This morning, I decided to make the trek to Sultan on public transportation. It’s a picturesque small town on the Skykomish River, and it’s somehow served by an hourly bus from Everett. I say “somehow” because these sort of rural transit links are exceedingly uncommon, even in a region like Seattle where there’s a relatively healthy level of public transit funding.

My choice to use transit was admittedly one part novelty. Yesterday, I decided it would be fun to visit the Sultan Bakery – an all time roadside cafe with great food and great prices – and toyed around with biking or taking the bus there. I often make little plans like these and don’t follow through, but today I was feeling the need to get out of the city. And look, I enjoy riding a new bus as much as (well probably much more than) the next guy, but really I also have a professional interest in rural public transportation schemes.

But first – let’s ask the question: is Sultan a rural town? Or is it a suburban one?

Based on the numbers from the Census, I’d say Sultan is solidly suburban. It’s primarily a bedroom community for the much larger job markets of Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, and Everett. This isn’t surprising – and it’s probably why Community Transit serves Sultan with an hourly bus even on the weekends¹. There are strong employment (and by extension cultural and social) ties between Sultan and the rest of the Seattle area.

Incidentally, these sort of rural-feeling but functionally suburban places are also interesting to me. But for our purposes here, the important thing is that Sultan does in fact have an hourly (though slow and deviating) bus from Everett. And my experience riding it on a Sunday afternoon was lovely.

Something interesting to me is that when you ride a coverage route like this you immediately realize what a lifeline it is for regular folks. I rode to Sultan around noon and came back around 2:30, and I saw some folks who had taken the bus to a Freddie’s in Monroe taking a return trip after finishing their shopping. In prior excursions on coverage routes, it’s been common for me to see drivers who know specific community members and who clearly cherish their role in helping facilitate people’s lives. I’d probably have to ride the 271 a few more times to pick up on that, but in any case it reminds me that we all deserve quality public transportation.

I’m often getting in the weeds on this blog, or in commenting on other blogs, about the need for better bus service in our dense urban areas. And of course, this is true. But I feel that we also need reliable links to the urban fringe. It’s important both for the folks who live out there, but also because it means I can actually visit cool places different in feel and function than where I live without driving – even if it still feels like things are so much more limited than they should be.

Taking the bus to Sultan from Seattle is in some ways, an exercise in dogma for me. I have built up a reputation among friends and colleagues as someone who does this kind of things – to the point that my co-workers know I’ll probably take a bus instead of carpooling to a work meeting off-site if it’s even sort of reasonable. But there’s a future coming where we will no longer own a car, and leaving the city will become more difficult. It pains me to admit that this actually does matter to me.

I say “pains” because I am very much of the opinion that the socially constructed ideas of wilderness and the particular interaction with mainstream culture in the Pacific Northwest can be quite limiting. If you only ever choose to hike or recreate in the big open spaces that we have collectively set aside for that purpose, you really do risk missing the nuance and beauty in the city park, the restored wetland, or the obviously managed natural area. Even so, I do like hiking in places where I can’t hear cars, or even where I simply am aware that it took a long journey to arrive.

Having access to small rural (or suburban) towns like Sultan at all is something I’m extremely pleased with. And the trails and swimming holes at Osprey Park will demand a revisit in the peak summer months, as the specific niche of “transit-accessible swimming spots on cold mountain streams” is about as small as you would think. Expanding transit access to places like this is definitionally difficult. For one, it’s expensive to run coverage service into rural places, and they are often thus low performing routes. Hard times eventually befall all transit agencies, and service cuts to places like Sultan are both common and often permanent. King County cut the 357 to Skykomish decades ago, and places like Enumclaw or North Bend lack Sunday service altogether².

Still, it does occur to me that my preference for this kind of transit trip – the one that takes more than two and a half hours with three transfers when the drive is like 45 minutes borders on absurd for most. And on this blog, and in my life, I find myself having to justify this kind of decision. There are so many reasons why I like it, but I think it’s worth asking if you would have someone justify why they went on a hike, or a bike ride, or a road trip.

To this end, I’ve found myself consumed by the idea of insisting that the choices I make are completely normal. There is nothing strange about enjoying public transit for its own sake, or at least nothing more strange than about enjoying anything else for its own sake. I find the sense of community on rural buses to be the same sense of community I feel on my local workhorses, and to this end riding transit helps ground me in the reality of my own life.

I have a similar feeling about other essentially mundane things I enjoy. I’ve written at least three different posts on this blog about grocery shopping³, because I think there’s a lot of illustrative value in analyzing the mundane, but also because I enjoy grocery shopping. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes, but by and large, I find it to be a positive experience – something I would credit this to the role food plays, and has played, in my life. Since food plays such a central role in how I think about myself, my community, and my world writ large, why wouldn’t I find the grocery store to be a fascinating place?

So yes, I went to the Sultan Bakery on the 271 today. I could have driven, but that wouldn’t have been interesting or noteworthy⁴. If I have the choice, I want to fill my life with things that are interesting and noteworthy to me, and I feel that the easiest way to do this is to have a flexible idea of what is noteworthy in the first place. That core idea is something I’ve been centering in my life, and today that meant spending a beautiful spring day in the Skykomish valley. That sounds pretty good to me.

Thanks for reading – ’til next time.

Footnotes

1. It’s probably worth saying that the Community Transit Public Transit Benefit District encompasses all incorporated places in Snohomish County other than Everett (which has an independent transit agency). So really Sultan has bus service because they pay for it – but I think the identified need for that service comes from these sort of links. ↩︎
2. For now at least. The upcoming service change will restore Sunday service to North Bend, but perhaps that’s more because North Bend is a bonafide suburb now rather than a fringe exurb like it was in the 1980s. ↩︎
3. Exhibits A, B, and C ↩︎
4. Honestly, it actually would have been noteworthy in the sense that I do this kind of transit-based adventure fairly regularly and I’ve driven my car once in 2026. ↩︎