By The Herald Editorial Board

If Sound Transit’s Link light rail system — expected to begin service out of Lynnwood later this fall — is the river, Community Transit’s fixed route and other transit services are among the tributaries, connecting riders from throughout Snohomish County to a fast and frequent light rail service to King County, Seattle, Sea-Tac and eventually the East Side and Pierce County and Tacoma.

Starting Saturday, Community Transit will add a new tributary with its Swift Orange Line, the third bus rapid transit line operated by the Snohomish County-based transit agency. The line gets a celebratory Block Party from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at Edmonds College.

The Orange Line — a mostly east-west route that will connect the largely north-south Blue and Green lines — will run from its Green line connection at McCollum Park and Ride in Everett, to the Lynnwood City Center station’s light rail station, continuing on to its Blue Line connection at Highway 99 and 196th SW and the Edmonds College Transit Center.

“2024 is a huge year,” said Ric Ilgenfritz, Community Transit’s CEO since January 2021. It’s huge for the river and the tributaries that feed it.

The pandemic, of course, changed things for Community Transit, with about 60 percent of its ridership evaporating nearly overnight as work, college, school and even some personal services shifted to the remote online world.

Ridership has been steadily rebuilding each year after the start of the pandemic. As of this March, CT’s weekly boardings totaled more than 136,000, higher than the previous three years for the same period, but still below weekly boardings that were near 200,000 just before the pandemic.

But even as those numbers have improved, the transit agency has seen a shift in the types of riders, said Ilgenfritz. Where the ridership rebound has been strongest, he said, has been for its Swift bus rapid transit lines and other higher-frequency fixed route lines. What’s still lagging is ridership on its commuter routes to downtown Seattle.

Swift has proven itself as the flagship for the transit agency. Even during the pandemic, Swift — offering buses every 10 to 12 minutes on weekdays and every 15 to 20 minutes on early mornings, evenings and weekends — was accounting for about half of total ridership, said Melissa Cauley, CT’s chief planning and development officer.

“People liked that frequent service that was close to a place where they could walk to get to the doctor, get to the store, those sorts of things,” Cauley said.

Even as attention will focus this fall on the arrival of Sound Transit’s light rail service at Lynnwood Station — a start date for which is expected in a matter of weeks — its success will depend heavily on the riders arriving via Community Transit and the growth and changes it is making to its service.

With a Link light rail service extending into Snohomish County, Community Transit has carried much of the load — about 30 percent of CT’s total, into Seattle and King County. So, as much as light rail will depend on CT to feed it passengers, the light rail line will allow CT to adapt and improve its service, Ilgenfritz said,

“With the Lynnwood extension opening up, we can pull all of that service out of King County and redeploy it within Snohomish County,” he said. “With the pattern we’re seeing coming out of the pandemic, with the high-frequency routes seeing the most utilization, and light rail coming to Lynnwood, we have the opportunity to rebuild our network to be a much higher frequency, much more compact and dense network within Snohomish County.”

That means even more frequent service for the Swift lines and on the other fixed routes that are now offering service every 20 to 30 minutes, Cauley said.

The result, Ilgenfritz said, means a reduction from about 45 routes to 35, but more frequent and concentrated service in county communities, totaling a 30 percent increase to a half-million service hours. By August, Community Transit routes will be serving 76 percent more of the county’s population and 50 percent more jobs within walking distance of frequent transit.

Regular Community Transit riders will need to note the changes coming in late August, including the end of its 400- and 800-series routes into Seattle, and the launch of new 900-series Express routes for Silver Firs, Lake Stevens, Marysville and Stanwood, as well as revisions for routes with connections to Seaway, Mukilteo, Smokey Point, Edmonds and Bothell.

In coming years, a fourth Swift line — Gold — is planned to connect with the Blue line at Everett Station, extending north to the Smokey Point Transit Station.

Community Transit also is planning an expansion of its Zip microtransit service, which offers on-demand shared-ride shuttle service in the Alderwood area from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. with minivans and sedans. Similar to a rideshare app service, the service is available by phone or the GOIN’ app, for the same cost as regular transit, $2.50 for adults, $1.25 for ORCA card holders and free to youths under 18. Planning is underway to bring Zip service to Lake Stevens, Arlington and Darrington.

Sound Transit’s Link light rail, funding for which started with a ballot measure that passed in 1996 and subsequent measures in 2008 and 2016, was envisioned as a line that would connect out from King to Snohomish and Pierce counties, with Everett and Tacoma as its north and south terminals. But those connections have and will depend on other modes of transportation; take your pick: foot, bicycle, private vehicle, bus, heavy rail, ferry or flights at Paine Field and Sea-Tac.

With each new light rail station, existing transportation providers have the opportunity and the responsibility to adjust and improve their own services. The employees of Community Transit and its board of directors — elected officials of the county and its cities — have ensured that planning was completed and investments were made. In the case of the new Orange Line, that’s an $83 million investment, $67.9 million in federal funding and $5 million from the state budget.

What that’s buying is the ability for people to leave private vehicles at home, use increasingly cleaner-energy modes of transportation and make more quick and convenient connections between home and destinations.

“When you get a system to the point where you can toss the schedule because you know that buses are coming in the next 10 to 15 minutes, you’re really achieving that synergy where people can make it part of their lifestyle choice,” Ilgenfritz said.

Correction: In an earlier version of this editorial, Community Transit Chief Planning and Development Officer Melissa Cauley’s name was misspelled.