duvall.
Their priorities include expanded access to public transit, improved safety, reduced congestion from pass-through traffic, adding a third Snoqualmie Valley Shuttle, the completion of State Route 18 widening and other smaller projects.
They are tackling the challenges as a regional issue, recognizing that they can get more done and have a greater voice for funding if they work together. Ockerlander said they know one city getting a project helps the others.
“If Snoqualmie gets a major road improvement, it helps traffic flow and ends up benefiting us all,” she said.
The group is hoping to fill gaps left by the current public transit service, which they said is “not working for our residents,” in a letter to King County Metro last year.
Filling these transportation gaps could prove to be a huge relief to residents who, according to one 2019 study, are spending nearly a quarter of their income on transportation, and those without a car have few other options. It could also lessen congestion and impact on nearby roads.
Transportation improvements along SR 18 would also benefit local businesses, who are in need of low-income workers living in South King County where housing is more affordable.
“We’ve heard, especially from the Snoqualmie Valley Chamber of Commerce, that there is a lot of demand for transit,” said Mark Noll, a North Bend economic development manager, who worked three years at King County Metro. “This job housing imbalance is a challenge that transit can help address.”
Some of the challenges facing the Valley’s transit system aren’t unique, said Graydon Newman, a service planning supervisor at King County Metro. Chief among them being that Metro is limited in funding and resources to supply new routes or increase frequency.
However, the Valley is unique in that it’s more rural, less dense and has a smaller population than most of King County, meaning what defines effective transportation is more difficult to quantify.
“That challenge opens opportunities for us to find different ways to serve a rural area,” Newman said. “[We need] services that are flexible enough to be operated in less dense areas and meet people’s mobility needs.”
Until recently, Metro relied heavily on the number of riders each bus picked up as a measure of success, a statistic that heavily favors dense, urban areas.
Over the years, Valley officials have said this has caused the rural area to lose connections, making their routes the first to be cut, especially during economic downturns.
“The Snoqualmie Valley has lost service over the last 20 years,” Ockerlander said. “Particularly since the 2008 recession when a significant cut had to happen.”
Until 2013, Metro was operating large buses down the spine of the Valley — between North Bend and Duvall — every three hours and carrying 7 to 12 riders a day.
That changed after Metro contracted that route to Snoqualmie Valley Transportation (SVT), which, using small buses, founded the Valley Shuttle. Within a few months, SVT increased frequency to every 90 minutes and grew ridership ten-fold.
“There’s a direct correlation between how frequently the buses run and the number of riders,” said Amy Biggs, SVT’s executive director.
“If the frequency of fixed route service isn’t frequent enough, we get into the pattern of nobody using it because it’s inconvenient and because nobody uses it, we have the service deleted.”
Biggs and Noll agree that frequency and convenience are key to solving transportation problems in the Valley, adding that many residents would like to use a bus, but are unwilling to do so, given current wait times.
Outside of SVT, King County Metro runs three routes that connect the Valley to the larger county bus system, all of which have long wait times.
Bus 208, which runs from North Bend and Snoqualmie to the Issaquah Transit Center, and bus routes 232 and 224, running from Duvall to the Redmond Transit Center, all have headways between 2 to 2.5 hours and mostly run during peak weekend hours.
Service on the weekends is even less viable. SVT doesn’t operate on the weekends, Route 208 only runs on Saturdays and no services operate on Sunday. There is also a noticeable absence of service along SR 18.
Some improvements could be coming in the near future though. Metro recently released a long-term vision of what service could look like out to 2050, that includes a goal of 60-minute headways throughout the county, including to rural areas, and some service along SR 18.
The long-term plan is only partially funded, and Biggs said adding more fixed route service won’t solve all of the Valley’s problems, especially if service is infrequent, but it could bring some relief.
In the shorter term, Metro and Sound Transit are planning to add 12 new light rail stations on the Eastside in Mercer Island, Bellevue and Redmond, which will result in changes to bus routes coming out of the Valley.
“That presents a lot of opportunity for Eastside communities, including North Bend,” Noll said. “I think we see this as an opportunity to coordinate with Metro as they do the restructure process to bring more frequent service.”
North Bend and Snoqualmie would see Route 208 replaced with Route 215, which would run from 14 hours a day, Monday through Friday, and 12 hours on the weekends. It would have headways between 45 and 90 minutes and connect Valley residents to the light rail stop in Mercer Island.
Route 224 in Duvall would still connect Duvall to the Redmond Transit Center, have similar operating hours and only run weekdays, but would see its headways reduced from 90 to 60 minutes.
Route 232, which formerly connected Duvall to Redmond by running through Woodinville, would be replaced with Route 931, which connects Duvall to Woodinville and Bothell.
Corey Holder, an Eastside transportation planner with Metro who focuses mostly on the Valley, said these proposals are in the final phase of outreach, before a proposal will be submitted to the King County Council for adoption.
“These increases are in response to the needs we’ve heard from the Snoqualmie Valley community,” he said. “As well as comments from cities and community planners.”
Cities continuing to provide those comments to Metro and others will be important in solving the Valley’s transportation challenges and securing more funding, Biggs said.
“Metro has always been responsible in willing to work with us. We just need to make sure we’re regularly giving them word,” she said. “By having everyone saying the same thing, it gives us the ability to potentially get funding more easily, because we can prove what we’re asking for is something cities have said is important to them.”
