By
Seattle Times staff reporter
Three station platforms aren’t the correct height for wheelchair access — and 25 shelters need to be removed, welded and painted again — along Seattle’s latest addition to its RapidRide bus service.
The line, which traverses the Capitol Hill, First Hill, Central District and Madison Valley neighborhoods, opened last month.
Orange steel plates are on the street at three center median stations, in order to raise buses by less than an inch for better operation of wheelchair ramps. The problem was identified before the route began running on Sept. 14 and the steel plates are temporary, said Ethan Bergerson, a spokesperson with the Seattle Department of Transportation, which was responsible for the line’s construction.
King County Metro, which operates the line, is looking at other ways to solve the problem, including bus adjustments or changing platform height to a designated 13 inches so the plates can be removed.
The three stations with low platforms are at stop 104, serving eastbound Madison Street between Terry and Boren avenues; stop 105, for eastbound Madison Street between Summit and Boylston avenues; and stop 124, which serves westbound Madison Street at East Union Street and 12th Avenue East.
Aside from the platform flaws, all of the line’s 25 bus shelters have issues with paint thickness and color, incorrect welds and holes in their frames. Unfixed, the shelters could easily rust and have an otherwise shorter life span.
Work began Friday on the shelters and will happen offsite. Two to four shelters will be removed at a time, and repair and reinstallation is expected to be complete within four months.
The line will continue normal operations through the work.
Neither SDOT nor Metro provided an estimate of how much the repair work would cost, or what led to the construction flaws.
Al Sanders, Metro’s spokesperson, said engineers and project managers at SDOT and Metro are looking into what went wrong, adding he wouldn’t “point fingers.”
“We’re working to discover where the issues were,” Sanders said. “We just want to make sure they’re fixed.”
The $144.3 million, 2.5-mile line runs every six minutes for most of every day, largely along Madison Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and First Avenue. On Sundays, it runs less frequently.
Building the line took three years, and brought nearly 4 miles of new sidewalks, new bike and pedestrian signals, rebuilt utilities by Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities, the replacement of a 120-year-old water main, and a road made of concrete designed to slow speeds down near schools, libraries and hospitals.
Metro’s RapidRide network launched in 2010 with the A Line connecting Tukwila to Federal Way. The program promised more frequent service with swifter commutes, using some elements associated with bus-rapid transit like bus-only lanes, traffic signals that turn green for the vehicles, fewer stops and more doors for passengers to get on and off the coaches.
The G Line is the eighth in Metro’s RapidRide network. Four more lines are in the works — the I, J, K and R lines — and are expected to begin service in 2027 through 2030.