As The Urbanist reported, "When I was a teenager at Golden Gardens Park, we had the 46," Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss said this June, standing at a bus stop on Market Street. "So I'm glad that for Penelope and others like her that we've got bus service restarted down here to Golden Gardens."
The bus he was talking about, Golden Gardens Direct, ran every day from June 27 through August 30 this year, leaving Market Street and 15th Avenue NW every thirty minutes and dropping riders at the beach without a car, a parking spot, or a climb. It has now stopped running for the season. Whether it starts again next summer, on the same terms or a longer one, is not settled. It depends on a ridership review King County Metro is conducting this fall and on a ballot measure Seattle voters will decide in November.
A Route That Already Failed Once
Strauss's reference to "the 46" wasn't nostalgia for its own sake. Route 46 ran from the 1980s until 2012, connecting the University of Washington to Golden Gardens by way of Wallingford and Ballard. For years it ran less than hourly, and toward the end only limited trips continued all the way from Market Street down to the park. Metro cut it in September 2012 for the reason transit agencies always cut a route: not enough people were riding it.
That history matters because it means this summer's bus wasn't a new idea. It was the same idea, tried again, fourteen years after the first version failed for lack of demand. If Golden Gardens Direct worked this time, the interesting question isn't whether Seattle can run a bus to a beach. It's what changed between 2012 and 2026 that made the same route worth trying twice.
What Changed Between 2012 and 2026
Strauss's own answer, given to reporters at the launch, was density. Ballard has added more than 6,000 homes in the past twenty years, and the parking problem at Golden Gardens has grown with it. Overflow now stretches past the park's own lots down to Un Bien and the Ballard Elks Lodge, streets that were never meant to double as beach parking.
That overflow is the gap Golden Gardens Direct was built to close. Before the pilot, getting to Golden Gardens without a car meant one of two routes: a half-mile walk down roughly 300 vertical feet of stairs from the streets above, or a two and a half mile walk along Seaview Avenue with no sidewalk relief. Riders coming from Sunset Hill had a third option, Route 45, but it required the same steep descent on foot once the bus let them off. A Ballard resident named Will Butler told KOMO News he usually walks, bikes, or scoots instead of driving. KOMO News quoted another resident, Jane Holiday, describing the parking problem: "Sometimes, if you try to park here, you're circling for a long time."
The pilot's ten stops were built around that gap rather than around ridership convenience alone. They ran from Market and 15th, where the route intercepts the D Line, past the Ballard Locks and the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden, past the Ballard Elks Lodge and the Leif Erickson statue on Shilshole Avenue, and down to multiple stops on Seaview before ending at the park. Every stop was chosen to intersect an existing bus line or a landmark people already use to orient themselves, which is a different design logic than Route 46 ever had.
What Thirty-Minute Frequency Actually Bought Riders
The old Route 46 problem was frequency, not existence. Golden Gardens Direct ran every thirty minutes, daily, for a fixed nine-hour window, using vehicles built to hold 22 to 27 seated riders with room to stand and bike racks for two to three bicycles. The fare matched a standard Metro ride, three dollars for adults, free for anyone 18 or younger, with the usual dollar discount for ORCA LIFT and Regional Reduced Fare Permit holders.
None of that is expensive by transit standards, but it wasn't free to build either. The pilot ran on roughly $300,000 in Seattle Transit Measure funds for the 2026 season, money Strauss secured through a city budget amendment the year before. That's a small line item against a citywide transit budget, and it bought exactly one summer of proof that thirty-minute service to a beach with no reliable transit connection could actually attract riders, something the old 46 never managed to do.
The Question Nobody Has Answered Yet
Strauss has said the ridership numbers from this summer will be reviewed to decide what happens next, and he's been open about wanting more than a repeat of the same nine-week window. As The Urbanist reported, "If we could do April to October, I think that would be really awesome," Strauss said in June, "but whatever we can do is great."
What Seattle can afford to do next summer is tied up in a bigger decision. The $300,000 that funded Golden Gardens Direct came out of the current Seattle Transit Measure, a 0.15% sales tax voters approved in 2020 that expires in April 2027. Mayor Katie Wilson has proposed replacing it with a larger measure, a 0.3% sales tax over ten years generating an estimated $138 million annually instead of the current fund's roughly $50 million a year. The City Council passed the renewal proposal 9-0 on July 21, and it will appear on the November 2026 ballot. If approved, city officials say it would expand Seattle's purchased bus service from about 180,000 to 280,000 annual trips, according to reporting from Capitol Hill Seattle News.
None of that guarantees Golden Gardens Direct comes back, let alone runs longer. But it is the fund the bus draws from, and a larger fund makes an expanded season more plausible than a flat one does. The vote in November will settle the size of that pool before Metro and the city decide what to do with this particular route inside it.
What Still Works If You Don't Wait
Until that decision is made, the two options that predate the bus haven't gone anywhere. The stairs from the neighborhoods above the park are still there for anyone willing to make the climb both directions, and the walk along Seaview Avenue is still the flat but longer alternative. For anyone weighing whether to live above those stairs permanently, it's worth understanding what daily life on that bluff actually involves, which is covered in more detail in a piece on life on the bluff in Sunset Hill.
Golden Gardens itself hasn't changed. It's still an 87-acre park with beach volleyball courts, a fishing pier, a boat launch, and a one-acre off-leash area for dogs. The park was open daily until 10:30 p.m. through the end of September. What changed for nine weeks this summer was how easy it was to get there without circling for parking or counting stairs, and whether that stays true next June is now something Ballard will find out alongside everyone else, one ridership report and one ballot at a time.
For more on what's happening across Ballard this season, from the neighborhood's small business changes to its transit and infrastructure updates, Samie Bryan keeps a close eye on the details that shape daily life here, not just the ones that show up in a listing description. Let's Connect.
