Victory vibes: Over 330,000 Metro boardings on Seahawks parade day

Long before the sun peeked over the horizon on Super Bowl victory parade day, Seahawks fans started their journeys to downtown Seattle, leaving their cars behind and boarding buses, trains, water taxis and streetcars to stake out their front-row view.

With clear blue sky and sunshine, hour by hour, tens of thousands of people arrived downtown, and families and fans wearing 50 years of different team jerseys lined the streets with grins. The typical sound of downtown traffic was replaced by the buzz of fans waiting for the Seahawks stars to travel past.

Before long Metro’s vintage bus crawled into view, leading the parade to the roar of fans throughout the downtown.

Metro adjusted bus service around major street closures and launched two parade-day shuttles to keep people moving on the city streets, while Sound Transit ramped up 1 Line service with extra trains running every 6 minutes to handle the surge of ridership demand.

Together, transit agencies kept the region connected: buses weaving along alternate streets, trains gliding beneath the festivities, and water taxis and streetcars running at full strength. Nobody knows for sure yet how many people attended the parade, but imagine the gridlock if everyone had tried to drive and park?

Extra buses, trains and water taxis full of smiles made sure to keep people moving so everyone could mark this major milestone.

King County Metro boardings by the numbers

• 334,046: Estimated Metro bus, water taxi and special shuttle boardings systemwide for the day. This includes an estimated:
  • 319,000 boardings across all regular bus service, including Sound Transit Express routes operated by Metro.
  • 2,661 boardings on special Metro parade day shuttles that operated along the parade route.
  • 5,956 boardings on additional trips added throughout the system.
  • 5,435 boardings on West Seattle water taxi (second highest ever, compared to 7,721 Sub Pop Festival, Aug. 11, 2018. There were 4,592 riders on Super Bowl parade day on Feb. 4, 2014.)
  • 994 boardings on the Vashon Water Taxi.

Our partners at Sound Transit have reported an estimated 220,000 boardings on Link 1 Line, 6,000 on the 2 Line and 20,000 boardings on Sounder.

Metro is grateful to the transit operators, rail operators, water taxi captains and front-line staff, alongside our City of Seattle partners, who worked tirelessly together to deliver bus service to carry riders on this historic and memory-making event.