I was joking about a free Uber service, but Bellevue’s gone and done it

They say behind every joke lies some truth. For me recently it turned out to be lying right across the lake in Bellevue.

In a recent column about riding the empty ghost trams of Seattle’s streetcar, I noted that the one in South Lake Union is costing taxpayers more than $20 per ride. I cracked: “It would have been cheaper for the city to pay for me to hire an Uber.”

One reader responded: “I’m fairly sure you were joking about the city hiring you an Uber … guess what, that’s exactly what they’re doing here in Bellevue! You should venture over to the smart side of the lake to check it out.”

It turns out it’s true. It’s not Uber specifically, but six months ago, Bellevue debuted its own downtown circulator transit service — sort of its own version of a streetcar. Only theirs is without the tracks, the trains or really any startup infrastructure expense at all.

A company called Circuit has been contracted to run a fleet of eight all-electric shuttles around the downtown portion of Bellevue. You can summon any of the shuttles with an app, and then ride anywhere within a 6-square-mile zone — for free.

The service is paid for by Bellevue’s hotel tax.

I took the reader’s advice and tried it out. From the Bellevue Hilton parking lot south of downtown, I pulled up the Circuit app and told it I wanted to go to Bellevue’s Downtown Park, 1.1 miles away. In six minutes, a spacious shuttle pulled up that looked like a Hot Wheels toy on steroids, with the wide windows of a sightseeing van.

A few minutes later, I was deposited in the park — no charge. I tried it again, taking a hop from the park, on the southwest side of Bellevue’s downtown, all the way across to the fancy new Spring District, 2.3 miles away. Same result: A silent shuttle showed up in four minutes. On the way we also stopped to pick up some Amazonians, who were leaving work from the company’s new Sonic skyscraper.

The driver said the hotels have gone all-in for the service, as it’s effectively “free” Uber rides for their guests. He guessed maybe a third of the passengers so far are visitors, a third are downtown workers and another third are residents connecting to other transit or running errands to the grocery store.

The bureau behind the pilot project, Visit Bellevue, says it’s getting about 8,000 riders a month after starting in August — so 270 per day on average. The cost is $70,000 a month for the shuttles, the drivers and insurance. That’s roughly $8.75 per ride so far — high by the standards of public mass transit, but still less than half what Seattle’s South Lake Union streetcar is costing, without any of the capital expense.

This is known as “microtransit” — on-demand shuttles that circulate within neighborhoods. Circuit currently runs them in 40 cities, including downtown San Diego, Miami, and Austin, Texas, with Bellevue the only city so far in Washington. There are similar services such as King County’s “Metro Flex,” a pay shuttle in South End cities such as Tukwila and out in Issaquah.

“People seem to really love that there are no fixed stops or routes — it goes where you want to go,“ says Brad Jones, executive director of Visit Bellevue. “It changes the game of public transit. It doesn’t feel like public transit.”

This is what I was hinting at back when I wrote about how we might be entering an era of “untransit” — where the rise of remote work begins to fragment the old “hub and spoke” fixed-line transportation and commuting model.

The drawback to the new microtransit is there’s nothing mass about it. Each Bellevue shuttle only has six seats. So even with sophisticated computer algorithms governing its every move, it’s less efficient than express buses or rail trains that can move large numbers of people along fixed routes. San Diego’s electric shuttle system, called FRED (for “Free Rides Everywhere Downtown”), has only gotten up to about 1,000 riders per day, though as in Bellevue that’s across a small area. In 2022, FRED did achieve per-rider costs of $5.50.

You can see what a pickle Seattle is in. The South Lake Union streetcar, with its short fixed route that doesn’t go much of anywhere, gets 500 riders a day currently. But it costs four to five times more to operate than either San Diego’s FRED or Bellevue’s Bellhop shuttles, which go exactly where you ask it.

Now Seattle is considering $410 million more to build a 1.3-mile connecting line along First Avenue downtown, to join the South Lake Union line with one that travels up over First Hill and Capitol Hill. That figure is just the capital expense — it doesn’t include the cost of running the trains.

Could an on-demand shuttle — a municipal Uber — be a better bet?

“This is a service Seattle should explore instead of spending millions of taxpayer money on more streetcar track,” suggested another reader, who had just been to San Diego and used FRED. “San Diego’s service is great — in fact it could substitute for some of the bus services in small cities in our state, where you often see huge buses running without anyone in them.”

I don’t know the answer, not being a transit expert. But even if Seattle decides to build the central streetcar, they’re now saying it wouldn’t be finished until at least 2031. So why not try out a municipal Uber system for the time being? (Note to newcomers: In Seattle-speak, the phrase “for the time being” technically means the next decade, or indefinitely, whichever comes later.)

It’s worth exploring whether to mothball the South Lake Union streetcar, and use its $4.4 million yearly operating budget to instead run a free, on-demand app-based shuttle covering South Lake Union to Pike Place Market and the waterfront, through downtown to Pioneer Square and the stadiums. That’d be enough to pay for 30 circulating shuttles, with no upfront costs. To travel outside the zone, you’d catch light rail or a bus. The city could keep the First Hill streetcar line going, as a much healthier 3,000 to 4,000 riders per day are using that.

It’d be like a modern version of the abandoned “ride free” zone that we used to have for Metro buses downtown. Maybe it would help kick-start our struggling civic center. It couldn’t hurt to try something while the streetcar fiasco is being further flogged.

I know it’s not in Seattle’s identity to copy Bellevue, on anything. But kid brother might be on to something. Maybe the joke really is on us this time.