Summer service change: Kitsap Transit adding more trips starting July 11
Passengers prepare to board a bus at the Bremerton Transportation Center.
Kitsap Transit is adding more service this summer!
Bus service changes occur four times a year; they’re a chance for Kitsap Transit to alter routes, add or cut service, and adjust timepoints to ensure our system is best serving our riders. In addition to these updates, we’re making some changes to our printed schedules to help streamline how we deliver information to riders.
The summer service change, which takes effect on July 11, is focused on adding early morning and late evening service to better serve commuters traveling to and from work around Kitsap County. We’ve also revised timepoints on some routes based on comments from riders and our Run Committee, or to better align with Kitsap Transit Fast Ferry schedules.
Read on to see what’s changing!
Service additions:
Added early morning and late evening trips on Routes 4, 5, 9, 20, 24, 26, 221 and 225
Added half-hour service in the afternoons on Routes 26 and 221
Added evening trips added on Routes 215, 219, 223, 229 and 332
Added half-hour Saturday service on Routes 212 and 217
Ferry-Take-Home changes:
Added two Ferry-Take-Home (FTH) trips to Route 81 in the afternoon. The current Route 81 FTH will depart 15 minutes earlier
Converted the 4:05 PM Ferry-Take-Home trips on Routes 20, 24 and 26 to a regular routed trip
Service reductions:
Route 86 service will be reduced by more than half due to persistent low ridership. For more information, click here to check out our Rider Alert.
Removed a morning trip on Route 222 that doesn’t connect to a ferry
Timepoint adjustments:
Adjusted several timepoints on Routes 301, 302 and 307 to align with Kitsap Transit Fast Ferries’ schedules
Adjusted timing on several Saturday afternoon trips on Route 390
Route changes:
Modified Route 9 (see map below)
Modified Route 99 (see map below)
Route 9-South Park modified route.
Route 99-Bill Point modified route.
You can plan your trip using the Trip Planner on Kitsap Transit’s website or by calling our Customer Service Office at (360) 377-2877.
Simpler, less complicated timetables
In other news, Kitsap Transit has redesigned its timetables in our printed booklets and online. Our hope is that the new timetables will be easier to read and understand as you’re planning your trip, especially if you’re new to riding transit.
Behind the scenes, every time Kitsap Transit has a service change, our marketing staff must pore over and manually update thousands of timepoints in tables in printed booklets, webpages and display panels. For this service change, that amounts to more than 3,700 changes on just our printed and web schedules, not counting thousands more on our display panels at bus shelters, park & rides and transit centers. With every keystroke, there’s a risk of errors creeping in that don’t get caught during proofing.
We figured it was time to restructure and automate this process to reduce errors, improve consistency across our many customer touchpoints and free up the time of our marketing staff to do more creative work.
We consider this automation project to be a work in progress and appreciate your feedback!
A few key changes:
The biggest change you’ll see is that routes where we laid out the times as a single table combining inbound and outbound trips are now broken into separate inbound and outbound tables. We think it makes it easier for riders, current and new ones, to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B. As a result you won’t see “ARRIVE” anymore in the middle and right-most column headings of a table; instead the times in the right-most column are the arrival times.
We’ve also eliminated some of the clutter that once peppered our timetables, such as asterisks and notes. Key information is now in notes above or below tables, while standard tips are in an Understanding the Schedule section and a new Ferry Connections section. Please do read the notes for important route or stop details!
Finally, we’ve eliminated listing connecting sailing times for Washington State Ferries. It’s difficult to keep up with our own service changes, let alone those of other operators. When we printed our booklets in the past, if WSF changed their schedules, that rendered our booklets incorrect. We think it’s more honest to direct riders to WSF’s website for current schedules. The same goes for connections with Jefferson Transit.
You can see an example of the new timetables below:
