It’s the end of an era in Seattle, as buses will no longer serve the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel, instead being routed along surface streets above the tunnel from today onwards. The tunnel will now exclusively be used for light rail services, which will increase with the opening of East Link in the future.
To commemorate this occasion, let’s have a look at an historical map showing a time when buses previously ran on the surface downtown.
It’s a pretty simple affair, with red and blue bus routes being surprinted on top of a standard Rand McNally map of Seattle… if you look closely, you can see that black road lines continue through the middle of the circular route number bullets. The dense downtown network (with buses running along every avenue from 1st to 5th!) is almost impossible to make out, but there’s a more detailed downtown map on the reverse. It shows through the the thin paper a bit, as well as what seems to be a very large notice about only exact change being accepted to the bottom right.
Of note is the extremely dense and regular grid of routes in Ballard, and the comparative lack of routes in South Seattle. Many routes end in a little loop, so I’m guessing that these are trolleybus routes that can’t just turn around on the spot to go back the other way.
The presence of the blue “Blue Streak” express bus routes allows us to date the map even more precisely than the 1970 copyright notice at the bottom of the map. These express services commenced on September 8, 1970 with Route 41, a route that still exists today in the current King County Metro network.
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