‘The daddies on the bus go … ‘

Rachel Niehaus grinded her teeth as she contemplated the jaunt from her home in Mill Creek to Edmonds Community College.

“I take the bus,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “I’d kill somebody if I had to drive that every day. We’re talking serious road rage.”

It matters little which route you choose — the Bothell-Everett Highway, Interstate 5 or 164th Street SE/SW— every road out of the greater Mill Creek area is a virtual sea of brake lights during morning and evening rush hours.

Driving in the area has always been a challenge for Niehaus, “but it’s gotten noticeably worse in the five years I’ve lived in Mill Creek; it’s a real nightmare.”

She makes good use of her time on the bus — catching up on schoolwork or taking care of other business.

“I sometimes watch people in their cars, pounding their fists and screaming,” Niehaus said with a smirk. “I look out the window and think to myself how happy I am to be sitting on the bus and not in a car stuck in traffic.”

She’s not alone.

It seems a growing number of people feel safer on busses and commuter trains than they do in their own cars.

Alicia Santana, who’s enjoying an extended vacation from her hometown in Chile, fell in love with the region’s public transportation system soon after her arrival in Mill Creek four months ago.

“It’s so much fun,” Santana said. “At first, my husband told me ‘No, don’t ride the bus. It’s not safe,’ but when I convinced him to ride with me to Seattle, he was so funny. His eyes got really wide and he couldn’t stop looking around at all the people and all the sights.”

Santana started calling on her American friends to ride the bus with her, marveling at such amenities as bike racks and reserved seating for people with disabilities.

“In Chile, we are a poor country so many people use the public transportation because very few of us have cars,” she said. “Here, everyone has a car, but they still ride the bus. You see many different people — people in suits and dressy shoes going to work in the morning. Some of them are typing on the computer and others are talking on the phone. I see more and more of them on the bus every day.”

But most of these new riders aren’t boarding the bus for the fun of it.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic and soaring fuel prices are believed the major factors driving ridership on buses and other public transportation alternatives.

Since the beginning of the year, Community Transit has experienced an increase of nearly 10,000 new users a month.

“It’s dramatic,” Snohomish County Public Works staffer Jay Larson said at a mass transit expo in Mill Creek on Saturday, May 17. “If we can show that using public transportation isn’t near as daunting as they presume it is, we can really reduce the number cars on our roads and highways.”

Saturday’s event was sponsored through Snohomish County’s recently established Transportation Demand Management Program aimed at reducing gridlock on local roadways including the 164th Street corridor between Lynnwood and Mill Creek.

The county forged a partnership with Community Transit in December after 164th Street was declared at ultimate capacity, a designation that allows continued development along the corridor but increases traffic mitigation fees assessed to developers to fund programs that encourage residents to utilize public transportation.

“We have all this growth in South Snohomish County and the challenge is: where do you put all these people?” Larson said. “We have a responsibility to accommodate traffic but also to preserve the rights of property owners along 164th. So what we are trying to do is come up with the best set of solutions to reduce vehicle traffic.”

Many people are skeptical that commuters will in large numbers will suddenly abandon their cars for buses or van pools.

City leaders in Mill Creek have beat their drums to no avail.

“Some people can’t use public transportation; their jobs require them to have cars,” Mill Creek City Councilman Mark Harmsworth said. “I believe there are opportunities to expand 164th. We need to invest a little money in that and in making improvements to other east/west roadways to the north and south.”

The county is examining several options to reduce traffic not only in the Mill Creek and Lynnwood areas but all over. Increasing utilization of public transportation is one piece in the puzzle, Larson said.

For people like Niehaus, improvements to public transportation over the past decade have been near life saving.

“I can’t tell you how stressed out I’d be if I had to sit in my car for two or three hours every day,” she said. “It used to be a real hassle riding the bus — you couldn’t get a direct route to where ever you were going and you’d wait at transfer stations for 20 minutes or longer. It’s not like that anymore.”