~Guest Post by Snoqualmie Valley Transportation
Public transportation is well known for its benefits to urban areas—infrastructure resilience, workforce development and reduced traffic congestion. Rural areas experience those same benefits, but with two key differences: The scale is smaller, and our communities’ reliance on it is heavier since the distances to travel are significantly longer.
In the Snoqualmie Valley, about 30 miles east of Seattle, a lot of working people don’t drive. Take the youth in the community: Many don’t drive due to the cost of insurance or because they firmly believe that transit is the best option for cost, safety, and the environment. Other residents, like Denetia Gray, grew up using public transit; she prefers it to driving her old, unreliable car. Or they’re like Kitty Marsh, who never had to learn to drive because she could always take a bus. She admits that now, at age 55, she may have to pick up the skill in case of an emergency.
Both Gray, of North Bend, and Marsh, of Snoqualmie, are regular users of Snoqualmie Valley Transportation’s demand-response service, a shared ride option that provides door-to-door trips to work, the grocery store, the park, and anywhere in the Valley they want to go.
“You do have to plan ahead,” says Gray, to ride what she calls ‘the van,’ but she says it’s easy to set up a schedule and just as easy to change with a quick phone call. For times that she doesn’t have a ride scheduled, she says she can usually walk or ride her bicycle, but prefers not to when it’s cold and raining.
“I can Uber, too,” she said. “I sometimes do that. But you can’t always get an Uber here.”
Snoqualmie Valley Transportation covers almost 340 land miles, about 16 percent of King County. It has demand-response and fixed routes, with buses arriving and departing on a regular schedule. With a few exceptions, it serves all of the more than 70,000 people in North Bend, Snoqualmie, and the length of the Snoqualmie Valley seven days a week. Most ride fares are either a donation or $1, and people under 18 ride free.
Marsh doesn’t use Uber, so she’s grateful for SVT and its low-to-no fare charge. “That $1 donation is really a steal,” she says, adding, “Without SVT, I probably would not work.”
That’s not an exaggeration. Marsh now works in the valley, but years earlier, she quit her Issaquah job because the bus she needed, a county bus route that went to and from Issaquah, was unreliable. It sometimes ran late or did not pick her up at all.
“Three times the bus just didn’t pick us up, just drove right past us,” Marsh said.
Her fellow riders bonded over their group text alerts when the bus was arriving or leaving a stop, to give the next riders an ETA, she said.
The consistency of SVT’s demand-response service is exactly what Marsh needed to continue her career. Her trips are all scheduled a month in advance, and the ongoing communication when there are changes is very helpful. She appreciates the text updates if there are any delays and is usually happy to oblige when SVT staff call to ask if they can shift her schedule slightly to help out a rider who needs to get to a medical appointment.
“We do our very best to accommodate people,” said Jodi Scott, one of four call takers at the SVT office. Scott and her co-worker, Mia McCorvey, are the weekday team who work with callers to book rides at the SVT office, working full time to get people where they need to go.
It’s an essential service to McCorvey. Having grown up in urban areas, she knew public transportation well—“the bus comes every 15 minutes, right?”—so she was surprised to find wait times of an hour or more between buses in rural east King County when she began work at SVT.
“These rural areas are the areas that need transit the most,” she said, adding that this was especially true of older adults. SVT is a project of Mt. Si Senior Center, and many seniors use the service for errands and getting to the Center. Without SVT, they would lose a lot of autonomy, and “I’m not sure how those people are expected to get around.”
The answer was, and still is, SVT, at least since 2003 when Mt. Si Senior Center launched the service. Demand response service – a book-in-advance shared ride door-to-door program – was the first and only offering at SVT for a few years, said SVT Director Amy Biggs, but riders and residents asked for more, and more. They wanted demand response plus fixed routes, covering a larger area, with longer operating hours, and weekend service. SVT provided it all, by connecting with elected officials and community leaders, the two school districts, human services, and local businesses to identify needs, then find ways to meet them. The funding for this amazing service comes from WSDOT, King County Metro, and SVT’s long-time local partner, the Snoqualmie Tribe.
As a result, SVT has become a life-changing service for Valley residents of all ages and abilities, not just because it gets people to essential medical treatments. The Transitional Learning Center of Snoqualmie Valley School District uses SVT to teach students about public transportation and give them a measure of independence. TLC is a continuing education program for special needs students who’ve graduated from secondary education, to prepare them for adult life with work, social, and community experiences.
Allison Feely had real concerns about sending her son, Marshall, who is nonverbal, to ride the bus from their home in Carnation to TLC in Snoqualmie. He didn’t qualify for school transportation, her husband worked full-time, and they had two younger children in middle school and involved in after-school activities, so it wasn’t possible for her to drive him daily anymore.
“I was definitely in a panic trying to figure out how to do all the different things,” Feely said.
After talking with the TLC teacher and SVT staff, she was willing to try the service with insurance. On Marshall’s first day riding the bus home from school, she followed behind in her car. She also talked to the driver afterward to be sure there had been no problems, and she found out Marshall seemed to enjoy the trip.
“It was just such a liberating moment,” she said, adding tearfully, “It was hard for me to let go… I’m learning, along with Marshall, that Marshall can go out in the world … and that’s really amazing.”
Elizabeth Harris had a similar experience when she entrusted her daughter, Claire, to the bus for classes at TLC four years ago. She never would have, if they hadn’t lived in North Bend, she said, but “being in a small town, it feels very safe.”
Now, Claire uses the bus regularly to get to her new education program and her job. Harris, too, is able to spend more time at work, but more importantly, her daughter loves being self-reliant.
“For her, the best part of the day is getting on that bus,” said Harris. As she waits at home, “she gets her dollar out or her punch card – she’s learned how to use that — and it makes her feel independent.”
“In an area where residents are paying from 12 to 70 percent of their total household income on transportation, public transportation becomes a key element in being able to pay their rent and live their lives,” said Biggs. “We are so honored that we can support so many people in our community and that the cities and human services support SVT.”
Table of North Bend household spending
About Snoqualmie Valley Transportation: Snoqualmie Valley Transportation (SVT) is a program of Mt. Si Senior Center. It is the primary bus system serving Snoqualmie Valley. Funded by King County Metro Transit, Snoqualmie Tribe, WSDOT, and donations, SVT provides a variety of local-only bus services, in North Bend, Snoqualmie, Fall City, Carnation, Duvall and Monroe. More information about Snoqualmie Valley Transportation can be found on at: http://svtbus.org or by calling 425-888-7001.
Snoqualmie Valley Transportation is supported with funding from Washington’s Climate Commitment Act. The CCA supports Washington’s climate action efforts by putting cap-and-invest dollars to work reducing climate pollution, creating jobs, and improving public health. Information about the CCA is available at www.climate.wa.gov.
